Israel continues bombing Gaza despite upcoming vaccination truce, Violence on the rise in the occupied West Bank, RSF calls for an independent investigation of Ismail al-Ghoul’s assassination and for Israel to stop targeting journalists, Israelis call for strike after six more hostages killed in Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister makes northern residents’ return part of broader Gaza goals as border crossfire with Lebanon continues, UN Security Council renews UNIFIL’s mandate for another year, Israel strike kills four on the Syrian side of Lebanon’s border, Death toll of Israel’s deadliest strike in Lebanon since October 8 rises to 11, Roumieh prison riot subdued by Internal Security Forces, Lebanese Army recovers body off Tripoli coast, Saki residents burn tires to extract copper and resell it with total impunity, Lebanon’s Health Ministry medical expense coverage upped to 80 percent of pre-crisis level, Hezbollah MP Melhem Hojeiri creates new political movement in Saida against Oussama Saad, EDL begins unloading Egyptian fuel as production set to increase, Floods and dam collapse intensify suffering in Sudan 500 days into the civil war, German government repatriates 28 people to Afghanistan, Amnesty denounces “alarming decision”
Vaccinate them, but keep on bombing. Israel’s war on Gaza, having taken on the irrefutable features of genocidal destruction, seems to have turned into a struggle for the unequivocal possession of the right to kill. If polio kills, Israel fails.
Self-proclaimed the only entity authorized to destroy the lives of Gaza, of its children – it adds the eradication of the lethal virus to the list of reasons for a war which, paradoxically, continues to call ‘right.’ And which has done, in almost eleven months, at least fifty thousand victims – not counting those missing under the piles of rubble.
While Palestinian Health officials assert a real ceasefire is needed in the war-ravaged Strip for the polio vaccination campaign to succeed, in fact, Israel continues to pound the enclave, killing dozens of people in the past 48 hours: just as the vaccination campaign sets off. Polio, experts warn, benefits from lack of hygiene, sanitation and clean water: “because if we had those components – the clean water, the proper facilities for bathing and latrines – we wouldn’t have polio. But this infrastructure has been completely destroyed,” said Chessa Latifi, the deputy director of emergency preparedness and response at Project HOPE.
And not only war, forced displacement and the breakdown of the healthcare system in Gaza will likely hinder the upcoming vaccination drive; not only, in the lack of any guarantee of safety, even reaching the clinics is an hazardous move; not only, the majority of Gazans do not have the fuel or means to access the clinics. But even if the vaccination campaign succeeds, what would be the sense of saving children from a virus, if you’re condemning them to nothing but airstrikes, massacres, and famine? In other words, that is not the core issue: the vaccine drive alone will not help prevent the spread of the virus, it will not save any life.
As usual, Israel prides itself on putting a band-aid on the chasm of death and devastation that it itself has created: just as the pretext of democracy has been shadowing for decades over ethnic cleansing and aparheid, now that of vaccination is diverting from the catastrophe of an ongoing, unprecedented genocide.
No end in sight
On the other side of the spectrum, negotiation talks for a real cease-fire seem to have reached a stall again. While the US and Israel’s media machines keep claiming that Hamas is the party that consistently rejects Gaza cease-fire proposals, a careful reading of the group’s official statement shows that it has accepted President Joe Biden’s earlier plan, which the UN Security Council also approved. Often, though, US and Arab mediators begin with the proposed Israeli text and then offer it to Hamas, in an effort to get the group to take the blame for its rejection.
At this point, the problem of having the United States – the strongest ally with Israel – as an expected honest broker, is unmasking a clear conflict of interest. Not by chance, as well-known Palestinian analyst Nasser Laham wrote, over the last forty years, the US has failed every time it has tried to mediate between the parties in the Middle East. Any attempt at a breakthrough is therefore dogged by an endemic – yet understandable – lack of trust: Palestinian, towards any American mediation.
And as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been constantly moving the goalposts and always blaming Hamas for rejecting ceasefire proposals – not willing to end the war without his version of a victory -, the onslaught is reaching its eleventh month, its fifty-thousandth victim.
The point, at this juncture, is fundamental. Hamas wants this war to end. Wars end with a cease-fire that is well observed. Peace begins after justice is reached – and justice cannot unfold if the root causes of the violence are not tackled. Any proposal that leaves out an end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, therefore, will ultimately be rejected.
