English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For May 30/2025
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news

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Bible Quotations For today
If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint John 03/12-15/:”If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.””

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on May 29-30/2025
Raiding the Home of Lebanese Writer and Journalist Wissam Saadeh and Confiscating His Cell Phone: A Rejected and Condemned Act of Terror/Elias Bejjani/May 29/2025
The Possible Appointment of Nejad Fares as Lebanon’s Ambassador to Washington Raises Serious Questions/Elias Bejjani/May 26/2025
Etienne Saqr – Abu Arz: Swimming Against the Tide
When did the Syrians become so much smarter than the Lebanese on national interests?/Hussain Abdul-Hussain/Face Book/May 29/2025
Israeli Strike Kills a Municipal Worker in Southern Lebanon
Lebanese Army removes barriers set up by Israeli troops in South Lebanon's Odaisseh
Israel says Lebanese Army 'way more effective than expected' in disarming Hezbollah
Hezbollah's arsenal remains: Lebanon stalls on disarmament as international community awaits
Lebanon takes border measures in coordination with Damascus to curb smuggling
On Peacekeepers' Day, UNIFIL emphasizes commitment to peace, despite continued tensions
Geagea says Hezbollah's Qassem seems to be 'on another planet'
Hezbollah MPs lash out at Foreign Minister Rajji
Geagea defending Rajji: Those who reject policy statement must resign from govt.
Iraq says Israel ready to free Hezbollah captives as part of Tsurkov deal
Salam: We don't want civil war but we're committed to extending state authority
Lebanon to hold first official negotiation meeting with IMF delegation on Friday
IMF delegation meets donor ambassadors at the residence of Egyptian ambassador in Beirut
Shell from Syria wounds citizen in Akkar town
Palestinian Arms: What Guarantees the Success of Disarmament?/Hanna Saleh/Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
Another Reading of Lebanon’s ‘Liberation Day’/Hazem Saghieh/Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on May 29-30/2025
Israel approves biggest expansion of West Bank settlements in decades
‘They Are Potential Targets’: Houthi President Threatens Civilian Aircraft After Sanaa Airport Struck
Iran Mulling Proposal For Stopgap Agreement to Pause Nuclear Enrichment
Israel says intercepts missile from Yemen after air raid warning
Israel accepts ceasefire plan for Gaza, US says, Hamas reviewing
Israel Strike on a Home in Gaza Kills 22 as it Orders Hospital Evacuation
UK Slams New Israeli Settlements as an Obstacle to Palestinian Statehood
Two-State Solution Conference Prepares Roadmap with International Backing
Gaza Aid System Under Pressure as Thousands Seek Food
US Flag Raised in Damascus, Envoy Says Syria-Israel Peace is Possible
Cyprus offers Syrian families money to resettle and work permits for main earners
Syria Signs $7 billion Power Deal with Qatar's UCC Holding-led Consortium
Saudi crown prince, Canadian prime minister discuss bilateral relations

Titles For The Latest English LCCC analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources on May 29-30/2025
A secular jihadi brings the intifada to Washington ...The Islamist/leftist alliance metastasizes/Clifford D. May/The Washington Times/May 29/2025
U.S. Professors Flocking to Terrorist-Run Turkish Think Tank/Melissa Sacks and David May/ Real Clear Defense/May 29/2025
America's (And Israel's) Ottoman Gamble/Amb. Alberto M. Fernandez/ MEMRI Daily Brief No. 778/May 29, 2025 |
India and Pakistan: 'A Bad Nuclear War'/Gordon G. Chang/Gatestone Institute/May 29, 2025

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published  on May 29-30/2025
Raiding the Home of Lebanese Writer and Journalist Wissam Saadeh and Confiscating His Cell Phone: A Rejected and Condemned Act of Terror
Elias Bejjani/May 29/2025
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/2025/05/143756/
Multiple social media outlets reported today that the home of Lebanese writer and journalist Wissam Saadeh was raided by security forces, and his mobile phone was confiscated, based on an order issued by Judge Fadi Akiki.
We affirm that this action is categorically rejected and strongly condemned, as it constitutes a direct assault on freedom of expression and the essential role of journalism in Lebanon.
This condut is, by all standards, an act of terror and a blatant violation of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Lebanese Constitution, foremost among them freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are sacred pillars in any sound democratic system.
Pursuing journalists and free voices—rather than holding corrupt officials and criminals accountable for dismantling the foundations of the state—reflects a deeply troubling decline in the priorities of Lebanon’s judicial and security institutions. Wissam Saadeh is a respected Lebanese writer, widely known for his intellect, integrity, and constructive critical thinking. This blatant judicial assault against him is not merely a personal attack—it is a warning to every free voice daring to speak the truth at a time when the criminal and terrorist grip of Iranian occupation, represented by the Hezbollah gang wholly loyal to the IRGC, is beginning to falter.
In defense of truth and the preservation of freedoms, we call on the Minister of Justice to put an immediate end to Judge Fadi Akiki’s abuses of power, and in fact, to hold him accountable for the many baseless accusations he has issued—and continues to issue—against writers, journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens, without legal justification.
We reaffirm that freedom of the press is not a matter of opinion—it is a cornerstone of national and democratic life. The continuation of this repressive approach, embodied by Judge Akiki and those behind him, will not intimidate the sovereign voices or silence the truth, but will further expose ongoing efforts to subjugate the nation of the Cedars to fear, suppression, and authoritarianism.
We demand an immediate end to such practices, and accountability for anyone who abuses judicial or security authority. We also express our full solidarity with writer and journalist Wissam Saadeh, and with every free voice that refuses to submit to the machinery of repression, terror, and the assault on fundamental freedoms.
Freedom of speech is a red line—and Lebanon can only be rebuilt on the foundations of liberty, dignity, and justice.

The Possible Appointment of Nejad Fares as Lebanon’s Ambassador to Washington Raises Serious Questions
Elias Bejjani/May 26/2025
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/2025/05/143687/
Last week, social media platforms circulated news about intensive deliberations taking place at the highest levels in Lebanon to choose a new ambassador to the United States. The leading candidate appears to be Mr. Nejad Fares, a prominent figure in the "American Task Force for Lebanon" (ATFL), who is reportedly receiving special backing from president Joseph Aoun. As discussions around this appointment intensify, it is essential to pause and raise a number of questions and observations—not out of personal suspicion, but from a standpoint rooted in Lebanon’s national interest, its sovereignty, and the ongoing regional shifts and domestic challenges Lebanon faces in its struggle to reclaim its independence and liberate itself from the Iranian-Hezbollah occupation.
The first and most obvious question is this, why is a dual U.S. citizen being considered for this crucial post, when Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora are home to hundreds of highly qualified, sovereign-minded individuals who meet all legal requirements and do not need to renounce any foreign citizenship to comply with Lebanese laws?
Doesn't this indicate a troubling narrowness in the selection process—especially in president's  Aoun’s choices?
And why, during such a critical and sensitive period, the focus is on nominating figures who spark political controversy and raise many questions?
If it is indeed true that president Aoun is pushing for Mr. Nejad Fares to be appointed to this position, then it is Mr. Fares’s duty—first and foremost—to clearly and publicly declare to the Lebanese people, and to the regional and international actors striving to help Lebanon break free from Iranian occupation:
Where does he stand on the key United Nations Security Council resolutions related to Lebanon, particularly:
Resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of all militias,
Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war and reasserted the sovereignty of the Lebanese state,
Resolution 1680, which called for the demarcation of borders with Syria.
And most importantly, his clear stance on all the provisions of the ceasefire agreement issued following the end of the war that Hezbollah launched against the State of Israel—on orders from Iran, not Lebanon—in support of Hamas’s terrorist war.
We must ask: Does Mr. Fares support the full implementation of these resolutions? Or does he, like president Joseph Aoun, adhere to the failed notion of “dialogue with Hezbollah”—a theory that has proven disastrous over the past two decades? Hezbollah has never once abandoned its weapons. It has rejected every call for dialogue, broken every national accord, and each time it sat at the dialogue table, it later returned to impose its terms on the Lebanese people by force of arms.
The national and moral responsibility falls on Mr. Fares—if he truly intends to take on this diplomatic post—to issue an unambiguous and public statement detailing his position on Hezbollah and the aforementioned international resolutions. He must express his full commitment to these resolutions and affirm his belief that only the Lebanese state should possess arms—no one else.
Ultimately, if the reports of Mr. Nejad Fares’s nomination are accurate, then many inside Lebanon and within the diaspora view this choice as highly unfortunate, one that raises serious doubts about its timing and implications.
In conclusion, Lebanon today needs ambassadors with a sovereign and independent track record—diplomats committed to confronting the Iranian project and ending Hezbollah’s occupation. It is time to appoint ambassadors who genuinely represent a Lebanon that seeks peace, liberation, and an end to Hezbollah’s grip and to all forms of violence and hostility.

Etienne Saqr – Abu Arz: Swimming Against the Tide
May 29/2025
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/2025/05/143764/
(Free translation from Arabic by Elias Bejjani)
Statement issued by the Guardians of the Cedars Party – Lebanese National Movement
Following the resounding defeat of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” at the hands of the Israeli military, the political landscape of the Middle East has begun shifting dramatically in favor of the Saudi-led “Axis of Modernity.”
Iraq, long a captive of Tehran’s influence, has embarked on a path of liberation. It has begun curbing the role of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a militia network aligned with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and has returned to the Arab fold—most notably by hosting the 34th Arab Summit. This diplomatic milestone marks a strategic repositioning on the regional map.
Syria—once the cornerstone of the “Axis of Resistance” and Iran’s key strategic ally—has executed a dramatic U-turn. It has turned away from its past alignment, initiating engagement with both the Arab world and the West. High-level meetings with Israeli officials have taken place in preparation for a potential entry into the Abraham Accords. This culminated in a historic summit in Riyadh between Presidents Ahmed al-Sharaa and Donald Trump, which in turn led to the swift lifting of international sanctions on Syria.
In stark contrast, official Lebanon continues to swim against the tide.
The country remains plagued by what can only be described as an “Iranian trauma syndrome.” It delays the implementation of international resolutions, evades any serious dialogue about Hezbollah’s weapons, and clings to a policy of appeasement—making empty promises and futile attempts to balance irreconcilable positions. In doing so, it satisfies no one and undermines its own dignity.
Most troubling are the ambiguous and often complicit stances adopted by some Lebanese officials toward Hezbollah. This was epitomized by the recent statement of the Lebanese Army Commander, who publicly praised Hezbollah on the 25th anniversary of the so-called “Liberation of the South.” This narrative conveniently ignores the well-documented truth: the events of May 25, 2000, were not a liberation but rather a unilateral Israeli withdrawal, carried out under German mediation and in coordination with Hezbollah—facts of which we were direct witnesses. It is therefore imperative for the Lebanese state to abolish the falsehood that is the so-called “Day of Resistance and Liberation.”
This reckless, inconsistent policy—and Lebanon’s refusal to align with the emerging New Middle East or to embrace development and openness—will only accelerate its descent into failure. Without a bold and sovereign decision, Lebanon risks remaining mired in isolation, fragility, and decline—until the day comes when its name is formally listed among the world’s failed states.
Enough floundering. Enough hypocrisy. Enough allegiance to a dying project.
It is time for Lebanon to emerge from the shadows and reclaim its true identity: a free and sovereign nation, the bearer of a civilizational message, and a beacon of distinction in this troubled region.
Long Live Lebanon

When did the Syrians become so much smarter than the Lebanese on national interests?
Hussain Abdul-Hussain/Face Book/May 29/2025
When did the Syrians become so much smarter than the Lebanese on national interests? Or, when did the Lebanese become so dumb and numb?
Poll: Most Syrians think normalization w/Israel will contribute to more prosperity and stability. 70% think it will lead to more international, Arab investment in Syria
63.69% think it will improve Syria's economic situation
58% think it will bring an end to regional wars and improving Syria's security situation
34.12% think it will lead Syria to abandon the Syrian territories occupied by Israel
62.67% think it will lead to regional countries controlling Syria's decisions and Israel taking more territory.

