Rania Khalek is a Lebanese-American journalist based in Beirut and the host of Dispatches on BreakThrough News. She returned to Current Affairs to give Digital Editor John Ross an update on Lebanon, where Israel has continued bombing, occupying territory, issuing displacement orders, and demolishing villages during what is being called a “ceasefire.”

John Ross

Last time you spoke with Current Affairs, you warned that Israel was openly threatening to turn southern Lebanon into the next Gaza, and since then, we’ve seen continued Israeli strikes during what’s being called a ceasefire, in addition to mass displacement, entire villages being blown up, and journalists and medics being targeted, as well as a so-called “Yellow Line” or buffer zone, where people may just never be allowed to return. And since you’re based in Lebanon, I was hoping that you could just walk us through what the so-called “ceasefire” has actually looked like on the ground.

Rania Khalek

Yes. So this ceasefire has been in effect since April 17, I believe, and was imposed unilaterally by Donald Trump a week after the ceasefire went into effect between the Iranians and the Americans. And I just quickly want to point out that the initial Iranian-American ceasefire was supposed to include Lebanon. That’s what the Iranians were under the impression of. That’s what the Pakistanis thought would be the case. That’s apparently what the Americans had agreed to. But as soon as that ceasefire went into effect, it was the next day that Israel dropped 160 bombs on Lebanon in 10 minutes, killing almost 400 people, if not more—in 10 minutes—to try to obstruct Lebanon’s ability to be a part of that ceasefire, in addition to trying to really collapse the Iranian-American ceasefire. Then things got much more vicious after that day, April 8. It was called Black Wednesday.

Then Trump imposes this ceasefire on Lebanon. Everybody felt a little bit of relief. Because over a million Lebanese had been displaced from the south and from the south suburbs of Beirut, a lot of people went back to their homes to check on their houses, but a lot of them have been displaced again since then because the bombing hasn’t stopped in southern Lebanon. As you mentioned when I was on last, I talked about Israel’s stated plans to turn parts of southern Lebanon into Khan Yunis, into Rafa, into Gaza. And we’ve seen what the Israelis did in Gaza, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. They have refused to withdraw from the areas they invaded in the south. They continue to occupy villages, and they’re carrying out these controlled detonations of entire villages. Almost 40 Lebanese villages have been largely damaged or entirely destroyed, Gaza-style, because of this. And this is going on during the ceasefire.

Since March 2, when this war escalated, the Israelis have destroyed 50,000 Lebanese housing units. That has continued throughout the ceasefire. That’s 50,000 homes people don’t have anymore, and they’re doing it on purpose. That’s their policy so people don’t return. They want to create a buffer zone, or dead zone, across southern Lebanon so that people don’t return, similar to what they’ve done in Gaza, where they have this yellow line, this imaginary line they’ve placed on the map, where they destroy everything beyond that yellow line to create this dead zone between the Israelis and the people they’re trying to eliminate. So that’s what they’ve done in southern Lebanon. They’ve continued to kill people. They’ve killed almost, I think, 400 people—something like 380 people is the last number I saw during the ceasefire. That’s crazy. Hundreds of people are killed during a ceasefire every day. It’s like 20 people yesterday—I think it was 17. They continue to bomb Civil Defense workers as they’re trying to rescue people from the rubble across southern Lebanon.

Every morning, I wake up and see notifications from the Israeli military spokespeople in Arabic that people need to evacuate their villages. We call them “forced displacement orders.” That’s still going on. And then yesterday, the one thing that’s been in place since the “ceasefire” went into effect—and I put “ceasefire” in huge quotes here—is there’s been a kind of ceasefire on Beirut, I guess you could say, but that was actually broken yesterday. For the first time since this fake ceasefire went into effect, Israel bombed the southern suburbs of Beirut. And in fact, what’s interesting about this bombing that they carried out is, the Israelis said that they did it in coordination with the Americans, as in they called up Donald Trump—Netanyahu called up Donald Trump—and they coordinated this bombing yesterday in the southern suburbs of Beirut. And so now that actually kind of makes the Americans directly involved in a war on Lebanon that, as far as I know, the American public and the representatives in Congress have not authorized. So it really brings a kind of new level of American involvement to this war. But yes, the situation on the ground here is absolutely horrific.