In Lebanon
Targeted strike: On Wednesday, August 28, an Israeli drone strike killed four people on the Syrian side of the Lebanese border, hitting a vehicle which, according to security sources, had not been ferrying weapons. Hezbollah announced the death of one of its members, while the Islamic Jihad claimed three, among whom Faris Qasim, who it said was a significant figure in the operations division of the Iranian-backed Palestinian militant group, responsible for operational plans in Syria and Lebanon.
Israel has carried out several such strikes, aiming to target a vital Hezbollah supply route, along with serial attacks targeting party members in Syria.
On Tuesday night, an Israeli strike mildly injured the driver of a van on a road east of Baalbek, reportedly transporting a damaged rocket launcher, a security source told Reuters. At least 433 Hezbollah members have been killed in Lebanon and Syria since October 7.
Border crossfire: Israeli shelling, aerial bombardment and incendiary strikes have been going on across the Lebanese borders since Friday, blasting through south Lebanon’s houses and leaving trails of charred and cratered land across the area. Hezbollah announced several cross-border attacks targeting Israeli military positions with explosive drones as well as its Katyusha and Falaq rockets.
At least 47 people were hospitalized between Wednesday and Friday in south Lebanon, the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee’s Civil Defense announced, adding that it had extinguished 25 fires during the same period.
Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said “the safe return of residents of northern Israel to their homes” must be included in Israel’s goals for the war in Gaza. Hezbollah has repeatedly said it would not stop attacks on northern Israel before a cease-fire begins in Gaza.
Keep on growing: The death toll of Israel’s deadliest strike since October 8 has risen to 11, as a Syrian national wounded in August 17’s attack on a residential building between Kfour and Toul, Nabatieh, died from his injuries on Thursday.
The Israeli attack massacred a family of four and six other people, all of whom were Syrian nationals -making it Israel’s deadliest attack since the outbreak of the conflict.
Renewed: The UN Security Council renewed UNIFIL’s mandate for another year, voting unanimously in favor of Resolution 2696, renewing for the 46th time since 1978 the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon’s deployment near the Lebanese-Israeli border.
The council urged for “de-escalation” efforts from all parties to restore “calm, restraint, and stability” around the Blue Line – drawn to establish the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon in the wake of the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war and seeking, among other things, to maintain the Lebanese Army’s arms monopoly south of the Litani river.
Lebanon’s UN representative and caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati thanked the council affirming the government’s commitment “to work closely with UNIFIL to address the challenges and threats to stability in the south,” the premier said. On the other side, Israel’s UN representative threatened Lebanon would be “dragged into chaos and destruction” if it did not confront Hezbollah, calling for action from the international community before the clashes ongoing since October 8 “spiral out of control” and urging it to classify the party as a terrorist organization.
Fuel crisis dossier: A shipment of 30,000 tons of fuel purchased from Egypt to alleviate the shortages that shutdown Lebanon’s only two-operational power plants earlier this month, was finally unloaded during the weekend. The shipment was purchased on the spot market by the Lebanese government and transported by the Chem Helen, a tanker that arrived in Lebanon on Monday night.
This shipment does not include the much-vaunted fuel donated by Algeria, which also arrived last week, yet unlikely to be usable immediately. Not only high seas have delayed the unloading of the fuel shipment – which was scheduled to begin today at 2 pm -, but even if it meets the specifications, Lebanon may not be able to use the Algerian fuel before at least two months, as the power plants that use this fuel type are too old or no longer in operation, and a new operation and maintenance contract, which is being prepared and has yet to be signed, would allow the power plants to restart only in November.
Electricité du Liban (EDL) began offloading the first of three Egyptian fuel shipments on Friday, following a slight delay. These shipments were expected by the end of September to boost electricity production, which had reached critically low levels due to a lack of resupply. EDL plans to “gradually restart” the two power plants, beginning with Zahrani, expecting to add 400 megawatts to its grid, in addition to 65 MW of hydropower capacity. This could provide an average of four hours of electricity per day and power vital infrastructure such as the airport, the port, water pumps, sewage systems, etc. for 24 hours a day.