Israeli Strike Kills a Municipal Worker in Southern Lebanon
Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
An Israeli drone strike killed a municipal worker in southern Lebanon, the state-run National News Agency said on Thursday. The man was on his way to work on a well supplying water to homes when he was killed in the town of Nabatieh al-Fawqa, the agency said. Lebanon’s Health Ministry also reported one person killed in the strike. The Israeli army said in a statement that it had killed a “Hezbollah terrorist” who was “rehabilitating a site used by” the group “to manage its fire and defense array."A US-brokered ceasefire agreement brought the latest war between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah to an end in late November, but Israel has continued to launch near-daily strikes on Lebanon since then. Lebanon has complained that Israel is violating the ceasefire while Israel says it is striking Hezbollah facilities and officials to prevent the group from rearming.

Lebanese Army removes barriers set up by Israeli troops in South Lebanon's Odaisseh
LBCI/May 29/2025
A unit of the Lebanese Army, in coordination with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), removed several earth barriers and reopened roads in the outskirts of Odaisseh in the Marjayoun district that had been previously blocked by Israeli forces.
According to a statement from the Lebanese Army Command, while the army unit was carrying out the operation, Israeli troops accompanied by a tank attempted to obstruct the work. However, the attempt was unsuccessful, and the Lebanese forces continued their mission.

Israel says Lebanese Army 'way more effective than expected' in disarming Hezbollah
Naharnet/May 29/2025
An Israeli army official has said that the Lebanese Army has been “way more effective than expected” in removing Hezbollah’s arms, adding that the Israeli army is “pleased by this trend.”Lebanon’s army has dismantled most of Hezbollah’s posts and weapons stockpile in the country’s south, with the help of Israeli intelligence passed along by the U.S., and Israeli and American officials are said to be pleasantly surprised by the progress, the Wall Street Journal has reported. But the report, which also cited Arab officials, noted that the Lebanese Army still faces the challenge of completing the job in the south and implementing its plan to disarm Hezbollah and assert control over the entire country. Israeli intelligence, delivered to the Lebanese state via the U.S., helped locate remaining Hezbollah caches and posts in the south, unidentified senior Arab officials told the newspaper. Some of the weapons were destroyed, others were kept for the army’s own use. Senior Lebanese officials said Hezbollah has also been forced to give up control of Beirut’s international airport. That has impacted Hezbollah’s ability to bring in funds, according to the report.

Hezbollah's arsenal remains: Lebanon stalls on disarmament as international community awaits
LBCI/May 29/2025
February 26, 2025, marked the confidence vote session of Lebanon's new government.
Ninety-two days have passed since then, but there has been no tangible progress on one of its most critical commitments: disarming all non-state actors and ensuring that weapons are solely in the hands of the Lebanese state. Despite repeated promises, Lebanon's official stance on the issue has moved at what critics describe as a "snail's pace." The international community continues to watch closely, expecting decisive action. Yet, Hezbollah maintains that it is willing to cooperate—only once the government fully implements both the ministerial statement and the inaugural presidential speech. When asked to clarify this position, MP Hassan Fadlallah confirmed that cooperation remains conditional. While the Lebanese Army has reportedly deployed across most of the area south of the Litani River, except the five Israeli-occupied hills, and has secured approximately 80% of Hezbollah's weapons stockpiles in that region, the remainder lies in areas that require demining. Efforts are ongoing, but they are far from sufficient. The broader concern remains north of the Litani, where Hezbollah's arsenal has not been addressed. Both President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam are reportedly fully aware of the need to resolve this matter. Meanwhile, Israel has shown no intention of withdrawing from the five occupied hills and continues its violations and targeted assassinations. Talks over Hezbollah's detained fighters remain stalled, leaving the process in a political deadlock. Observers now question whether a breakthrough might come from initiating a national defense dialogue—one that Hezbollah might join unconditionally—or from jumpstarting reconstruction efforts to build trust, potentially starting with the $250 million World Bank loan designated for that purpose. In any case, the issue of disarmament requires urgent action before the country risks sliding back into a broader conflict—something Israel may be preparing for more eagerly than any other scenario.

Lebanon takes border measures in coordination with Damascus to curb smuggling
NAJIA HOUSSARI/Arab News/May 29, 2025
UNIFIL commander says situation along the Blue Line is tense as ‘violations’ continue
BEIRUT: Lebanese and Syrian delegations met in Damascus this week to discuss procedures for controlling cross-border smuggling, especially drug trafficking. The Syrian Interior Ministry announced that both sides discussed developments on the Lebanon-Syria border and ways to enhance cooperation to control it and prevent smuggling operations. It said that Maj. Gen. Ahmed Latouf, assistant minister for police affairs, on Tuesday evening met with a Lebanese army delegation headed by Brig. Gen. Michel Boutros. Chief of the Syrian army’s general staff, Maj. Gen. Ali Al-Naasan and Boutros had previously held a meeting to enhance military coordination between the two countries. In a statement released by the Syrian Arab News Agency, the interior ministry said the meeting between Naasan and Boutros was part of a series of ongoing discussions between them. According to the release, the chief of operations in Syria also attended the talks. A Lebanese military source said that the Lebanese army was enhancing its presence along the land border with Syria and maintaining strict control over areas known for smuggling, noting that similar measures were being taken on the Syrian side.
Two days ago, Hamish Cowell, the UK ambassador to Lebanon, said on X that he had visited the eastern border of Lebanon with Syria the previous week. During his visit, he observed how the Lebanese army’s new forward operating bases supported counter-smuggling efforts and improved border security.
The ambassador commended the soldiers of the Land Border Regiment for their efforts in defending Lebanon, emphasizing that UK support is ongoing.
The UK had previously provided watchtowers to help secure the borders.
The Lebanese army command had clarified to the Syrian side that the watchtowers were to monitor the border, prevent the infiltration of terrorists, and control the smuggling of people, drugs, weapons, and contraband from and into Lebanon. The army added that equipment installed in the towers was exclusively connected to the Lebanese military command and that cameras were aimed to monitor Lebanese rather than Syrian territory. The purpose was to observe the movement of people and vehicles outside official border crossings and to prevent infiltration and smuggling activities on the Lebanese side of the border. Lebanon shares a border with Syria that extends over 350 kilometers, threading through towns, villages, rugged terrain, and mountainous areas. Much of this border is unmarked, allowing for the smuggling of people, goods, fuel, weapons, ammunition, wanted individuals, and stolen vehicles.
Hezbollah manages dozens of crossings, because the areas around these crossings are supportive environments for the party.
The Lebanese government has identified 136 illegal border crossings between Lebanon and Syria, a number that increased during the Syrian war. In comparison, there are only six official border crossings between the two countries, which are in the northern and eastern regions. The Army Command announced on Thursday, the day after the Damascus meeting, that it had thwarted an attempt to smuggle a large quantity of drugs and fuel in the area between Yahfoufa and Baalbek. Nine suspects were arrested. Army units detained 26 Syrians illegally present in the Bekaa region, along with a Lebanese citizen in the Arsal-Baalbek highlands who was trying to smuggle fuel and other materials. On Lebanon’s southern border, Israeli breaches of Lebanese sovereignty continued. Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on his X account that an air force aircraft struck the Mount Shaqif area, eliminating a Hezbollah operative in southern Lebanon. The operative was reportedly attempting to reconstruct a site that had previously been used by Hezbollah for fire control and defense. He said such activity at the site constituted a violation of the understanding between Israel and Lebanon and has been targeted several times in recent weeks. Adraee said that the army would continue to act to eliminate any threat to Israel. The warning came as the Lebanese Ministry of Health confirmed the death of “a martyr in an Israeli drone strike … in Nabatieh Al-Fawqa.”Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lazaro Saenz, the head of mission and force commander of UNIFIL, said that the situation along the Blue Line is tense as a result of ongoing violations and significant risks, and any mistake could lead to serious consequences. On International Day of UN Peacekeepers, he said: “We welcome the calm that has prevailed since November, but weapons still roar and the challenges remain significant.” Israeli forces, which still occupy five hills in the Lebanese border area, advanced on Monday night toward Mays Al-Jabal in a serious land breach and set up earthen barriers in the area. The Lebanese army contacted the five-member committee overseeing the ceasefire agreement and then the next day proceeded to remove the newly erected barrier.

On Peacekeepers' Day, UNIFIL emphasizes commitment to peace, despite continued tensions
Naharnet/May 29/2025
In honor of the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, UNIFIL hosted a ceremony at its Naqoura headquarters attended by members of the Lebanese Army, security services, local political and religious authorities, ambassadors, and U.N. officials. “The situation along the Blue Line remains tense and unpredictable, with repeated violations and a high risk of miscalculation," Head of Mission and Force Commander Lieutenant-General Aroldo Lázaro warned. "Through our liaison and coordination mechanisms, we offer a channel for dialogue and de-escalation helping to build the foundation for a possible solution," he said. Emphasizing the need for a political process, the UNIFIL head noted that "the path to peace in southern Lebanon is political.""We must all work to create the right conditions for a long-term, sustainable solution," he urged. "One important step in recent months has been the significant deployment of more LAF (Lebanese Army) soldiers to the south,” the UNIFIL chief emphasized. “Their presence as the sole providers of state authority and security must be preserved and for that, help from international partners needs to be maintained,” he added. During the ceremony, Lieutenant General Lázaro and Lebanese Army Commander representative Brigadier General Nicola Tabet laid wreaths in tribute to fallen peacekeepers. Over 4,400 U.N. peacekeepers have lost their lives on missions around the world since 1948, including more than 330 since UNIFIL was established in 1978.
“Today, with solemn respect and deep gratitude, their legacy is etched into the foundation of this mission, and their commitment continues to inspire all of us who wear the blue helmet,” said Lieutenant General Lázaro. “As we commemorate the 77th anniversary of U.N. peacekeeping, may we also renew our shared commitment to a more peaceful future, for south Lebanon, for the region, and for all the conflicts where the United Nations tries to bring peace,” the UNIFIL head concluded. In 2002, 29 May was designated as the International Day of U.N. Peacekeepers to pay tribute to the "professionalism, dedication, and courage of the military and civilian peacekeepers serving in U.N. peacekeeping operations, and to remember those who lost their lives for the cause of peace," a UNIFIL statement said. The date was chosen to commemorate the establishment of the first peacekeeping mission, the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), whose Observer Group Lebanon members currently work alongside UNIFIL for peace and stability in south Lebanon.