Ross

Yes, and of course, it also begs the question: how can the United States possibly be a neutral partner in peace negotiations when they’re actively participating in the bombings? But I just wanted to linger on something you were talking about before, on what is being lost when these villages in South Lebanon are being destroyed. I remember a little over a decade ago, for example, when ISIS was destroying cultural and religious sites in Syria. Of course, there was rightly a lot of horror in the United States in outlets like the Atlantic about the attempt to just wipe out history and civilization. But when Israel destroys entire villages in Lebanon, it often gets framed or described in this language of security or military infrastructure. It’s like, “Oh, this was just a Hezbollah stronghold. We just had to blow up this entire village.” Can you talk about what Israel is destroying beyond the physical buildings themselves and also what it does to people psychologically when they’re displaced, told there’s a ceasefire, try to go home, and then realize there’s nothing to go back to, or they’re being driven out all over again?

Khalek

Yes. Okay, so these are villages that have been around for generations, for hundreds and hundreds of years, and in some cases, a thousand years. These villages have so much history. A lot of attention has been given to Israel desecrating religious symbols of Christianity in the south, because while Lebanon, or the Middle East in general, is largely portrayed as this Islamic place—it is majority Muslim—there are historic Christian communities. In fact, the original Christian communities, or the ancestors of the original Christians of this region, exist across Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, with so many old churches and religious sites. Israeli soldiers have been desecrating those sites in places like Debel, for example, a village in southern Lebanon that’s majority Christian. And that’s been provoking a lot of outrage because Israel has portrayed itself as protecting Judeo-Christian culture, or so they say, against the Islamic hordes.

And so there’s a kind of acceptance in the West of the routine destruction of mosques, whether in Gaza or in South Lebanon, and the routine killing of Muslims in Lebanon—specifically Shia Muslims, because that’s who makes up the base of Hezbollah’s community. Shias in Lebanon make up the majority of the south. But all that’s to say there are sites and statues that have been destroyed. There are sites that are believed to be the burial sites of Christian saints that have been destroyed by the Israelis. Several churches, since 2024 when there was the first big war between the Israelis and Lebanon, have been destroyed, especially this time around. Because there are Israeli soldiers marauding across the south, they’ve also photographed themselves desecrating both Muslim and Christian symbols, but then having to apologize for desecrating the Christian symbols because it upsets Christians in the West—as it should, by the way. But what that demonstrates to me, and should demonstrate to everyone, is that Israel is a Jewish settler colony committed to Zionism, which is Jewish settler colonialism in this region. It’s Jewish supremacy. And basically, anybody who’s not Jewish, whether Christian or some variation of Muslim, is somebody who’s considered killable and needs to be ethnically cleansed to make room for Greater Israel, or for security, depending on what kind of Israeli you’re talking to.

So it doesn’t matter in Lebanon if you’re Christian, Shia, Sunni, or Druze. The problem is that you’re Lebanese, that you’re Arab, and that you’re not Jewish. The same goes for Palestine, by the way. We see the Israelis invading a Christian village, Taybeh, in the West Bank that keeps getting a lot of attention, destroying homes and desecrating their symbols. It is because they obviously hate Islam and Christianity because, again, this is a settler colonial movement, but it’s just the mere fact of destroying the indigenous people, their symbols, and their historic sites on the land. So when we talk about what’s being destroyed in South Lebanon, you’re talking about hundreds and hundreds, and in some cases, a thousand years of history of people who’ve been on this land, of houses that have been passed down generation after generation, of state infrastructure like bridges and municipal buildings, and of water sanitation infrastructure. You may have seen what they destroyed.

Actually, in the same Christian village of Debel, there was video footage of the Israelis destroying solar panels. Lebanon has very, very poor state electricity, so a lot of villages outside the city are dependent on solar panels to get electricity. And so destroying those solar panels is essentially making a village unlivable. You’re destroying the electricity infrastructure of that village. So these are people’s lives too. I want people to really consider the fact that these are homes just like your home, wherever you live across the U.S.: it has your photographs of your family and your dining room and your childhood bedroom. I’ll use my village as an example. The village I come from, which is not in the south but is in the mountains of Lebanon—I’ve had generation after generation of ancestors who’ve lived in that village, and all the memories and all the houses that have been built on top. And so when you destroy a home like that, you’re destroying something with hundreds of years of history, usually. So that’s what people are losing here. They’re losing their land as well. The Israelis are poisoning the land. They’re dropping white phosphorus that’s actually destroying the ability for agricultural land to be able to grow and have vegetation on it. And the thing about the south is it is the kind of agricultural heartland of Lebanon. It’s where we grow a lot of our food. There are olive trees. Israelis, famously, kind of seem to hate olive trees, which is bizarre for people that claim to be indigenous to so badly hate the indigenous trees of the land. But they want to make sure, literally, that you cannot grow food, that the soil is dirty, and that your home can never be livable again. And that’s what they’re doing, and it’s just absolutely horrific.

