When Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, announced that the US and Iran, along with their allies, had agreed to an immediate ceasefire on Tuesday night, he made clear that the truce applied “everywhere including Lebanon”. But hours later, the Israeli government insisted that the deal did not include halting its attacks on Lebanon, which had become one of the deadliest fronts of the regional war instigated by the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran.
By Wednesday afternoon, Israel had launched its largest and most destructive attack on Lebanon in years, killing at least 300 people and wounding more than 1,100. Dozens of Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on 100 targets across Lebanon within 10 minutes, with the Israeli military claiming it was targeting Hezbollah “command centers” in an operation it called “Eternal Darkness”. But Israeli warplanes leveled several buildings in crowded residential neighborhoods of Beirut, spreading panic in the Lebanese capital and overwhelming hospitals with hundreds of casualties. Israel also continued bombing Lebanon’s infrastructure, destroying the last remaining bridge that linked southern Lebanon to the rest of the country.
Israel’s escalating attacks on Lebanon could unravel the two-week ceasefire even before negotiations between the US and Iran, which are expected to start on Saturday in Islamabad. Iranian leaders are accusing the US of failing to uphold the truce and threatening to back out of it unless Washington restrains its ally. “The U.S. must choose – ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, wrote on Twitter/X on Wednesday. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”
The U.S. military has launched operations to begin de-mining the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Central Command (Centcom) said on Saturday.
Twenty-three years ago, I sat beside Hamid Karzai in his presidential office in Kabul, watching US bombers pound Saddam Hussein’s Iraq live on Al Jazeera. 
Former Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist Mahmoud Khalil is now a step closer to being deported from the US after the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) issued a final removal order in his case on Thursday. 
The president of the United States threatened this week to commit genocide against Iran. As Israel engages in continued bombing in Lebanon, killing more than 200 people in a single day, that fact must never be scrubbed away, not least because there is no guarantee the threat will not be revived. But as we descend towards the abyss, we need to understand where our fall began.
Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D-Calif.) campaign for California governor lost two co-chairs and key endorsements on Friday after the San Francisco Chronicle reported on allegations that he sexually assaulted a former staffer.