Geagea says Hezbollah's Qassem seems to be 'on another planet'
Naharnet/May 29/2025
Hezbollah leader Sheikh Naim Qassem seems "as if he's on another planet" to Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea who criticized Qassem's "unrealistic" statements, in an interview with LBCI on Wednesday night. Geagea said foreign countries will not help Lebanon or deal with the Lebanese state as long as Hezbollah is keeping its "illegal" arms. "There will be no reconstruction, no financial rescue — all of that is now suspended, frozen, and paralyzed, until Hezbollah disarms. No one will want to deal with the state in such a situation."Geagea praised Prime Minister Nawaf Salam's stance on Hezbollah's arms but urged President Joseph Aoun to set a deadline for the disarmament of the group. "Salam's stances are very clear but Aoun's dialogue can not be indefinitely open. A timeframe is needed, decisive decisions are needed, although no one wants conflict," he said. Aoun and Hezbollah have been exchanging messages and the president met with a delegation from Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc on Monday. Aoun has long stressed that disarming Hezbollah should happen through a calm dialogue warning against the use of force or dealing hastily with the matter. Hezbollah's leader said the group will not discuss giving up its remaining weapons until Israel withdraws from the five border points it occupies in southern Lebanon and stops its airstrikes. "We have completely adhered" to the ceasefire agreement, Qassem said, adding: "Don’t ask us for anything else from now on. Let Israel withdraw, stop its aggression, release the prisoners and fulfill all obligations under the agreement. After that, we will discuss each new development."Geagea responded that Hezbollah has no right to impose conditions and sarcastically added that the group failed to liberate Lebanese land through the use of force. "Can Hezbollah make Israel withdraw by force? Than why hasn't it done that?"Hezbollah was left badly weakened by more than a year of hostilities with Israel, beginning with the group's campaign of rocket fire at its arch-foe in support of Gaza, and culminating in a major Israeli bombing campaign and ground incursion into Lebanon. "We need to implement the ceasefire deal. A Peace treaty with Israel is not our priority now," Geagea said, amid talks about a possible normalization of ties with Israel. Israel's ambassador to the U.S. had said earlier this month that Syria and Lebanon could join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel even before Saudi Arabia. "I am very optimistic about the potential of an Abraham Accord with Syria and Lebanon," Ambassador Yechiel Leiter said.

Hezbollah MPs lash out at Foreign Minister Rajji
Naharnet/May 29/2025
A number of Hezbollah MPs have lashed out at Foreign Minister Youssef Rajji, who is close to the Lebanese Forces, over his latest remarks on Hezbollah and its weapons. “Foreign Minister Youssef Rajji’s remarks reflect the opinion of a political party, not the government. He used to fire bullets at people during the (civil) war, and now he is firing words,” MP Hassan Fadlallah said in an interview on al-Manar TV. Responding to Rajji’s statement that the Lebanese people no longer want the so-called army-people-resistance equation, MP Ibrahim al-Moussawi said: “Which people are you referring to? The people who marched in the funeral of (Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah)? You are talking about hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people … Are you talking about the people who signed with their blood before their ink in the municipal elections to reiterate this equation?”Slamming Rajji’s remarks as “irresponsible” and “shameful,” Moussawi said the people want to hear the minister talking about “Israeli occupation, aggression and daily assassinations.” In an interview with the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, Rajji said that Hezbollah chief Sheikh Naim Qassem “can say what he wants” about the army-people-resistance equation but added that “the Lebanese people no longer want this outdated equation.”“This is an outlaw armed group and it is not legitimate. We ask it to seek a solution, hand over its weapons and form a normal political party that has the creed it wants. I support total creed freedom and let its fighters return to their normal life and each member to their job,” the minister added.

Geagea defending Rajji: Those who reject policy statement must resign from govt.
Naharnet/May 29/2025
Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea on Thursday defended pro-LF Foreign Minister Youssef Rajji in the face of verbal attacks from Hezbollah officials against the backdrop of his latest stances on Hezbollah and its arms. Geagea stressed that Rajji’s stances are not personal or partisan but reflect those of the Lebanese president, prime minister and government.“The era of chaos and the usurpation of the state’s decisions is over and the time of the actual state that alone monopolizes arms and controls war and peace decisions has come,” Geagea added. “These rogue voices are foiling all the attempts of the new presidential tenure for the rise of an actual state in Lebanon and subsequently for removing Israel from the points it has occupied,” the LF leader said. “These rogue voices must allow the Lebanese to rest and must make way for the rise of an actual state in Lebanon … Those who reject the Ministerial Statement and the state’s official policy must resign from the government, instead of spending their time attacking the foreign minister over his commitment to the official stances,” Geagea went on to say. In an interview with the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, Rajji said that Hezbollah chief Sheikh Naim Qassem “can say what he wants” about the army-people-resistance equation but added that “the Lebanese people no longer want this outdated equation.” “This is an outlaw armed group and it is not legitimate. We ask it to seek a solution, hand over its weapons and form a normal political party that has the creed it wants. I support total creed freedom and let its fighters return to their normal life and each member to their job,” the minister added.

Iraq says Israel ready to free Hezbollah captives as part of Tsurkov deal
Associated Press/May 29/2025
An Iraqi official speaking on condition of anonymity has told The Associated Press that the U.S. and Israel are not opposed to the release of Lebanese prisoners held in Israel as part of a deal for the release of Russian-Israeli researcher Elizabeth Tsurkov, who is held in Iraq by the Iran-backed Kataeb Hezbollah group. The 38-year-old Middle East researcher was kidnapped in 2023 while doing research in Iraq, and officials from several countries say progress is being made to secure her release. Tsurkov marks 800 days in captivity on Thursday. There were reports over the weekend that negotiators were very close to a deal, but the terms are complicated and Tsurkov's sister said no deal appears imminent. Negotiators are focusing on an exchange that would include seven Lebanese captured during the latest war between Israel and Hezbollah. But Iraqi and Lebanese officials told The Associated Press the talks recently stalled over Iran's demand for the release of one of its citizens detained in Iraq for the killing of an American. Elizabeth Tsurkov disappeared in Baghdad in March 2023 while doing research for her doctorate at Princeton University. The only direct sign of life her family has received is a November 2023 video of her broadcast on an Iraqi television station and circulated on pro-Iranian social media.
In the past few months, officials from several countries, including the Iraqi foreign minister and deputy prime minister, have confirmed she is alive and being held in Iraq by a Shiite Muslim militant group called Kataeb Hezbollah, according to her sister.
The group has not claimed the kidnapping nor have Iraqi officials publicly said which group is responsible. Moving pieces from Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, and the U.S.,Emma Tsurkov, who lives in California, believes the U.S., Israel's closest ally, has the most leverage to pressure the Iraqi government for her sister's release – either by withholding arms or financial assistance. Israel, which does not negotiate directly with Iraq because the two countries have no formal relations, has less influence, she said. Although Tsurkov entered Iraq using her Russian passport, Russia has declined to get involved in negotiating for her release, Emma Tsurkov said. Earlier this year, a senior Israeli official said the Israeli government is working with allies in a renewed push to win the freedom of Tsurkov. Israeli officials declined to comment for this AP story. About a month ago, a U.S. official and several former diplomats visited Baghdad to mediate for Tsurkov's release, according to a senior Iraqi political official involved in the negotiations. They held indirect talks with Iranian officials and leaders from the militant group holding her, according to this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the secretive talks.
Adam Boehler, the Trump administration's top hostage envoy, has repeatedly called for Tsurkov's release and has traveled to Iraq to press his case. "We have and will continue to underscore with the Iraqi government the urgency of securing her release," State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said Tuesday. An official with a Lebanese group involved in the indirect negotiations said that, in exchange for Tsurkov's freedom, they are seeking the release of seven Lebanese prisoners, some of whom are associated with Hezbollah and a Lebanese navy officer who was kidnapped by an Israeli commando force on Lebanon's northern coast in early November. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Also involved in a possible exchange are five men in prison in Iraq for the 2022 fatal shooting of Stephen Edward Troell, a 45-year-old teacher from Tennessee. Troell was killed as he pulled up to the street where he lived in central Baghdad with his family. Iranian citizen Mohammed Ali Ridha was convicted in the killing, along with four Iraqis, in what was described as a kidnapping gone wrong. The prospect of Ridha's release is one of the major holdups in the negotiations, Lebanese and Iraqi officials said. Elizabeth Tsurkov is a well-known academic who was often interviewed in the media, and her research was focused on sectarianism in the Middle East, specifically Iraq.

Salam: We don't want civil war but we're committed to extending state authority
Naharnet/May 29/2025
Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has told the Wall Street Journal that the Lebanese government has achieved 80% of its objectives in taking control of country’s south. The November 2024 ceasefire ended more than a year of fighting, including some two months of open war, between Israel and Hezbollah.
“All over the Lebanese territory, the state should have a monopoly on arms,” Salam added, reportedly banging his fists on a table. “We don’t want to put the country onto a civil-war track, but believe me, this is not going to affect our commitment to the need to extend and consolidate the authority of the state,” he said.Israeli intelligence, delivered to the Lebanese via the U.S., helped locate remaining Hezbollah caches and posts in the south, unidentified senior Arab officials told the newspaper. Some of the weapons were destroyed, others were kept for the army’s own use. Though the ceasefire agreement focuses on dismantling Hezbollah south of the Litani River, the report said that Salam and the U.S. are pushing for the same disarmament of the group across the rest of the country. However, the group has insisted it needs to retain some arms, with Hezbollah lawmaker Ibrahim al-Moussawi telling the Wall Street Journal that “Hezbollah arms that continue to exist in certain parts are points of strength of Lebanon.”Senior officials in Hezbollah and the government are concerned about the possibility of internal Lebanese clashes, though Salam said he is determined to see the disarmament through. “We don’t want to put the country onto a civil-war track, but believe me, this is not going to affect our commitment to the need to extend and consolidate the authority of the state,” he said. During the ongoing ceasefire in Lebanon, the Israeli army has continued to strike Hezbollah operatives and sites it says violate the understandings between Israel and Lebanon. More than 150 Hezbollah operatives have been reportedly killed since the start of the ceasefire. Under the terms of the deal, Israel was obligated to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon under the ceasefire. It pulled out from all but five so-called “strategic” posts located several hundred meters inside Lebanon, which it says are necessary to defend Israeli communities.

Lebanon to hold first official negotiation meeting with IMF delegation on Friday
LBCI/May 29/2025
The Lebanese government is set to hold its first formal negotiation session with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation on Friday as part of renewed efforts to secure support for a comprehensive economic and financial reform program. According to a statement issued by the Finance Ministry's media office, the meeting will take place at the Ministry's headquarters in central Beirut from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.  The session marks the first official engagement between the Lebanese government and the IMF negotiating team since the Spring Meetings in Washington, following two weeks of technical talks held at the Finance Ministry. Finance Minister Yassine Jaber will lead the Lebanese delegation and include Economy and Trade Minister Amer Bisat, Banque du Liban (BDL) governor Karim Souaid, Director General of Finance Georges Maarawi, and a team of financial experts from the Finance Ministry, along with advisors from the Presidency and the Premiership involved in financial and economic matters. Ernesto Riga, chief of the IMF mission to Lebanon, will head the IMF delegation. The talks are expected to focus on reviving stalled negotiations for a recovery program aimed at stabilizing Lebanon's economy and restoring international confidence as the country faces mounting financial and institutional challenges.

IMF delegation meets donor ambassadors at the residence of Egyptian ambassador in Beirut
LBCI/May 29/2025
Sources told LBCI that an International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation met with ambassadors of donor and supporting countries to Lebanon at the residence of the Egyptian ambassador in Beirut. The discussions focused on the critical challenges facing Lebanon's stalled economic reform agenda, emphasizing the urgency of implementing immediate measures. According to sources familiar with the meeting, the IMF emphasized that time is running out for the Lebanese government to implement the necessary reforms required to regain the confidence of the international community and financial institutions.
The gathering underscores growing international concern over Lebanon's political paralysis and its implications for global support and recovery prospects.

