Israel kills hundreds in Lebanon. J.D. Vance claims ‘the Israelis [are] trying to set us up for success’
The last time a government official from Lebanon sat down to think carefully about national digital infrastructure, nobody expected another war with Israel. That’s how it has always gone.
“We were not ready for this,” says Kamal Shehadi, the Lebanese minister of technology and AI, and minister of the displaced. “I have to admit that we didn’t expect something of this magnitude to happen.”
On March 2, 2026, Israeli evacuation warnings began appearing on phones across southern Lebanon. Days later, similar alerts reached residents of Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs, urging them to leave as strikes were imminent.
Within minutes, families were moving. Within days, nearly 1.3 million people—nearly 1 in 5 residents of the country—were forcibly displaced. Schools that have been turned into shelters were filled past capacity. People slept in cars along the coast road north of Beirut. And somewhere in a government office, a small team started updating a database.
That platform is currently the closest thing Lebanon has to a real-time view of its own humanitarian crisis. It tracks food packages, fuel supplies, hygiene kits, and medicine. It tells government officials which shelter in which district is running low on blankets. It is, by global standards, modest technology. By Lebanon’s standards, it might be the most functional piece of government software in the country.
While the US, Israel, and Iran negotiate, Israel has excluded Lebanon from the ongoing two-week ceasefire. Local media have reported up to 100 Israeli air strikes on Lebanon within 10 minutes on April 8, in a clear sign that forced displacement, disruption, and chaos will continue in the nation. [Continue reading…]
Israel’s military launched what it described as its most powerful attacks on Lebanon on Wednesday, killing hundreds of people and turning joy over the ceasefire in Iran into panic.
The importance of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon — and how they could lead to the unraveling of the ceasefire — was highlighted by Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a key player in the country’s current power structure, who said in a post on X that the attacks were a violation of the negotiating framework that President Donald Trump had agreed to.
French President Emmanuel Macron also weighed in after talking to both Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and said the ceasefire must include Lebanon.
“I expressed my hope that the ceasefire will be fully respected by each of the belligerents, across all areas of confrontation, including in Lebanon,” he wrote in a post on X. “This is a necessary condition for the ceasefire to be credible and lasting.”
Verified video and photos from the region showed how sprawling strikes across parts of Beirut, southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley shot towering columns of acrid smoke into the sky above the capital and sparked a desperate evacuation.
According to the Reuters news service, Lebanon’s civil defense service said the new strikes had killed more than 250 people — heaping more casualties on the more than 1,500 in Lebanon already killed in the more than five-week-old Israeli invasion.
Hezbollah had halted fire on northern Israel after the ceasefire between Iran, the U.S. and Israel took effect, the group said in a statement. [Continue reading…]
Vance told reporters at the end of his visit to Budapest there’s a “legitimate misunderstanding” between the U.S. and Iran regarding the ceasefire in Lebanon.
- “I think the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon and it just didn’t. We never made that promise. We never indicated that would be the case. What we said is that the ceasefire will be focused on Iran and America’s allies both Israel and the Gulf Arab states,” he said.
- “That said, the Israelis have actually offered to check themselves a little bit in Lebanon because they want to make sure that our negotiation is successful. That’s not because that is part of the ceasefire. I think that’s the Israelis trying to set us up for success.”