Since mid-August, the Lebanese have had less than an hour of electricity per day on average, relying heavily on private generators. Even with full capacity and sufficient fuel, EDL cannot provide continuous power nationwide.
In a statement released on Friday, EDL said it had received the results of a quality check performed by “Bureau Veritas laboratories in Dubai, UAE, on representative samples taken from the cargo.” This is a standard procedure conducted by the bureau and commissioned by the Energy and Water Ministry.
Prisoners riot: The Internal Security Forces’ riot squad subdued a riot at Lebanon’s largest penitentiary, the Roumieh prison, during which prisoners took several guards hostage during a general uprising decrying the alleged neglect causing the death of a fellow inmate, Omar Hamid. The deceased prisoner had been sentenced to death for an Islamic State bombing that killed two Lebanese officers.
“The prisoner Omar Hamid died as a result of the negligence of the prison administration and the lack of medical care,” Lebanese lawyer Mohammad Sablouh wrote on Facebook. “Instead of admitting that the internal security forces are wrong and working to rectify the problem years ago, they justified the existence of riot control forces with the argument of kidnapping prisoners, officers and elements, but the truth came out with the lie of the prison administration and invented these lies to cover up their failure to care for prisoners,” he continued, calling for a transparent investigation to reveal the truth, and demanding judicial accounting.
In a previous interview for ZAMANALWSL, Sablouh stated that “the hospital is five minutes away from the prison of Roumieh by foot.”
Human rights watchdog Amnesty International condemned “a sharp increase in custodial deaths” in Lebanon, piling on to a series of warnings from detainees’ relatives and international organizations over, what have been called, “horrific” carceral conditions.
A new party: In the southern city of Saida, a new political party, “Victory through Work,” has just been founded with the aim of taking away votes from the local Sunni Nasserite Popular Organization of Oussama Saad – son of founder Maarouf – whose relationship with Hezbollah has worsened since October 7, despite the fact that they historically place themselves within the ‘Axis of the Resistance.’
The founder of this new faction, born on August 17, is in fact Melhem Hojeiri, a Sunni parliamentarian from Hezbollah, elected in the district of Baalbek. Despite his Nasserite and “pro-resistance” political background, Hojeiri no longer hides his differences with Hezbollah, his former ally: he had distanced himself from the Shiite party, seeking to get closer to the October 17, 2019 uprising.
Paradoxically – because the premise is precisely an internal fracture within the Axis – the objective is to strengthen an inter-confessional political front and unite it in view of possible developments in the war with Israel, which at the moment remains only of friction.
Off shore: A body of an unidentified person was found floating in the waters off the Tripoli port on Tuesday, August 27. The Lebanese Navy retrieved the body and brought it ashore, where it was then transported to Tripoli Governmental Hospital by a team from the Lebanese Red Cross, where a forensic doctor and a forensic evidence team examined the body to determine the cause of death and the circumstances surrounding the drowning.
Black-smoked: On the same day, black smoke billowed over Tripoli, particularly in the Saki district, where residents burned tires to extract copper and resell it, with total impunity.
This phenomenon is making a comeback in the northern capital, where the smoke caused by these fires pollutes the air, soil and water, affecting both the environment and the health of local residents. The security services have tried to put an end to this practice, but their initiatives have failed, as no one has been arrested, although those responsible for such actions are known to the competent authorities.
Caretaker Environment Minister Nasser Yassin told reporters he was looking into the matter, promising an intervention by the Internal Security Forces to prevent anyone from setting tires on fire and to put an end to such practices.
Upped: Caretaker Health Minister Firas Abiad said the Ministry would cover expenses for 50 new medical procedures as of September, increasing its payments to hospitals and the sums paid on behalf of uninsured patients up till 80 percent of pre-crisis level.
Abiad announced the Ministry commits, empowered by a novel digital accounting system, “to pay its invoices from now on within three to four months,” increasing the amounts paid by the public body in order “to cut short the pretexts of asking for surpluses from patients.” The caretaker Minister added that work was underway to make treatment in government facilities comparable to the private sector.