Shell from Syria wounds citizen in Akkar town
Naharnet/May 29/2025
A Shilka-type shell fired from Syria landed in the Akkar town of al-Dawseh, wounding a Lebanese man, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported on Thursday, without elaborating on who might have fired it. The defense ministers of Lebanon and Syria signed an agreement in Jeddah in late March "to address security and military threats" along the countries’ common border. The accord came after frontier clashes earlier in March left 10 people dead. Those clashes pitted Syrian authorities against Hezbollah-allied Lebanese clans. Border tensions flared earlier in March after Syria's new authorities accused Hezbollah of abducting three soldiers into Lebanon and killing them. The Iran-backed group, which had been an ally of toppled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, denied involvement. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam met in Damascus in mid-April with Syria's interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa, accompanied by a Lebanese ministerial delegation comprising the ministers of foreign affairs, defense and interior. It is the first trip to Damascus by a senior Lebanese official since a new government was formed in Beirut in February, two months after an Islamist-led alliance ousted longtime Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad. This visit is "key to correcting the course of ties between the two countries on the basis of mutual respect," a Lebanese official said. Beirut and Damascus have been seeking to improve ties since the overthrow of Assad, whose family dynasty commanded a decades-long tutelage over Lebanon and is accused of assassinating numerous Lebanese officials who expressed opposition to its rule. Salam’s talks in Damascus tackled controlling and demarcating the porous, 330-kilometer shared border, as well as combating smuggling. In December, Sharaa said his country would not negatively interfere in Lebanon and would respect its neighbor's sovereignty.

Palestinian Arms: What Guarantees the Success of Disarmament?
Hanna Saleh/Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
In mid-June, the Lebanese authorities will begin receiving weapons handed over by Palestinian factions operating in refugee camps, starting with the camps in Beirut and its southern suburbs. By implementing this decision, Lebanon will end a dangerous chapter of history that began in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967. Through the “Cairo Agreement” of 1969, Lebanon formally ceded its sovereignty, with “Fatahland” declared in the Arkoub region (in the south of the country) before gradually expanding as the camps in Lebanon were transformed into dangerous military enclaves.
Primarily an initiative of the Palestinian Authority, disarming the Palestinian factions reinforces Lebanon’s efforts to assert its sovereignty and turn the page on a history of these factions’ abuses. Abu Mazen had adopted this position a year ago. “Palestinian refugees are guests of the Lebanese state,” he regularly reiterated, stressing the need for Palestinians to return the favor in recognition of everything the Lebanese people have offered to the Palestinian cause. However, at the time, the Lebanese ignored his statements and complied with Hezbollah’s wishes.
It is worth noting that the Palestinian Authority’s position has been that the refugees did not need weapons since the Oslo Accords. Indeed, they no longer had a resistance project nor a front with Israel in Lebanon. However, Hezbollah shielded these armed factions and exploited them to serve its interests, turning the camps into a refuge for criminals, terrorists, and fugitives. Lebanon- its institutions, army, and people- has suffered greatly as a result, as have the refugees themselves.
On 8 June 1999, the Lebanese judiciary was shaken by the assassination of four judges at the South Lebanon Court of Appeal, where two gunmen shot them as they were sitting on the bench. The killers fled to the ʿAyn al-Ḥilwah camp near Sidon. Only many years was an indictment issued. In 2017, eighteen years after the crime, the terrorist group Asbat al-Ansar was found guilty, with the court concluding that its leader, Abou Muḥjin, had ordered the attack “to undermine the Lebanese state.”
In mid-May 2007, security forces raided several sites harboring fugitives in Tripoli. On the 20th of May, Fatah al-Islam militants infiltrated a military post and killed twenty-seven soldiers in their sleep. It later emerged that the orders came from the extremist Shaker al-Absi, the leader of the group that had seized the Nahr al-Bared camp and that he had managed to temporarily cut Tripoli off from Dinniyeh and Akkar (north Lebanon). The army paid a heavy price. Hundreds were killed and wounded in the battle the army waged to purge the camp of these terrorists who had used civilians as human shields. Hezbollah’s intentions were exposed during this episode, as it drew a red line in the face of the authorities and the army’s decision to end this perilous state of affairs.
In the interval between Sidon judges’ assassination and the Nahr al-Bared terrorism, the Lebanese National Dialogue Conference before the July 2006 war. At the conference, it was decided that Palestinian factions operating outside the camps would be disarmed as a first step that would be followed by addressing the arms inside the camps. Hezbollah quickly reneged on the agreement, however. Over the years, Ayn al-Ḥilwah camp and others have witnessed clashes that claimed innocent lives as Hamas, with Hezbollah’s backing, sought to take control of Lebanon’s largest camp in the country after having gained the upper hand over the PLO in the two camps in Tyre, Al-Buss and Rashidiya. It is from those camps that rockets were launched recently- in an incident that the enemy exploited to inflict more death and destruction.
There are several dimensions to the Palestinian Authority’s move to delegitimize all the armed factions in the camps. Mahmoud Abbas, who has been insisting on placing the camps under the authority of the Lebanese state for years, as well as calling for a reevaluation of how refugees are managed, probably hopes to prevent intra-Palestinian strife preemptively. This was echoed by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who said “The strength of the Palestinians today does not lie in weapons but in international recognition and diplomacy.”
The PLO is keenly working to prevent the kind of Lebanese-Palestinian strife that the so-called “Resistance Axis” has often threatened, and these efforts are appreciated. Abbas’s visit to Lebanon and his support for the country's efforts to restore its sovereignty have provoked the remnants of that Axis. Some circles are claiming that the Palestinian president “only has influence over his own faction (i.e., Fatah),” and that if Fatah were to disarm, the camps would fall under the control of extremists, and that the weapons of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are protected by Hezbollah.
Hezbollah, which refuses to hand over its own arms, understands that the disarmament of Palestinian factions undercuts its broader strategy and its effort to turn back the clock. That is why its top brass is giving triumphalist speeches of defiance and denial, refusing to recognize the implications of Lebanon’s political earthquake and the major shift in regional power dynamics. It may seek to obstruct Palestinian factions’ disarmament even if that means triggering clashes.
It is in this light that we should view the decision to begin collecting weapons from the Beirut camps rather than those in Tyre, south of the Litani River. The key to success, however, is a firm commitment by the Lebanese state to enforcing the state's sovereignty. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam is clearly taking this approach. He has not been mincing his words recently: “The era of exporting the Iranian revolution is over, and we will keep quiet about any non-state actor’s arsenal.”

Another Reading of Lebanon’s ‘Liberation Day’
Hazem Saghieh/Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
Were the Lebanese really liberated on the 25th of May twenty-five years ago?
The official answer has not changed: yes. The commemoration of this occasion and its elevation into a national holiday, “Resistance and Liberation Day” was born of this answer. The residents of the region that had been occupied returned to their towns and villages after the Israeli army’s withdrawal, and the state and its institutions reestablished a nominal presence there. However, looking at our current state of affairs, one would be baffled to learn that we had been liberated 25 years ago only to find ourselves today in this miserable situation, confronted by another occupation and destruction that has driven people from the same homes they had returned to. Furthermore, holidays are supposed to reflect a degree of stability and sustainability that stem from natural factors, a collective story, a historical event, or a long-standing tradition...Even more astonishingly, however, the same party credited with our “liberation” in 2000, Hezbollah, has summoned occupation again. Not only are five points along the border controlled by the Israeli army; severe constraints and burdens have also been imposed on Lebanese sovereignty and decision-making - burdens that could continue to weigh us down for years to come.
There is, then, some duplicity involved in applying the term “liberation” in our case. It belongs to the same genre of deception that the party has spoon-fed the Lebanese over the years, like “the era of defeats is over” and “Israel is weaker than a spider’s web.”
And now that we are in a situation that allows for scrutinizing assumptions that had once been off limits, acts of forgery must be exposed in all of their forms. Given the immense suffering that the “support war” has caused in Lebanon, there is an urgent need to question the largely adulterated mainstream historical narrative of resistance and liberation. Thus, correcting this account of the past has become a necessary requisite for leading sensible, honest lives in the present, and by extension, for correcting what reality means.
Before confronting the overarching lie, however, we must first contend with three falsehoods that have branched out of it:
First: Israel’s initial occupation of Lebanon - in 1978 and 1982, before Hezbollah’s emergence - came out of nowhere, born of the enemy’s essentially evil nature and nothing else. As for the notion that it may have been a reaction to the actions of an armed resistance movement (Palestinian at the time), it should be muted or swept under the rug.
Second: Hezbollah’s resistance was developed from scratch. Mind you, other factions (both communists and non-communists) had preceded it and were eventually liquidated by it. Third: liberation, like resistance, was deliberately prevented from being a unifying national project. In 2005, for instance, some of Hezbollah’s opponents proposed a compromise that recognized both liberations: from Israel in 2000 and from Syria that year. The idea was to build a shared national narrative that all Lebanese could embrace, but the suggestion was met with nothing but rejection and suspicion, to saying nothing of thanking “Assad’s Syria.”As for what happened in the year 2000 specifically, the real story is, once again, far more complex than the narrative that has prevailed. Under the Labor government headed by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Israel announced as soon as 1999 its intention to withdraw unilaterally. In response to this statement, Lebanese media outlets affiliated with Damascus and Hezbollah began speaking of a “withdrawal conspiracy” - terminology echoed by Lebanese politicians aligned with the Syrian-Iranian axis.
When Israel actually withdrew a year later, the issue of retrieving the Shebaa Farms - territory Israel had occupied from Syria in 1967 - was suddenly brought back to the fore, becoming a pretext to justify Hezbollah’s maintenance of its arms. To strengthen the credibility of this defense, Damascus conveniently ignored the fact that Shebaa was Syrian territory, albeit without ever formally recognizing the territorial claims of the Lebanese. And, in tandem with keeping the conflict alive through the Shebaa Farms, the resistance’s role in leading us to liberation was inflated; it was presented not as a mere means to an end but an existential need. Without, in any way, belittling the sacrifices of the party nor the hardship that its community was made to suffer, the fact remains that its resistance was not crucial to liberation. In fact, its most consequential achievement was giving the Israeli peace camp an additional argument to underpin its advocacy of withdrawal from all occupied territories. Over the span of 18 years (1982–2000), Israel suffered 800 casualties as a result of resistance operations in total - fewer than 45 deaths a year. At the time, many pointed out that more Israelis were dying in road traffic accidents annually.
The fact is that the party’s version of history is neither revisionist nor negationist. The reason is simple: there had been no prior narrative of occupation, liberation, and resistance that the party was compelled to “correct.” The party and its orbit were the only authors of this narrative that begins with them alone. They thereby consolidated a warped history and an adulterated consciousness. Both aimed to further local and regional agendas, and that was before this distortion and manipulation morphed into a “historical horizon” that was written with water.

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published  on May 29-30/2025
Israel approves biggest expansion of West Bank settlements in decades
Dana Karni and Oren Liebermann, CNN/May 29, 2025
Israel approved a massive expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank this week in a move described as a continuation of de facto annexation of the territory. Peace Now, an Israeli non-governmental organization that tracks settlements, said it was the largest expansion of settlements since the signing of the Oslo Accords more than 30 years ago. Israel will establish 22 new settlements, including deep within the West Bank and in area from which the country had previously withdrawn, as part of the new security cabinet decision, according to a joint statement from Defense Minister Israel Katz and far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “All the new communities are being established with a long-term strategic vision, aimed at reinforcing Israeli control of the territory, preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, and securing development reserves for settlement in the coming decades,” the statement said. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the president of the Palestinian Authority, called the announcement a “dangerous escalation and a challenge to international legitimacy and international law.” In a statement issued earlier in the week after reports emerged of the settlement approval, Abu Rudeineh said the move would “perpetuate regional violence and instability.” Peace Now blasted the government for making such a decision in the midst of a war. “The government is making clear - again and without restraint - that it prefers deepening the occupation and advancing de facto annexation over pursuing peace,” the organization said. “The Israeli government no longer pretends otherwise: the annexation of the Occupied Territories and expansion of settlements is its central goal.” Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, as well as in East Jerusalem and the occupied Golan Heights, are considered illegal under international law. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), were designed to pave the way to the establishment of a Palestinian state and the realization of a two-state solution. For months, Israel’s military has carried out a massive operation in the West Bank, deploying tanks to the territory for the first time in decades and displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians. In February, Katz ordered the military “to prepare for a prolonged presence” as the military evacuated Palestinian refugee camps. Within the last several weeks, Israeli forces have carried out multiple waves of raids and arrests across the West Bank. Peace Now said 12 of the new settlements will be the legalization of illegal outposts. Outposts are illegally established by Jewish settlers without approval from the government with the intention to push for formal recognition and legalization. Another nine of the settlements will be entirely new, while the final one will be the conversion of an existing neighborhood to an independent settlement, according to Peace Now. Two of the settlements in the new plan were evacuated during the disengagement from parts of the West Bank in 2005, which forbade Israelis from establishing a civilian presence in those areas. That law was overturned by the current right-wing Israeli government. Smotrich gloated about the new settlements, making clear his goal was annexation. “The next step – sovereignty! We did not take a foreign land, but the inheritance of our ancestors,” he said in a statement. Earlier this month, the security cabinet approved a land registration process for Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli civil and security control. Peace Now called the move “a mega theft of Palestinian lands.”