Ross

Yes, 100 percent. You would think that people who are indigenous to the land wouldn’t be trying to destroy it.

But shifting gears a little bit, the last time you spoke with Current Affairs, you gave a really helpful history of Hezbollah, which I would encourage people to check out. But this time I wanted to ask about how the internal Lebanese debate has evolved over the last month. Drop Site News reported on April 27 that Hezbollah security general Sheik Naim Qassem rejected direct negotiations with Israel, reaffirmed that the group will not give up weapons in defense, and criticized the Lebanese Government, accusing it of abandoning Lebanon’s rights. Qassem also said that any solution must be based on five conditions: ending Israeli attacks, Israel’s withdrawal, the release of detainees, the return of displaced residents, and reconstruction. And to me, all of that sounds pretty reasonable. So how should Americans understand the real fault lines in Lebanon right now? Is it simply pro-Hezbollah versus anti-Hezbollah? Or do you think it’s more fundamentally a divide between people who see Israel as this existential colonial threat to Lebanon and people who think that Lebanon can somehow survive by accommodating Israel?

Khalek

I think it’s definitely the latter because, of course, there’s the pro-Hezbollah and anti-Hezbollah camp, but that actually becomes murkier when war is happening—when Lebanon’s actually under attack. And a lot of the people who maybe don’t like Hezbollah politically, internally in the country, recognize that Lebanon does not have an army that is capable of protecting Lebanon. It’s intentionally incapable of protecting Lebanon because it depends on the Americans for its weapons, and the Americans, by law, have to preserve Israel’s military edge and are like their military base in the region. So they’re never going to allow any other force across the region, especially one that borders Israel, to have the ability to confront or challenge the Israelis. So the Lebanese army is very weak. It has very basic weapons, and it’s just not capable of protecting the country from an aggressor as bad as the Israelis. And that’s why Hezbollah exists.

That’s why Hezbollah has always existed. It stepped in to defend Lebanon in the ’80s, which I know I explained last month on the show, but it’s worth reemphasizing. In the 1980s, when Israel invaded Lebanon and occupied the south for 18 years after its invasion, that’s where Hezbollah came into being. It was people of the south that organized themselves militarily to confront a colonial occupier, and they were given weapons and allied with the Iranians. So they have this whole ideology behind them, but at the core of their ideology, even more than the role that religion plays—although it does play a huge role for Hezbollah—is being people who are being occupied and trying to get their land and homes back. And that situation existed back then too. The Lebanese state was fractured and weak, and there were elements in Lebanon who, exactly like you said, have an accommodationist approach to the Israelis, or they’re actually in collaboration with the Israelis because they agree with them. And so it’s like those people versus the people of the south, and the people of the south were left on their own to deal with it, and so they dealt with it with armed resistance. And that’s what’s happening now as well.

Anybody in the country you know who is from the south—not everyone, but typically because they’re geographically and materially forced into this situation—is more likely to support armed resistance than, perhaps, people who aren’t from the south. That said, there are a couple of camps that exist in the rest of the country, outside the south, that see all of Lebanon as their country. They see Israel’s trampling on the land of the south and trying to steal it as an affront to Lebanese sovereignty. A lot of people feel that way, whether they’re from the south or not, and therefore, because the army cannot defend Lebanon, even if they don’t like Hezbollah politically internally in the country, they see those soldiers on the ground as brave, patriotic heroes who are fighting for the territorial integrity of Lebanon as a country.

There’s another camp of people—I wouldn’t say they’re collaborators with Israel or that they love Zionism, but I think that there’s a lot of media in this country that’s funded by oligarchs who are close to the Gulf states or close to the Americans, and they feed this narrative that basically, resistance is futile, you can’t fight the Israelis, and resistance to the Israelis is the reason we have a thousand other problems in Lebanon. It’s all because of resistance. And if the Lebanese just stopped resisting Israel, we could be like Dubai, or we could be like Jordan, or we could be like Egypt. I’m not really sure why you’d want to be like any of those countries, but they are seen in a bit of a positive light in that respect—maybe because they have better electricity, I don’t know. But all that’s to say there is this kind of exhaustion, because Lebanon has been a very difficult place to live for the last 10 years with the port blast and the economic collapse and on and on and on. There’s this kind of despair and this idea that what’s the point in fighting them? We just need to make a peace agreement already.