In The Region
Raiding the West Bank: Violent Israeli raids on the occupied West Bank have been ongoing for five days, killing at least 29, Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. The Israeli military raided Jenin, Nablus, Tubas and Tulkarem in the occupied Palestinian territory, killing, among the victims – eleven only during the first raid -, two brothers aged 13 and 17, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported. Then, as Israel’s deadly assault on the Jenin refugee camp entered its fifth day, residents reported being stuck in their homes without water, food or electricity.
The Israeli army confirmed it annihilated a top Islamic Jihad commander, after the second day of raids on the northern occupied-West Bank. The first one left enormous destruction, including the destruction of water and sewage infrastructure. And while Hamas and the Islamic Jihad announced that at least 13 of those killed were fighters from their armed branches, since Wednesday, the Red Crescent has also counted 55 wounded and several shootings and attacks on its ambulances.
In the camp of Jenin alone, which is home to about 11,000 Palestinians, Israeli forces have killed at least 12 people, including five who were killed in air attacks and seven who were shot with live ammunition. The victims include 83-year-old Tawfiq Ahmad Younis Qandil, shot and killed by Israeli snipers on Friday night when he stepped outside to get groceries, according to his family. The Israeli military also bulldozed roads, destroyed public infrastructure on a massive scale and damaged private homes as well as a mosque. There are reports of Israeli soldiers rounding up dozens of young Palestinians, subjecting them to various forms of mistreatment and taking them to undisclosed locations.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were already facing their deadliest year in decades by March 2023 before the spike in Israeli military raids and settler violence after October 7 – exacerbated by the authorization of expanded land grabbing for settlements by Israel’s government, deemed illegal by several international organizations.
As part of the increasing violence and humiliating treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, sexual harassment at checkpoints in the occupied cities is on the rise, as reported by an increasing number of Palestinian women.
In June, a UN report found that Israeli authorities have systematically subjected Palestinian women and girls to sexual violence, including forced nudity, public stripping, sexualized torture and harassment. The report concluded that these abuses form part of the Israeli Security Forces’ operating procedures. “These acts were intended to humiliate and degrade the victims and the Palestinian community at large, by perpetuating gender stereotypes that create a sense of shame, subordination, emasculation and inferiority,” the report read.
Pause to vaccinate: A new cease-fire deal discussed in Doha has drafted calls for pauses to distribute polio vaccines in the war-torn Gaza Strip, after European Union chief of diplomacy Josep Borell urged for a respite to distribute the doses, more than a million of which were donated to the enclave after the viral disease was detected – and has since reportedly infected months-old children.
Israel and Hamas have agreed to three separate, zoned, three-day pauses in fighting in the Strip to allow for the vaccination of some 640,000 children against polio. While the Israeli authorities indicated that vaccines would be given daily from 6:00 am until 3:00 pm for three days in central Gaza, three days in southern Gaza, and three days in northern Gaza, the Strip’s Health Ministry distributed a different schedule, with the vaccine program lasting four days in each location.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said tests carried out with UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, “showed the presence of poliovirus” in the besieged territory, as confirmed by the Israeli Ministry, in whose laboratory the virus was tested as polio type 2. It added the World Health Organization had made similar findings. The highly infectious virus found in sewage samples from Gaza puts thousands of people living in crowded displaced persons’ camps at risk of deformities and paralysis. “The presence of poliovirus in wastewater that collects and flows between displacement camp tents and in inhabited areas because of the destruction of infrastructure marks a new health disaster,” the Gaza Ministry said, highlighting “severe overcrowding” and “scarce water” that is becoming contaminated with sewage and the accumulation of rubbish. The Ministry denounced Israel’s refusal to let hygiene supplies into Gaza “creates a suitable environment for the spread of different diseases.”
Authorities in the central Gaza town of Deir el-Balah said last month that wastewater treatment stations had been shut down because of a lack of fuel. They warned that roads “will be flooded by wastewater” and that 700,000 civilians, most of them displaced, would be put at risk of catching sewage-borne diseases.
UN agencies have been campaigning for four decades to eradicate polio, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, but there has been a resurgence in recent years in Afghanistan and Pakistan and some isolated cases in Nigeria. The war has plunged the Palestinian territory into a humanitarian disaster with more than half of its 2.4 million people displaced and in dire need. The NGO Oxfam has castigated “Israel’s use of water as a weapon of war” and the Dutch peace-promoting NGO PAX has pointed out the health threat in a territory “drowned” under waste and rubble.