‘They Are Potential Targets’: Houthi President Threatens Civilian Aircraft After Sanaa Airport Struck
FDD/May 29/2025
Latest Developments
Houthi Planes Destroyed: Israeli fighter jets destroyed the last aircraft operated by Houthi rebels in a strike on Sanaa International Airport in Yemen on May 28. The strike came one day after the Iran-backed terrorist group launched two missiles at Israel. The IDF said the aircraft were used by the Houthis to transfer “terrorists who planned terrorist attacks against Israel,” while the Houthis claimed the planes had been used to transport “pilgrims.”
Israel Imposes Naval and Aerial Blockade: Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said that Israel would impose a naval and aerial blockade on the Houthis, warning, “anyone who harms us will be harmed sevenfold.” The Houthi-controlled airport, Yemen’s largest, resumed limited operations last week following IDF strikes on May 6 that destroyed the airport’s runway, terminals, and aircraft. The strikes, which caused approximately $500 million in damage, came as a response to a Houthi-launched ballistic missile hitting Ben Gurion Airport a day earlier.
Houthi President Threatens Civilian Airlines: Houthi President Mahdi al-Mashat fumed as he surveyed the damage, issuing a threat to civilian airlines flying in and out of Israel. “We call on all travelers worldwide to avoid boarding aircraft still flying to Ben Gurion Airport, as they are potential targets and no longer safe,” Mashat declared. He also threatened Israel’s civilian population, stating, “Our missiles will either hit their designated targets — or strike randomly selected ones.”
FDD Expert Response
“Israel’s response against the Houthis may seem limited in scope, given the operational complexity of the mission. However, the seemingly underwhelming response may mask other motives. The Israeli Air Force has spent years preparing for a potential strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure — an operation that would require precision over a significant distance. In this context, the strike in Sanaa could serve a dual purpose: to incur a cost on the Houthis for their repeated attacks on Israel and as a live rehearsal for a future air operation against Iran.” — Joe Truzman, Senior Research Analyst and Editor at FDD’s Long War Journal
“In response to near-daily missiles and rockets from the Houthis, Israel continues to strike Houthi ports and the Sanaa airport. Dismantling these points of connection to outside support is crucial to preventing or at least slowing the Houthis’ rebuilding efforts. The United States and its partners should support measures to isolate the group by disconnecting its financial system from international banking, sanctioning Houthi leaders and Houthi-controlled businesses, and interrupting the Houthis’ smuggling routes. If the Houthis are allowed to rebuild their arsenal, as they and their Iranian backers intend, they will persist as a threat to the commercial shipping in the Red Sea, to Israel, and to American interests.” — Bridget Toomey, Research Analyst
FDD Background and Analysis
“‘Zionists, Stay in Shelters’: Houthis Threaten Retaliation Against Israel Following Devastating Strike on Sanaa Airport,” FDD Flash Brief
“‘They Say They Won’t Be Blowing Up Ships Anymore’: Trump Halts Bombing of Houthis Hours After Latest Israeli Strike on Yemen,” FDD Flash Brief
“IDF Strikes Houthi Targets in Yemen in Response to Ballistic Missile Attacks on Israel,” FDD Flash Brief
“Iran-Backed Houthis Launch 3 Missiles, 2 Drones at Israel Over 2 Days,” FDD Flash Brief

Iran Mulling Proposal For Stopgap Agreement to Pause Nuclear Enrichment
FDD/May 29/2025
Demand for Unfrozen Funds: Iranian negotiators may propose a temporary agreement that pauses Iran’s nuclear enrichment in return for the United States unfreezing Iranian funds. Citing two sources close to the negotiations, Reuters reported that the Islamic Republic will also demand that the United States recognize its “right” to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear power in ongoing nuclear negotiations. The “political agreement” would be intended to pave the way for a broader nuclear deal.
Export or Downblend Current Stocks: The sources also said that Iran could ship a portion of its highly enriched uranium stocks abroad or convert them for nuclear reactor fuel plates. Ongoing negotiations for a new nuclear deal with Iran have been hampered by competing red lines on Iran’s nuclear enrichment, with the Trump administration insisting on zero enrichment, while Iranian leaders have vowed never to give up their enrichment program. Negotiators are reportedly also discussing a regional facility to enrich fuel for nuclear power plants, operated jointly by Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states.
Trump Prevents Israeli Strike: President Donald Trump revealed that he warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against unilaterally striking Iranian nuclear facilities. “We’re having very good discussions with them and I [told Netanyahu] ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate right now,’” Trump told reporters. U.S. intelligence has estimated that Israel could prepare an attack on Iran in as little as seven hours. Trump claimed that under a new deal, Iran would allow U.S. nuclear inspectors to monitor their nuclear facilities and “take whatever we want” and “blow up whatever we want with nobody getting killed.”
FDD Expert Response
“No doubt, a pause in enrichment in Iran would be historic since the regime has not stopped enriching uranium for a single day since 2006. But just because it is historic does not mean it solves the problem. Pausing enrichment in Iran in exchange for frozen funds would afford a bankrupt terrorist regime more revenue and allow it to buy time to pass the October Snapback deadline at the United Nations. Any cessation of uranium enrichment must be accompanied by significant improvements in monitoring and verification. Absent more eyes on the nuclear program to deal with issues like stockpiles, uranium production, and facilities, a pause in enrichment would be strategically worthless.” — Behnam Ben Taleblu, Iran Program Senior Director and Senior Fellow
“Any Iranian enrichment — whether better monitored, limited to low levels, or spread to other states via a regional enrichment consortium — means the regime retains the ability to make fuel for nuclear weapons. Only a deal in which Tehran declares and verifiably eliminates key facilities, enriched uranium stocks, centrifuges, and associated infrastructure, as well as its weaponization and missile-delivery work, will fulfill the president’s original demand for dismantlement and block Iran’s pathway to a nuclear weapon.” — Andrea Stricker, Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program Deputy Director and Research Fellow
FDD Background and Analysis
“Iran Takes Trump’s Negotiators for a Ride,” by Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh
“Why Dismantling Iran’s Nuclear Program Doesn’t Mean War,” by Janatan Sayeh
“‘Not Conclusive’: Iran and U.S. Hold New Round of Nuclear Talks in Rome,” FDD Flash Brief
“9 Myths About Iran’s Uranium Enrichment Program,” by Andrea Stricker

Israel says intercepts missile from Yemen after air raid warning
AFP/May 29, 2025
JERUSALEM: The Israeli army said it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen on Thursday after air raid sirens sounded in the center of the country, with explosions heard over Jerusalem. “Following the sirens that sounded a short while ago in several areas in Israel, a missile launched from Yemen was intercepted,” the army said in a statement. It comes two days after Israel’s military said it intercepted a missile and another projectile fired from Yemen, which Iran-backed Houthi militants said they had fired. The Houthis have repeatedly launched missiles and drones targeting Israel since the Gaza war broke out in October 2023 following the Hamas attack on Israel. The Yemeni militants, who say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians, paused their attacks during a two-month Gaza ceasefire that ended in March, but began them again after Israel resumed its military campaign in the territory. While most of the projectiles have been intercepted, one missile fired by the group in early May hit the perimeter of Ben Gurion international airport near Tel Aviv for the first time. Israel has carried out several strikes in Yemen in retaliation for the Houthi attacks, including on ports and the airport in the capital Sanaa.

Israel accepts ceasefire plan for Gaza, US says, Hamas reviewing
Reuters/May 29, 2025
WASHINGTON/UNITED NATIONS/CAIRO: Israel has agreed to a US ceasefire proposal for Gaza, the White House said on Thursday, and Hamas said it was reviewing it as a US-backed system for distributing food aid in the shattered enclave expanded.
Israeli media reported earlier that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the families of hostages held in Gaza that Israel had accepted a deal presented by US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. Netanyahu’s office did not confirm the reports, but White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters in Washington that Israel had signed off on the proposal. She did not detail its contents. But the New York Times quoted an Israeli official familiar with the proposal as saying the initial phase would include a 60-day ceasefire and humanitarian aid flowing through UN-run operations. Hamas, which controls Gaza, “is studying the amended Witkoff proposal with a high sense of responsibility, stemming from interest to achieve the interests of our people and ensure an end to the aggression,” a Hamas official told Reuters. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private group backed by the United States and endorsed by Israel, expanded its aid distribution to a third site on Thursday. Heavily criticized by the United Nations and other aid groups as inadequate and flawed, the group’s operation began this week in Gaza, where the UN has said 2 million people are at risk of famine after Israel’s 11-week blockade on aid entering the enclave. The aid launch was marred by tumultuous scenes on Tuesday when thousands of Palestinians rushed distribution points and forced private security contractors to retreat. The chaotic start to the operation has raised international pressure on Israel to get more food in and halt the fighting in Gaza. GHF has so far supplied about 1.8 million meals and plans to open more sites in the coming weeks. Witkoff told reporters on Wednesday that Washington was close to “sending out a new term sheet” about a ceasefire to the two sides in the conflict that has raged since October 2023.“I have some very good feelings about getting to a long-term resolution, temporary ceasefire and a long-term resolution, a peaceful resolution, of that conflict,” Witkoff said then.It was unclear how the proposal might overcome the deep differences between Hamas and Israel that have stymied previous attempts to restore a ceasefire that broke down in March after only two months. Israel has insisted that Hamas disarm completely and be dismantled as a military and governing force and that all the 58 hostages still held in Gaza must be returned before it will agree to end the war. Hamas has rejected the demand to give up its weapons and says Israel must pull its troops out of Gaza and commit to ending the war. Israel has come under increasing international pressure, with many European countries that have normally been reluctant to criticize it openly demanding an end to the war and a major relief effort. Israel launched its campaign in Gaza in response to the devastating attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed some 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage into Gaza, according to Israeli tallies. The campaign has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, Gaza health officials say, and left the enclave in ruins.

Israel Strike on a Home in Gaza Kills 22 as it Orders Hospital Evacuation
Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
An Israeli strike on a house in central Gaza on Thursday killed 22 people, including nine women and children. The airstrike hit a family home in Bureij, an urban refugee camp in central Gaza, according to the officials at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah. An Associated Press journalist viewed the hospital records of the dead from the strike. Strikes in northern Gaza late Wednesday and early Thursday hit a house, killing eight people, including two women and three children, and a car in Gaza City, killing four, local hospitals said. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which says it only targets fighters and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because the gunmen operate in populated areas. Meanwhile the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of a hospital in northern Gaza, staff said. Dr. Rami al-Ashrafi said the army wants to evacuate everyone in Al-Awda Hospital in the heavily devastated Jabaliya area. One of the last functioning medical centers in northern Gaza, the hospital has been encircled by Israeli troops and has come under fire in recent days. Speaking by phone to the AP, al-Ashrafi said there are 82 staffers, including doctors, and seven patients left at the hospital. A total of 30 patients and 57 staff were already evacuated Tuesday, he said. Israeli authorities issued evacuation orders last week for large parts of northern Gaza ahead of offensives against Hamas, although the army did not order the hospital itself to evacuate.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, said last week that Israeli military operations and evacuation orders in Gaza “are stretching the health system beyond the breaking point.”