I don’t think that’s the majority view. And if you look at polling—there was a recent poll done by a reputable institute. I can’t remember the exact name of it, but it showed that 89 percent of Lebanese are against peace with Israel in this current climate. So that’s a vast majority of the country that’s against peace with Israel for all kinds of different reasons, I’m sure, but I think the number one reason would be because they’re destroying our country right now. And then there’s a small segment of Lebanon, though it’s not insignificant, that is Zionist. They believe in a Jewish state, just like they believe Lebanon should be like a Christian state, I guess, or they want business deals. They think, “Just get this out of the way; let Israel have its Zionism, and we can do business with them and make a ton of money.” This really does exist in Lebanon, and it’s unfortunate. Again, it’s a very minority opinion, but it’s an opinion held by people with a lot of money, and because of that, they’re able to fund media that promotes this narrative. And they are close to the Trump administration, so they have sway and kind of convince people in the Trump administration that, no, this is exactly what Lebanon wants, actually, and we can totally defeat Hezbollah and let Netanyahu and Israel keep bombing and destroying Hezbollah, because the Lebanese state is too weak to do it.

So I would say that’s where it splits. And the thing is, democratically speaking, if we care about democracy, if we care about what the majority of people want, the majority of people, not just in Lebanon but across the region, hate Israel. That’s why this region is full of monarchies and police states that are backed by the U.S. to try to suppress the democratic will of the people when it comes to U.S. imperialism and Israel, which basically represents that. Lebanon is still a democracy. It’s not a police state—not yet, at least—and it’s not a monarchy. And the people who hate Israel the most in Lebanon have the most weapons. So Lebanon will be a very difficult country, so even if you have some photo op that Trump orchestrates between the Lebanese president and the Israeli prime minister, on the ground, you are not going to have peace with Israel.

Ross

And another thing I find striking is that after the pager attacks last year that you mentioned and the assassination of Nasrallah, a lot of Western coverage made it seem as if Hezbollah had been permanently crippled. Oh, and by the way, if there’s anyone listening to this who still thinks that those pager attacks were “surgical,” go watch Rania’s documentary with Breakthrough News, where she interviews some of the survivors, and you’ll see that actually several children were maimed in those attacks as well.

But leaving that aside, Israel seems unable to comfortably hold territory in southern Lebanon. And I saw this morning that Haaretz says that Israel and Lebanon talks may resume next week in Washington, even though Israel, of course, is still bombing parts of southern Lebanon. I’ve heard you say elsewhere that many Lebanese are not just skeptical of direct talks with Israel but also horrified and disgusted by them. And I was wondering if you can explain why these negotiations feel so obscene to some people right now.

Khalek

Absolutely. Real quick, just because you mentioned the pager documentary I did, a lot of those kids I interviewed, who are basically disabled for life now and blind and missing limbs and fingers, are now displaced because they’re from southern villages. So a lot of the villages I visited to interview them have been destroyed, and everybody’s been forcibly displaced. So I think about that often, about being a disabled kid in this situation and being displaced over and over again and being blind. But anyway, moving to the question that you asked: yes, there is a very visceral reaction most Lebanese have to seeing the Israeli flag and the Lebanese flag next to each other, and the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors in DC sitting side by side, and seeing the Lebanese ambassador to DC stand next to Trump and say, “We want to thank you for trying to make Lebanon great again.” It’s a visceral nausea, and it’s because of what Israel’s doing here right now. It is obscene.

The Israelis are bombing people, killing entire families in their homes, and they’re laughing about it. They’re bragging about detonating entire villages. It’s just so jarring to see the Israelis, their behavior, and their gloating. Their soldiers are like marauding thieves. They’re videotaping themselves and taking photos of themselves, stealing our stuff. They’re going into people’s houses and stealing their gold. Exactly like in Gaza, they’re dressing up in women’s lingerie that they find because they’re disgusting. They’re stealing family photographs as trophies of people whose homes they’ve destroyed. They’re leaving Stars of David all over the place because that’s like their version of the swastika, basically, to mark their territory. It’s just the worst kind of thing you could possibly imagine to see happen to your homeland, and then to see the government that’s supposed to be representing you acting like it’s not happening and wanting to sit with those people.