Targeting aid convoys: Meanwhile, as the WHO (World Health Organization) announced that Israel has agreed to a temporary pause in fighting to allow for polio vaccinations to be given to children, Israel carried out a strike on a vehicle travelling in an aid convoy organized by US-based humanitarian group Anera in southern Gaza on Thursday evening, killing at least five people. Israel told the US that an initial review found that shots were fired at a clearly marked World Food Programme (WFP) vehicle in the Gaza Strip after a “communication error” between Israeli military units, deputy US envoy to the UN Robert Wood said on Thursday.
“We have urged them to immediately rectify the issues within their system,” Wood told a UN Security Council meeting on Gaza. “Israel must not only take ownership for its mistakes, but also take concrete actions to ensure the IDF does not fire on UN personnel again,” he added.
Journalists in the sights: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called for an independent investigation into the assassination of Al-Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, which occurred on July 31 in Jebalia, north of Gaza, when cameraman Rami al-Rifi was also killed.
The Israeli army indirectly admitted the premeditation of the assassination by speaking of al-Ghoul’s membership of Hamas, stating on X (formerly Twitter) that it had eliminated a “terrorist” and “journalist.”
This is not the first time the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have used this accusation to justify attacks against journalists without providing any substantial evidence. The issue was categorically rejected by the Qatari broadcaster and now RSF claims that the army’s accusations are devoid of evidence, there are clear contradictions in the IDF’s statements and the accusations are a pretext that has been continuously repeated by other cases.
RSF has turned to the ICC asking to act on these sensational cases of targeted assassinations, which have the sole objective of concealing the truth of the crimes committed.
More than 130 media professionals have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli army since 7 October, including at least 31 while doing their job.
To the streets: Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities in Israel, demanding a ceasefire deal, and Israel’s largest trades union federation – the Histadrut – called for a general strike, after the bodies of six more captives were recovered from Gaza.
Identified as Almog Sarusi, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the military said on Sunday that their remains were recovered “from an underground tunnel in the Rafah area” and returned to Israel where they were formally identified. It claimed that the captives were killed not long before their bodies were recovered, while senior Hamas official Izzat al-Risheq said the six captives were killed in Israeli air strikes.
In a statement, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents the families of captives held in Gaza, said the death of the six hostages was the direct result of Netanyahu’s failure to secure a deal to halt the fighting and bring their loved ones home. “They were all murdered in the last few days, after surviving almost 11 months of abuse, torture and starvation in Hamas captivity,” the forum said.
Chanting “Now, now,” scuffles between the protesters and security forces were reported on Sunday night in one of the largest anti-government demonstrations in Israel since the Gaza war began nearly 11 months ago. Many Israelis blocked roads in Tel Aviv and demonstrated outside Netanyahu’s office in West Jerusalem.
Stalled: Hamas sat out the past two weeks of talks condemning Israel’s insistence on maintaining troops in Gaza, notably in the strip of land bordering Egypt, the Philadelphi Corridor. A decision which was slammed even by families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, who saw it as a move believed to be a potential deal breaker in cease-fire negotiations.
“After almost a year of neglect, Netanyahu does not miss an opportunity to make sure that there will be no deal for the release of our loved ones,” the families’ statement, shared by Israel’s Channel 12, reads. “There is not a day when Netanyahu does not act in a real way to endanger the return of all the abductees home.”
Throughout the talks shuttling Israeli negotiators for meetings with mediators in Cairo and Doha, the US maintained that there had been progress while, according to Reuters’ reports, American President Joe Biden, and members of Israel’s negotiating team, sought to dissuade Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from maintaining soldiers in Gaza.
Repatriated: The German government has approved the repatriation of 28 Afghan citizens, despite the severance of diplomatic relations with Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in 2021. According to a government spokesperson, Steffen Hebestreit, these are people with definitive convictions handed down by the German judicial authorities.