UK Slams New Israeli Settlements as an Obstacle to Palestinian Statehood
Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
The UK slammed on Thursday Israel’s latest settlement expansion plans in the occupied West Bank.“The UK condemns these actions,” Foreign Office Minister Hamish Falconer said on the X social media platform. “Settlements are illegal under international law, further imperil the two-state solution, and do not protect Israel.”The British government last week imposed new sanctions on three people, two illegal settler outposts and two organizations that they said were supporting violence against the Palestinian community in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Foreign Secretary David Lammy said at the time that the illegal settlements were spreading across the West Bank with support of the Israeli government. Israel authorized 22 more Jewish settlements in the West Bank. This would include new settlements and the legalization of outposts already built without government authorization. Defense Minister Israel Katz called the settlement decision “a strategic move that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.”The Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now said the announcement was the most extensive move of its kind since the 1993 Oslo accords that launched the now-defunct peace process.Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, and the Palestinians want it to be the main part of their future state. Most of the international community views settlements as illegal and an obstacle to resolving the decades-old conflict. Israel has already built well over 100 settlements across the territory that are home to some 500,000 settlers. The settlements range from small hilltop outposts to fully developed communities with apartment blocks, shopping malls, factories and parks.
The West Bank is home to 3 million Palestinians, who live under Israeli military rule.

Two-State Solution Conference Prepares Roadmap with International Backing
Paris: Michel Abou Najm/Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
Preparations are underway for the “Two-State Solution Conference,” scheduled from June 17 to 20 and co-hosted by Saudi Arabia and France at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The conference aims to produce a final document serving as a “roadmap” for establishing a Palestinian state. This roadmap will draw on the work of eight expert groups tasked with offering practical proposals on various dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including statehood, security, economics, humanitarian concerns, and sustaining any future peace agreement. Key group chairs include Jordan and Spain on statehood, Italy and Indonesia on security, Norway and Japan on economic foundations, while the EU and the Arab League are overseeing proposals on the durability of peace. The structure reflects a broad international effort to tackle every major aspect of the conflict.
According to French diplomatic sources, the conference is driven by the urgency of reviving the two-state solution, now under severe threat due to the war in Gaza, the acceleration of Israeli settlement expansion, and the stated intentions of some Israeli leaders to reoccupy Gaza and displace its population.
France argues that the idea of indefinitely freezing or postponing the conflict is no longer viable. With military solutions failing, only a political resolution centered on mutual recognition and the creation of a Palestinian state offers a sustainable path forward.
French President Emmanuel Macron recently reaffirmed in Indonesia that the political route is the only path to lasting peace. He announced the conference as a platform to renew international momentum for recognizing both Palestine and Israel and affirming their right to coexist in peace and security. The event operates on a principle of mutual recognition. It invites Western nations that have not yet recognized Palestine to do so, while also encouraging Arab and Islamic countries that have yet to recognize Israel to take steps toward normalization. This approach recalls the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which proposed normalized relations with Israel in exchange for withdrawal from occupied territories and Palestinian statehood within 1967 borders. The sources said that while full normalization is seen as unlikely in the short term, France views it as a process, not a one-time event. Recognition of Palestine is not presented as conditional on normalization with Israel but may come alongside statements of intent from Arab nations signaling readiness for future steps. The sources added that the French government stresses that the conference is a starting point rather than a definitive solution. The goal is to reintroduce momentum for peace and back it with concrete proposals. Paris also emphasizes the need for Palestinian Authority reform and the disarmament of Hamas, aiming to ensure a credible Palestinian leadership. Although Israel has threatened to annex parts of the West Bank in response to the growing recognition of Palestine, France remains firm in its belief that diplomatic recognition is a reward for peace-seeking actors, not for extremists, the diplomatic sources underlined.

Gaza Aid System Under Pressure as Thousands Seek Food
Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
After a slow and chaotic start to the new US-backed aid system in Gaza, thousands of Palestinians have been arriving at distribution points, seeking desperately needed food despite scenes of disorder and fears of violence. The two hubs run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private group sponsored by the United States and endorsed by Israel, have been running since Tuesday, but the launch was marred by tumultuous scenes when thousands rushed the fences and forced private contractors providing security to retreat. An Israeli military official told Reuters that the GHF was now operating four aid distribution sites, three in the Rafah area in the south and one in the Netzarim area in central Gaza. The new system has been heavily criticized by the United Nations and other aid groups as an inadequate and flawed response to the humanitarian crisis left by Israel's 11-week blockade on aid entering Gaza. Wessam Khader, a 25-year-old father of a three-year-old boy, said he had gone to a site near Rafah, despite widespread suspicions of the new system among Palestinians and warnings from militant group Hamas to stay away. He said he had gone every day since Tuesday but only obtained a 3 kg (6.6 pounds) package containing flour, canned sardines, salt, noodles, biscuits and jam on the first day. "I was driven by the hunger, for several weeks we had no flour, we had nothing in the tent," he told Reuters by telephone from Rafah. "My son wakes every day asking for something to eat and I can't give him." When he arrived with his father and brother, there were thousands there already and no sign of the identification process that Israeli officials had said would be in place to screen out anyone considered to have links to Hamas. "I didn't see anything, no one asked for me for anything, and if there was an electronic gate or screening I think it collapsed under the feet of the crowds," he said. The gates, the wire fences were all brought down and even plastic pipes, metal boards and fencing material was carried off. "People were hungry and they took everything at the site," he said.Earlier this week, GHP said it had anticipated such reactions from a "distressed population". For Palestinians in northern Gaza, cut off from the distribution points in the south even that remains out of reach. "We see videos about the aid, and people getting some, but they keep saying no trucks can enter north where we live," said Ghada Zaki, a 52-year-old mother of seven in Gaza City, told Reuters via chat app.
AIR STRIKES
Israel imposed the blockade at the beginning of March, saying supplies were being stolen by Hamas and used to entrench its control over Gaza. Hamas denies stealing aid and says it has protected aid trucks from looters. Even as thousands made their way to the distribution site, Israeli jets continued to pound areas of Gaza, killing at least 45 people on Thursday, including 23 people in a strike that hit several houses in the Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical workers said. The Israeli military said it hit dozens of targets in Gaza overnight, including what it said were weapons storage dumps, sniper positions and tunnels. Speculation around a possible ceasefire agreement grew after US President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff said the White House was preparing a draft document that could provide the basis for an agreement. However, it was unclear what changes to previous proposals were being considered that might overcome the deep differences between Hamas and Israel that have stymied previous attempts to restore a ceasefire deal that broke down in March after only two months. Israel has insisted that Hamas disarm completely and be dismantled as a military and governing force and that all of the 58 hostages still held in Gaza must come back before it will agree to end the war. Hamas has rejected the demand to give up its weapons and says Israel must commit to ending the war for a deal to work. Israel has come under increasing international pressure, with many European countries that have normally been reluctant to criticize Israel openly demanding an end to the war and a major humanitarian relief effort.

US Flag Raised in Damascus, Envoy Says Syria-Israel Peace is Possible
Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
The United States' newly-appointed Syria envoy said he believed peace between Syria and Israel was achievable as he made his first trip to Damascus on Thursday, praising the new government and saying it was ready for dialogue. Thomas Barrack raised the American flag over the ambassador's residence for the first time since the US embassy closed in 2012, underlining a rapid expansion of US ties with Damascus since President Donald Trump unexpectedly announced the lifting of sanctions and met Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, Reuters reported. "Syria and Israel is a solvable problem. But it starts with a dialogue," Barrack told a small group of journalists in Damascus. "I’d say we need to start with just a non-aggression agreement, talk about boundaries and borders," he said. Barrack also said that Syria would no longer be deemed a state sponsor of terrorism by the United States, saying the issue was "gone with the Assad regime being finished" but that Congress had a six-month review period. "America's intent and the president’s vision is that we have to give this young government a chance by not interfering, not demanding, by not giving conditions, by not imposing our culture on your culture," Barrack said.
Interim President Sharaa, a former al Qaeda commander, is rapidly reorienting a country that had turbulent ties with the West and close relations to Iran and Russia during more than five decades of rule by the Assad family. Syria has long been a frontline state in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with Israel occupying the Syrian Golan Heights since a war in 1967. Israel seized more Syrian territory in the border zone following Bashar al-Assad's ouster in December, citing concerns about militants' roots of Syria's new rulers. Reuters reported on Tuesday that Israeli and Syrian officials were in direct contact, having held face-to-face meetings aimed at calming tensions and preventing conflict in the border region.Trump urged Sharaa to normalize relations with Israel when they met earlier this month. Barrack, who is also US ambassador to Türkiye, was named as Syria's US envoy on May 23. He noted Syria had been under US sanctions since 1979. Some of the toughest were implemented in 2020 under the so-called Caesar act, which Barrack said must be repealed by Congress within a 180-day window. "I promise you the one person who has less patience with these sanctions than all of you is President Trump," he said. The US closed its embassy in Damascus in February 2012, nearly a year after protests against Assad devolved into a violent conflict that went on to ravage Syria for more than a decade. Then-ambassador Robert Ford was pulled out of Syria shortly before the embassy closed. Subsequent US envoys for Syria operated from abroad and did not visit Damascus.

Cyprus offers Syrian families money to resettle and work permits for main earners
AP/May 29, 2025
NICOSIA: Cyprus will offer Syrian families money to help them resettle back in their homeland and allow the main income earners to remain on the island nation for up to three years to work as part of a voluntary repatriation program, a Cypriot minister said Thursday. Deputy Minister for Migration Nicholas Ioannides said that a prerequisite for families to qualify for the program is that they must drop their claims for asylum or rescind international protection status already granted to them prior to Dec. 31, 2024. Unveiling the program, Ioannides said that families wishing to voluntarily return will be given a one-off sum of 2,000 euros ($2,255) for one adult and 1,000 euros ($1,128) for each child. Childless couples are also eligible to apply. The application period runs from June 2 to Aug. 31. Additionally, the family’s main income earner — either the father or mother will be granted a special residency and work permit allowing them to stay for a minimum of two years in Cyprus with the option of another year. Ioannides said that many Syrians have expressed their willingness to return and help rebuild their country, but are reluctant to do so because of the uncertainty surrounding where they’ll be able to earn a living wage.
According to the head of Cyprus’ Asylum Service Andreas Georgiades, the program’s premise is to help families overcome any such reluctance by affording them a modest nest egg with which to cover their immediate needs while enabling the main income earner to continue working and sending money to his family.The income earner will be allowed to travel back and forth to Syria while his or her residency and work permit are valid. Syrian nationals make up the largest group of asylum-seekers in Cyprus by far. According to Asylum Service figures, 4,226 Syrians applied for asylum last year — almost 10 times more than Afghans who are the second-largest group. “This new program is a targeted, humanitarian and realistic policy that bolsters Syria’s post-war transition to normality,” Ioannides said, adding that European Home Affairs Commissioner Magnus Brunner considers the program as a potential example for other European Union member countries to follow. Meanwhile, Ioannides repeated that a 2009 Search and Rescue agreement that Cyprus has with Syria enables Cypriot authorities to send back boatloads of Syrian migrants trying to reach the island nation after they’re rescued in international waters. Ioannides said that two inflatable boats each loaded with 30 Syrian migrants were turned back in line with the bilateral agreement after being rescued when they transmitted that they were in danger. Ioannides again denied Cyprus engages in any pushbacks, despite urgings from both the UN refugee agency and Europe’s top human rights body to stop pushing back migrants trying to reach the island by boat.