And look, I’m not opposed to peace. I don’t think Lebanese are opposed to peace. It’s not about that. It’s just that this is not peace. This is submission. This is submission and capitulation and humiliation too, by the way, because it’s being done at the barrel of a gun. You’re going to sit with these people—you have no leverage—and they’re basically trying to steal your territory. They’re telling you they want to steal your territory. They want to annex southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. Their more radical officials, like Bezalel Smotrich, are literally saying that. Their settlers are already buying and selling Lebanese land among each other, renaming the villages, even though they don’t control it. It’s insane.

And then to see the prime minister of Lebanon, Nawaf Salam, and President Joseph Aoun talking about how this is all Hezbollah’s fault—how, literally, every Israeli bombing is Hezbollah’s fault. Israel has no agency. They’re not responsible for murdering 2,700—more than 2,700 Lebanese since March 2 have been murdered by the Israelis. And 14 percent of them are apparently children, which, when you compare that to Ukraine, by the way, 1 percent of the casualties are children. So Israel just really excels at targeting children. But they’re killing your children. They’ve displaced over a million of your people. They’re destroying your homes. They’re blowing up your villages. I’m sorry. I get emotional about this because it’s so upsetting. But what’s actually happening here is that the president of Lebanon and the prime minister of Lebanon came into power after the 2024 war on the backs of the Americans and Israelis because that war was a defeated battle for Hezbollah. Since then, they have been basically capitulating to the Americans and trying to do this disarmament campaign of Hezbollah, and then in the middle of the war, trying to disarm Hezbollah, sitting with the Israelis, talking about negotiations. And even worse than all of that, if it’s possible, is Iran has been insisting that Lebanon be included in a ceasefire. The Lebanese government, under these people who are America’s buddies, has said, “No, thank you. We negotiate for ourselves.” Even though they have no leverage, they’re declining to be a part of a broader settlement that is between the Iranians and the Americans because they have American hands up their asses—they are just puppets for the Americans at this point.

The Lebanese Government has capitulated so hard that the Saudis, who have always interfered in Lebanon and always also had their puppets in this country who have so much influence, specifically over the prime ministership, but also the presidency, have had to step in and be like, “Y’all need to chill out and step back. You do not just give away the country to Israel,” because the Saudis also are seeing Israel increasingly as a threat to them, and they will not allow Lebanon to just make peace with Israel or negotiate with Israel the Abraham Accords before even Saudi Arabia has done so. The Saudis have played such a destructive role in this country, but the Lebanese Government is just so far gone that actually Saudi Arabia is restraining them right now. It’s completely insane.

And you mentioned something else I just want to touch on real quick. You mentioned a lot of the Western media thought Hezbollah was crippled. They actually kind of were for a brief period of time. In 2024 those pager attacks left Hezbollah totally disoriented. There was not a surgical attack, but those pagers were used to communicate, and once communication is down like that, you’re kind of screwed for a bit. They always talk about, “For five days after the pager attacks, we were disoriented and not functioning.” And then after that, don’t forget, they killed the entire senior leadership, but they were still able to hold off an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2024, and Israel was forced to commit to a ceasefire because they kind of ran into the same trap they always do in Lebanon: they invade the same way they always do and are unable to hold territory because Hezbollah can exact casualties and make it difficult and painful for them, and they ultimately have to withdraw, whether it takes 18 years or two months. So after that two-month ceasefire in November 2024, Hezbollah was able to push back an Israeli invasion. But then there were 15 months after that ceasefire where Israel violated it every single day, over 15,000 times, which is a comical number. Hezbollah didn’t fire once at Israel. And because they didn’t fire once at Israel in those 15 months, a lot of people, and I’ll even say myself included, thought they must just be too weak. They can’t fire at Israel. They must have just been defeated. They’re still powerful, but just not powerful enough to fight Israel.

And then March 2 comes, and Hezbollah finally fires back for those 15 months when they were giving the Lebanese state a chance to try to force Israel to abide by the ceasefire. The Lebanese government didn’t do anything. They sat on their hands. They let almost 400 people get killed in those 15 months. Israel ceasefire violations went unanswered until they did. And Hezbollah has come back, proving that while they’re not as obviously militarily powerful as Israel—no one can be in the region, especially a non-state actor—they have put up a fight on the ground. They’ve got these fiber optic drones that are making it very difficult for the Israelis to comfortably stay in the villages they’ve occupied. We’ll have to see how it plays out, but Hezbollah is not a defeated organization.