The repatriation, given the breakdown of diplomatic relations, could not take place through official channels and, according to the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Qatar acted as mediator in the operation, with secret negotiations lasting at least two months. Also according to the German weekly, the repatriation flight took off from Leipzig-Halle airport, in Saxony.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz commented on the expulsion, calling it “a clear signal” that those who have committed crimes in Germany cannot hope to remain in the country. Amnesty International protested the government’s choice, with the secretary of the organization’s German office, Julia Duchrow, calling the decision “alarming.” No one should be expelled to a country where there is a risk of torture, Duchrow said. “It is alarming that the German government has not respected this obligation,” she added, accusing Scholz’s government of having preferred to “bow to political pressure” in view of Sunday’s elections in Thuringia and Saxony.
500 days of war: The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is calling for increased support from donors and the international community to sustain response to the rising humanitarian needs and displacement in Sudan compounded by the recent floods. Scores of people are still missing following the collapse of Arba’at dam in Sudan’s northeastern Red Sea State following heavy rains. An estimated 50,000 people have been affected, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Torrential rain has been causing havoc in the war-torn country since June, with warnings that 11 million people are likely to be exposed to exceptionally heavy rainfall in the coming days.
The dam collapse, which claimed at least 30 lives, comes on top of floods that have displaced more than 136,000 people across 14 states, as reported by the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix. An estimated 47 per cent of those displaced by the floods were already displaced due to the ongoing conflict. These disaster displacements are further deepening the country’s devastating humanitarian crisis after 500 days of a brutal war.
According to IOM estimates, more than 25,000 shelters and community infrastructures were destroyed by the floods forcing some displaced individuals to shelter with host communities and in schools, while many others are staying in the open, exposed to intense heat and rain. The conflict has caused significant damage to civilian infrastructure, including telecommunication networks, water supplies, and roads, further complicating efforts to respond to humanitarian needs.
Displacement continues to soar in Sudan, with over 10.7 million people seeking safety within the country, many displaced twice or more. Over the next three months, an estimated 25.6 million people will face acute food insecurity as the conflict spreads and coping mechanisms are exhausted – as the RSF (Rapid Support Forces), responsible for much of the destruction, continues to operate with impunity, actively destroying the country’s food reserves. Since the RSF took control of the state of Jazirah, the country’s farming centre, last December, the nation has been grappling with human-made famine. Farmers in the state have also reported a near-complete loss of cotton and wheat crops due to RSF control.
What We’re Reading
Too big to bail: Depositors’ harsh reality suggests a partial repayment scheme of savings, economist Maan Barazy reported for NOW. The Lebanese government’s restructuring plan disclosed a long phased recovery scenario, raising questions about the melting of 30 billion dollars of deposits and bank capital.
Against all odds: Lebanese mouneh, a traditional practice of preserving and storing food, has long been a cultural staple in Lebanon. NOW’s journalist Rodayna Raydan underlined how, in the current context of war and economic instability, it has taken on an even more significant role as a symbol of resilience and self-sufficiency.
From resistance to restraint: Hassan Nasrallah’s recent speech marked a significant rhetorical shift for Hezbollah, political psychologist Ramzi Abou Ismail wrote for NOW. After eleven months of intense conflict resulting in widespread destruction across Lebanon, Nasrallah’s messaging has taken on a noticeably cautious tone: for a leader long seen as the vanguard of resistance against Israel, this reluctance to escalate into full-scale war demands closer scrutiny.
You Still Stink: Nine years after the You Stink movement started, triggered by the closure of Beirut’s main landfill and trash piling up in the streets of the capital, very little has changed. Valeria Rando tackled for NOW the politics behind waste management, the risks of Lebanon’s garbage crisis, and the activists’ wearing attempts towards environmental justice.
A necessary conversation: Polarizing arguments inside the Lebanese ‘change camp’ are disrupting personal and political relationships between activists, forcing them back to the partisan game, Mohammad El Sahili wrote for NOW, calling for a necessary, constructive conversation beyond dichotomies.
Lebanon +
Hassan Fneish, a 32-year-old architect and photographer, and Fatima Joumaa, a 25-year-old filmmaker, have turned their cameras into what they call “powerful tools of resistance,” Lebanese newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour reported. Their work documenting the devastation of the southern lands, as well as the resilience of their people, is now on display in Multaqa Assafir, Hamra, where the offices of one Lebanon’s leading Arabic-language daily newspapers used to be. The young couple from southern Lebanon are bringing the story of their community to the country’s capital, preserving the experiences of those caught between Israel and Hezbollah’s ongoing war of attrition along the southern borders.
