It’s finally over. After 14 months of fighting, including the worst the country has seen in decades, the guns of Lebanon have fallen still. Nothing, of course, is certain: the Israel-Hezbollah agreement may yet flounder, and both sides have already …
How Israel and Lebanon can stop the slaughter
In the Middle East, transitions between US presidential administrations are often times of bold attempts at diplomacy. It was in the last days and hours of the Clinton administration that intense final status talks were advanced for an Israeli-Palestinian peace, …
Has Israel’s strategy changed?
Largely unremarked amid the drama, risk and controversy of its reaction to the October 7 attack is that, over the past year, Israel has experimented with a new type of warfare: targeting its enemies’ entire command structures. The occasional tactical …
Can Lebanon survive without Hezbollah?
Over the last fortnight, everything has changed in Lebanon. Hezbollah, which had dominated the country’s politics for more than 20 years, has seen its leadership decapitated, its arsenal diminished, its anti-Zionist credentials tarnished. All the while, its civilian base, huddled …
Has Netanyahu lost control of his war?
For decades, Benjamin Netanyahu touted himself as Mr Security, the leader Israelis could count on to keep them safe. Then came Hamas’s October 7 assault, which killed 1,200 people, and took at least 230 hostages, shattering the Prime Minister’s image …
Why Lebanon can’t be saved
In 2018, Henry Kissinger observed that Donald Trump was one of those historical characters who “appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The same could …
What will replace Hezbollah?
In the summer of 2019, I took one of Beirut’s vintage Mercedes taxis to the city’s southern suburbs. I was in Dahieh to meet Lokman Slim, a prominent Lebanese researcher and fierce critic of Hezbollah. Slim, together with his German-born …
Hezbollah has made a fatal mistake
The Lebanese border with Israel shimmers with shades of yellow and green. The scene is Levantine pastoral: if Monet were Middle Eastern, this is what he would have painted. It was late October, just weeks after Hamas’s atrocities, when I …
Should America strike back at Iran?
There’s no denying Iran’s proxy forces are great value for money. The regime’s support for its allied militias, including the Lebanese Hizbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, probably doesn’t exceed a few billion dollars per annum — perhaps even less, given …
Meet the Iranians supporting Israel
Lily Moo is used to death threats: in the past 14 months, 19 against her have been reported to the police. An Iranian in London, she has been leading Woman, Life, Freedom marches in her adopted home — calling for …
Israel is turning into Lebanon
Beirut, in the mid-20th century, was a synonym for Middle Eastern glamour, its Rue de la Phénicie a nocturnal haunt for Hollywood movie stars and Arab oil barons. In the early Fifties, when the city was in the Western press, …
Israel’s war is about to escalate
As I look out over Lebanon from high up on Israel’s northern border, I see undulating hills dappled with hedgerows and green brush that glows golden in the winter sun. But this is far from an idyll. Lebanese Hezbollah have …
Hamas is playing for time
Hamas leaders know that once the Israeli counter-offensive starts, they will lose their greatest asset: their inter-connected tunnels. This vast warren conceals the vital operations for the manufacture, storage and launch of their rockets, and shieldsheadquarters and rest areas from …
What Israel will face in Gaza
When conventional armies take on enemies who have neither uniforms nor overt bases, and who impolitely refuse to assemble in conveniently targetable mass formations, the inevitable problem is how to find them. Indeed, such a task is often impossible, a …