Syria Signs $7 billion Power Deal with Qatar's UCC Holding-led Consortium
Asharq Al Awsat/May 29/2025
Syria has signed a memorandum of understanding with a consortium of international companies led by Qatar's UCC Holding to develop major power generation projects with a foreign investment valued at about $7 billion, UCC said in a statement on Thursday.
The agreement involves building four combined-cycle gas turbine power plants with a total capacity of 4,000 megawatts, plus a 1,000-MW solar power plant in southern Syria, according to Reuters. "This agreement marks a crucial step in Syria's infrastructure recovery plan," said Syrian Energy Minister Mohammed al-Bashir, who signed the deal in Damascus in the presence of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and US envoy for Syria, Thomas Barrack. Construction is expected to begin after final agreements and financial close, and is targeted to finish within three years for the gas plants and less than two years for the solar plant. Once completed, the projects are expected to provide over 50% of Syria’s electricity needs. After 14 years of war, Syria's electricity sector has been suffering from severe damage to its grid and power stations, aging infrastructure, and persistent fuel shortages, generating only 1.6 gigawatts of electricity, down from 9.5 GW before 2011.Reconstructing the power sector is expected to cost around $11 billion and the new administration is betting on the private sector shouldering the burden, underlining a shift from the state-led economic policies of the Assad era. The projects will be financed through regional and international banks, in addition to capital injection from the partners, UCC Holding CEO Ramez Al Khayyat said.They are expected to create 50,000 direct and 250,000 indirect jobs during execution, the UCC Holding CEO said.

Saudi crown prince, Canadian prime minister discuss bilateral relations
Arab News/May 30, 2025
RIYADH: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shared a call on Thursday and discussed bilateral relations. They discussed prospects for cooperation between the two countries, and opportunities to develop and enhance it in all fields, the Saudi Press Agency reported. The pair also reviewed the situation in the Middle East, agreeing on the need for sustainable peace in the region. Carney was victorious in a May election after taken over as prime minister in March following the resignation of his predecessor Justin Trudeau.
The crown prince and Carney discussed energy security and deepening trade between Riyadh and Ottawa, according to a readout from the Canadian premier’s office. Both leaders agreed to remain in close contact, it read.

The Latest English LCCC analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources  on May 29-30/2025
A secular jihadi brings the intifada to Washington ...The Islamist/leftist alliance metastasizes
Clifford D. May/The Washington Times/May 29/2025
Not so long ago, homicidal antisemitism in America was widely regarded as peculiar to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other far-right extremists, men such as Robert Gregory Bowers who, in 2018, murdered 11 worshippers and wounded six more at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA.
Meanwhile, within the American left, antisemitism has been metastasizing. Last week, we saw the results.
A college-educated terrorist shot and killed – “allegedly” if you insist, but he admitted it and there’s surveillance footage – Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.
They were young Israeli embassy staffers, one Jewish, one Christian, though Elias Rodriguez could not have known such things.
What he did know is that they had just exited the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. following an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The event focused on providing humanitarian aid, not least to Gazans.
He shot both in the back, then fired repeatedly when they fell to the ground. After that, he tossed away his weapon and strolled into the museum. “There was a shooting,” he reportedly announced. “People have been shot! Call 911!” A woman tried to calm him. Another brought him a glass of water.
When the police arrived, he pulled out a red keffiyeh and shouted “Free, Free Palestine!”
Mr. Rodriguez, 31, is a leftist activist, affiliated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the ANSWER (for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition.
Both groups hate the West, America, Israel, and Jews. Does that qualify as intersectionality?
PSL and ANSWER reportedly receive funding from Neville Roy Singham, a multi-millionaire American citizen who makes his home in Shanghai and is married to Jodie Evans, a co-founder of Code Pink, a whacky-left group, one that delights in boisterously disrupting congressional hearings.
As for Mr. Rodriguez’s red keffiyeh, that’s associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a secular, Marxist-Leninist organization.
The PFLP receives financial and military backing from Tehran. One of its spokesmen has referred to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as “blood brothers” and “comrades.”
Designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the EU, and others, the PFLP supports “armed struggle” in alliance with Islamists. The annihilation of Israel is its primary goal.
A hypocrisy worth your attention: Leftists claim to champion “diversity and inclusion,” yet find it intolerable that one tiny Jewish state exists among the more that 20 Arab states and more than 50 Muslim states stretching from western Africa to eastern Asia.
Note, too, that no one who shouts, “Free Palestine!” means to suggest that people in Gaza and the West Bank should be guaranteed freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly – rights enjoyed by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Israelis.
Instead, the phrase is employed to express their demand that Israel be Judenfrei, German for Jew-free, the term the Nazis used to describe areas from which Jews had been eliminated through mass murder and/or forced transfers to concentration camps.
During World War II, Muslims intent on Jewish genocide allied with the Nazis.
The most enthusiastic Nazi fellow traveler was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and de facto leader of Palestinian Muslims. (They did not, in those days, self-identify as “Palestinians,” as did indigenous Jews of the Holy Land.)
He spent the war years in Berlin recruiting Muslims for Hitler’s Waffen-SS, and broadcasting Nazi propaganda into the Middle East.
After the defeat of the Nazis, the anti-Zionist project was adopted by the Soviet Union and the Communist International, aka the Comintern.
They refused to recognize Zionism as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people who reclaimed part of their ancient homeland that for centuries had been occupied by foreign empires and settler-colonists.
Instead, they denounced Zionism as bourgeois and incompatible with proletarian internationalism. After the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948, they backed Israel’s enemies. They invented the slanderous meme that “Zionism is racism.”
Other radical leftists followed suit. In the 1970s, the Baader-Meinhof Group, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), denounced Israel as a tool of the capitalist West.
RAF members trained with the PFLP and, most infamously, collaborated with the PFLP in the June 27, 1976 hijacking of an Air France Flight. After diverting the plane to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, the hijackers separated the Jewish passengers and held them hostage. On July 4, Israeli commandoes launched a mission that freed 102 of 106 hostages. The mission leader, Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was the only Israeli soldier killed during the rescue.
The notorious terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, personifies not just the alliance of leftist and Islamist terrorists but their convergence.
Born in Venezuela in 1949, he studied in Moscow and then trained with the PFLP. By his own count, 2,000 people were killed in more than 100 bombings, assassinations, and other attacks he coordinated. Captured by French agents in Sudan in 1994, he was transferred to France and sentenced to life in prison.
Behind bars, he converted to Islam. In 2003, he published “Revolutionary Islam,” in which he praised the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 as a “lofty feat,” and expressed admiration for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He called on “all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists,” to accept the leadership of jihadis because they represent the only “transnational force capable of standing up against the enslavement of nations” by the West. Today’s slogan, “Globalize the intifada!” is another way of issuing that same command. Mr. Rodriguez, the (alleged) executioner of a defenseless young woman and an unarmed young man, regards himself as such a revolutionary. Members of the left/Islamist alliance encourage that delusion.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a columnist for the Washington Times, and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/may/27/secular-jihadi-brings-intifada-washington/

U.S. Professors Flocking to Terrorist-Run Turkish Think Tank
Melissa Sacks and David May/ Real Clear Defense/May 29/2025
The United States banished former University of South Florida professor Sami al-Arian for supporting terrorism. But some U.S. academics have flocked to him, like flies to manure. Since his deportation in 2015, al-Arian has turned his pseudo-academic center in Turkey into a mecca for both terrorists and American academics sympathetic to their viewpoint.
The United States arrested al-Arian in 2003 and sentenced him in 2006 to 57 months in prison for conspiring to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an Iranian-backed and U.S.-designated terrorist organization that fights alongside Hamas in Gaza. Like Hamas, PIJ formed as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2017, shortly after being deported, al-Arian credited “the personal intervention of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan” for helping him “find a home in Turkey.”
Turkey has increasingly become a sanctuary for Islamist groups. While the United States and the European Union designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, Turkey has offered passports, residency, and a platform for global outreach to Hamas’s leaders. Erdogan stated last May, “we do not deem Hamas a terrorist organization … more than 1,000 members of Hamas are under treatment across our county.”
From his perch in Turkey, al-Arian established a university-based think tank in Istanbul, dubbed the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). Through his center, al-Arian has hosted not only members of Turkish parliament, like Hasan Turan, but also some of the most senior leaders in Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, including Osama Hamdan, Majed Al Zeer, and Khalida Jarrar.
Just as alarmingly, dozens of American professors have been active participants at CIGA events, where they have gloated over the “decline of the American empire” and spewed antisemitic tropes. At CIGA’s second Palestine conference in 2021, Jordanian-American professor Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut claimed, “Zionist manipulation and lobbying” has skewed Western media coverage of Palestinians.
University of Michigan associate professor of political science David Myer Temin was part of a CIGA webinar in November 2023 in which he discussed “decolonization and self-determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought.”
Last August, al-Arian hosted both Princeton professor Richard Falk and Georgetown professor Nader Hashemi for his CIGA Ramadan series. The Palestinian Authority previously sought Falk’s dismissal from the United Nations for being too supportive of Hamas, which Falk has openly praised as “peaceful.” Hashemi served as an editor for a Hamas-linked publication in the 1990s.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Sarah Shields attended and spoke with Lafayette College professor Hafsa Kanjwal on a panel at CIGA’s 2018 Muslim Ummah conference moderated by Abdullah al-Arian, Sami’s son, who is a professor at Georgetown’s Qatar campus. On last year’s anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, Ohio State University law professor John B. Quigley discussed “the future of Zionism after the Al-Aqsa flood” in a CIGA webinar with Columbia University’s Joseph Massad, who previously called the killing spree a “stunning victory.”
Lawrence Wilkerson from William and Mary appeared alongside al-Arian himself at an event in 2021 about “U.S. foreign policy and the global war on terror.” Perhaps al-Arian was well-situated to present the terrorists’ perspective.
San Franscico State University professor of Ethnic Studies and founder of the university’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies Rabab Abdulhadi has frequently been hosted by CIGA. Last spring, she helped organize and spoke at the SFSU Gaza Solidarity Encampment about how to “teach Palestine.”
Susan Abulhawa, organizer of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival conference at UPenn, which featured speakers with histories of antisemitism, was on a panel at CIGA’s “Second International Conference on Palestine” in June 2021. Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch participated in a different panel.
The Global Coalition for Al Quds and Palestine (GCQP), whose former head led a U.S.-designated Hamas front, attended and sponsored this conference. The conference was also sponsored by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and listed the Nader Hashemi-led Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver Korbel School as a sponsor. However, the dean of the Korbel School disavowed the sponsorship. Days before the Palestine conference, al-Arian and CIGA joined a webinar with Basem Naim, a Hamas politburo member.
Just last year, at CIGA’s Fourth International Conference on Palestine, fringe American journalist Max Blumenthal interviewed senior Hamas member Osama Hamdan.
The ideological overlap between American professors and designated terrorist groups is alarming. More alarming is that terrorists need not cross our borders to infiltrate our country. They have cooperative academics consorting with terrorists, importing their ideology, and teaching it to our nation’s next generation.
**Melissa Sacks is the director of network analysis at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where David May is a research manager and senior research analyst.
Follow FDD on X @FDD. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay. FDD is a Washington, DC-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
/May 29/2025
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/05/28/us_professors_flocking_to_terrorist-run_turkish_think_tank_1113045.html

America's (And Israel's) Ottoman Gamble
By Amb. Alberto M. Fernandez/ MEMRI Daily Brief No. 778/May 29, 2025 |
That the foreign policy of the new Trump Administration has been bold and disruptive is something most observers would agree. Some see it as catastrophic, others (I am one of those) see it as a long-needed corrective to past disasters. But it is still evolving.
A recent tweet by the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack caught some flack in the Middle East. The ambassador wrote on May 25 that: "A century ago, the West imposed maps, mandates, penciled borders, and foreign rule. Sykes-Picot divided Syria and the broader region for imperial gain – not peace. That mistake cost generations. We will not make it again. The era of Western interference is over. The future belongs to regional solutions, but partnerships, and a diplomacy grounded in respect."[1]
The tweet garnered some criticism from regional voices, especially in Lebanon (ironic in that Barrack is himself of Lebanese Christian origin) because the French Mandate led to the creation of the state of Lebanon.[2] Others might have noted that Anglo-French "imperial gain" prevented Turkish imperial gain, which is why Mosul is still part of Iraq and Aleppo still part of Syria. Still others may recall when the terrorist Islamic State announced the "end of Sykes-Picot."[3] The idea that Western imperialism, including Sykes-Picot, is the principal reason for all the region's ills (including the creation of Israel) is a staple of Arab Nationalist and Islamist propaganda.
But Barrack is not wrong to criticize the bane of Western interference in past decades (quoting President Trump's important Riyadh speech).[4] This not only brought us trillion-dollar wars and thousands of American dead but failed states in the region and turbo-charged global Jihadism.
"Regional solutions" is clearly an administration priority and so far, there is positive movement toward a better vision for the region. Trump has given the hard-pressed Syrian people (and President Ahmed Al-Sharaa) renewed hope with the lifting of draconian sanctions. Under American auspices (Barrack is also the Special Envoy for Syria), Israelis and Syrian officials are meeting and negotiating.[5] The U.S. is also mediating between Turkey and Israel, trying to gain a ceasefire in Gaza, a nuclear agreement with Iran, disarm Hezbollah in Lebanon and forge closer ties with Sunni Arab states and Turkey in order to secure regional security and counter the ambitions of Iran, China, and Russia. That is an impressive effort in only four months!
The question is not so much if this is the right American strategy for an America that wants to focus on its core interests and get allies to take up more of the burden. It is. The question is whether the pieces will actually fit together (and stay together) toward a more stable region or whether, in leaving past conflicts, we are preparing the stage for future ones.
It was less than five years ago that Turkey was openly abetting Islamist revolution in the Arab Middle East.[6] Islamist stations in Istanbul would broadcast against regimes in Egypt, Jordan and the Arabian Gulf while Erdogan saber-rattled against most of its immediate neighbors while actually waging war in Syria, Iraq, Armenia, and Libya.
Turkey's policies are not limited to one man and its leadership today has not changed – it is still the same mix of convinced Islamists and extreme nationalists – but its behavior has moderated.[7] Faced with economic headwinds, Erdoğan buried the hatchet with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE.[8] While discourse in the country is deeply antisemitic and anti-American, the rhetoric has usually not translated into concrete actions against the U.S. or Israel. The fall of Assad in Syria in 2024 and Turkey's importance on issues such as the Russia-Ukraine War have created a kind of "Neo-Ottoman Moment."[9]
This is all happening almost exactly a century after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the Ottoman Caliphate. But it seems that Turkey is finding that it can gain more with "honey than with vinegar," that being helpful to the Trump Administration will pay greater dividends than overt hostility.[10] Not so surprising actually, given the tactical flexibility and pragmatism of Islamists in general, and of Erdoğan's ideologically-motivated regime in particular.
The parameters of this gamble are very much along the lines promoted in the past by American strategist Michael Doran – a coming together of Turkey, Israel, and the United States (and Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan and Qatar) in a grand strategic alliance that enhances the security of all sides and benefits all parties.[11]
Under such a scenario, the United States gains by having reliable regional hegemons who can presumably provide security and stability, keeping out unfriendly powers, fighting terrorism and freeing American resources and interests for other areas. This vision seeks to solve the "problem" of Iran – which was empowered by the policies of the last two Democratic Administrations – by empowering Sunni powers as their adversaries. While we might be skeptical of such a scenario, it is not like the previous, costly strategy of direct US involvement in places like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya worked particularly well.
Israel supposedly would gain because of inferred (in some cases explicit) informal security arrangements and understandings with important Sunni powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, potential threats from Syria would be neutralized and Iran and its proxies are kept away from Israel's borders.[12]
The Sunni powers gain the powerful backing of the Americans and the benefit of tacit understandings with Israel. This also means a certain amount of carte blanche or green light when it comes to these states' dealings with internal issues and with other countries outside the circle of trust as long as these dealings do not conflict too directly with current American or Israeli interests (for example, America's interests in Armenia or Israel's interests in Southern Syria).[13]
It might work, especially in the short run, as long as ambitions remain in check and interests and equities are regularly deconflicted. But it is a risk because it assumes that, for example, Turkish ambitions – the same state that supports Hamas today and openly facilitated the rise of Islamic State fighters a decade ago – would not come into conflict with Israeli ones. That Turkey's interests are limited in Syria to the PKK and returning refugees. Or that an Islamist-ruled Syria would not (unlike all other Islamist states in the past like National Islamic Front-ruled Sudan or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan) become an exporter of extremism.
With American imperial overreach a very real issue, this is a gamble worth taking, but with eyes wide open. Empowering Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia is, in principle, a very good idea. With Turkey, the hope is that it is "domesticated," rather than just using one wild, fierce beast against another one and expecting a positive outcome in sync with our interests. Time will tell whether this was bold and timely cleverness or merely American (and Israeli) wishful thinking along the road to unimagined future conflagrations.
*Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice President of MEMRI.
[1] X.com/USAMBTurkiye/status/1926667533102301388, May 25, 2025.
[2] X.com/oldlevantine/status/1926991575998971950, May 26, 2025.
[3] Aljazeera.com/news/2016/5/18/a-century-on-what-remains-of-sykes-picot, May 8, 2016.
[4] Ijr.com/shoshana-bryen-trumps-riyadh-speech-was-an-invitation-not-an-intervention, May 23, 2025.
[5] Ft.com/content/1c82892a-23cf-4fe5-8e28-19c0c8d70d14
[6] See MEMRI Daily Brief No. 222, The Arabic Propaganda War From Istanbul, July 17, 2020.
[7] Newarab.com/analysis/hakan-fidan-spymaster-turkeys-foreign-minister, July 12, 2023.
[8] Cfr.org/in-brief/why-turkey-resetting-relations-saudi-arabia, May 4, 2022.
[9] See MEMRI Daily Brief No. 748, The Neo-Ottoman Moment, May 31, 2025.
[10] Newsweek.com/turkeys-erdogan-has-become-one-worlds-most-powerful-men-trump-ally-2073930, May 20, 2025.
[11] Mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2024/12/is-turkey-emerging-as-the-biggest-threat-to-israel-or-as-an-indispensable-ally, May 28, 2025.
[12] Middleeasteye.net/news/turkey-israel-establish-hotline-syria, May 21, 2025.
[13] Reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkeys-kurdish-heartland-distrust-erodes-peace-process-hopes-2025-03-31, March 31, 2025.

India and Pakistan: 'A Bad Nuclear War'
Gordon G. Chang/Gatestone Institute/May 29, 2025
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21654/india-pakistan-nuclear-war
The Trump administration, which had previously displayed a lack of interest in the conflict, then quickly intervened and brokered a ceasefire.
"[T]he possession of nuclear weapons may have incentivized risky confrontations that pass just below the ambiguous nuclear threshold." — Aqil Shah, Foreign Affairs, May 23, 2025.
Pakistan did not have to detonate one of its nuclear warheads to shake the world. Now, an emboldened Islamabad will almost certainly hit India again.
Nukes are supposed to moderate national leaders and make them cautious. When it comes to India and Pakistan, however, the opposite now looks true.
Pakistan did not have to detonate one of its nuclear warheads to shake the world. Now, an emboldened Islamabad will almost certainly hit India again.
"We stopped a nuclear conflict, I think it could have been a bad nuclear war, millions of people could have been killed, so I'm very proud of that," President Donald Trump told reporters on May 12.
Proud he should be. Although New Delhi refuses to acknowledge Washington's role in brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, the Trump administration was nonetheless instrumental in stopping fighting that could have escalated, as Newsweek wrote, "to the brink of all-out war."
On April 22, gunmen murdered 26 Hindu tourists and others at Pahalgam, in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan also claims that territory.
New Delhi blames Islamabad for harboring militants who staged the attack. Pakistan denies involvement.
India retaliated for the murders at Pahalgam by, among other things, launching Operation Sindoor on May 7 against known terrorist sites in Pakistan. The Indian military strikes, reports Georgetown University's Aqil Shah writing in Foreign Affairs this month, "ranged far beyond Pakistani-administered Kashmir into Punjab, Pakistan's heartland, eventually hitting not just the facilities of militant groups but also military targets, including airbases."
"In recent decades," Shah also notes, "fighting has been mostly confined to the border region around the disputed territory of Kashmir."
Of particular concern, Indian strikes targeted two installations linked to Pakistan's nuclear weapons arsenal: the Nur Khan Airbase, close to the country's nuclear-command headquarters, and the Mushaf Airbase, near a nuclear storage site.
After these strikes, Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called an emergency meeting of the National Command Authority, which has the authority to approve the use of nuclear weapons. This, Shah wrote, sent a "calculated message to India—and everybody else."
"These Indian attacks on the airbases could have been ones for the history books," Blaine Holt, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general, told Gatestone. "This particular inferno could have gone nuclear."
The Trump administration, which had previously displayed a lack of interest in the conflict, then quickly intervened and brokered a ceasefire. The about-face showed Islamabad that nuclear threats can move the world's most powerful state to act.
Has the danger now passed?
Undoubtedly not.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently said Operation Sindoor has not ended. For its part, Pakistan has threatened to resume hostilities as well.
There is, consequently, a dangerous dynamic in South Asia. In India, after a series of horrific attacks over this century, anger is driving policy. New Delhi charges that Pakistani terror attacks have taken more than 20,000 Indian lives in the past four decades.
In Pakistan, the possession of nuclear weapons has made a military-run regime bolder. "Nuclear deterrence can reduce the probability of a full-scale conventional war, but it can also breed instability by widening the space for lower levels of conflict, including skirmishes and terrorism," writes Shah. "In other words, the possession of nuclear weapons may have incentivized risky confrontations that pass just below the ambiguous nuclear threshold."
Pakistan, in short, saw its possession of nukes as giving it more room to assault a larger and more powerful India. Nuclear weapons are always on the minds of Pakistani officials. In late April, for instance, Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif declared, in a comment to Reuters, that his country would consider using its most destructive weapons if "there is a direct threat to our existence."
At around the same time a Pakistani foreign ministry spokesperson made a similar threat by warning India that Islamabad might respond "with full force across the complete spectrum of national power."
"China turned Pakistan into a nuclear-warhead-making and long-range-solid-fuel-ballistic-missile-making existential threat to India," Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center told Gatestone after the ceasefire.
"Pakistan, thanks to China, is a nuclear-armed state the Chinese now use for their own highly dangerous purposes," Peter Huessy of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies tells this site. "The U.S. doesn't have a new paradigm to deal with this tactic so must begin building Golden Dome and theater nuclear systems for protection."
Beijing armed Pakistan to keep India, which the Communist Party saw as a rival, off-balance, but in the process China has made Pakistan's militant Islamic regime a threat not only to India but also to the rest of the world.
The United States, Huessy says, has yet to develop a deterrence strategy to deal with the new reality.
The recent crisis taught the international community one thing: Pakistan did not have to detonate one of its nuclear warheads to shake the world. Now, an emboldened Islamabad will almost certainly hit India again.
"The world was lucky this time," says Holt.
Yes. Nukes are supposed to moderate national leaders and make them cautious. When it comes to India and Pakistan, however, the opposite now looks true.
*Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
*Follow Gordon G. Chang on X (formerly Twitter)
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