🌳 Airstrikes shatter the ceasefire

TOP STORIES

Israeli Airstrikes Kill 7 in South Lebanon as Convent Is Demolished

• Israeli airstrikes on Saturday killed at least 7 people and wounded others across southern Lebanon, with strikes hitting the villages of Kfar Dajal, Lwaizeh, and Shoukin, according to the Associated Press.
• In the border village of Yaroun, Israeli forces used bulldozers to demolish parts of a Catholic convent belonging to the Basilian Salvatorian Sisters — a compound that had housed a school closed since the 2006 war and a recently relocated clinic.
• The Israeli military said the structure had been used by Hezbollah to fire rockets and showed no religious markings; the Catholic Church in Lebanon flatly rejected that claim, calling the compound a place of peace and education, not a military base.
• Israel's military Arabic-language spokesperson said the air force carried out roughly 50 airstrikes in the past 24 hours; Lebanon's Health Ministry put the total war toll since fighting began two months ago at 2,659 killed and 8,183 wounded.

The backstory: A 10-day ceasefire declared in Washington took effect on April 17 and was extended by three weeks, but both sides have continued attacks. The current war began on March 2, when Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, and Israel subsequently launched airstrikes and a ground invasion, capturing dozens of border towns.

What to watch: Whether the demolition of religious sites—following widespread condemnation of an earlier incident involving a statue of Jesus in Debel—adds new international pressure on the ceasefire's fragile extension.

Grand Mufti and Church Leaders Rally Around Maronite Patriarch After Online Attacks

• Grand Mufti Sheikh Abd al-Latif Deryan called Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Bechara Boutros Al-Rahi to express solidarity after a wave of abusive social media posts targeting the Patriarch, with Dar al-Fatwa declaring its full institutional backing.
• Mufti Deryan stressed that the attacks do not merely target an individual but "strike at the core of national dignity," framing the defense of the Patriarch as a matter of national unity rather than sectarian loyalty.
• The Middle East Council of Churches separately issued a strong condemnation, calling the online campaign an assault on Lebanon's social fabric and warning that political differences must never descend into hate speech or incitement against religious symbols.

Why it matters: In a country where interfaith solidarity is both politically symbolic and historically fragile, a senior Sunni cleric publicly defending the Maronite Patriarch sends a signal about where religious leaders are drawing the line on sectarian mobilization.

Lebanon's Polarization Problem: A Reckoning With 20 Years of Assumptions

• Daraj published a sharp-edged essay arguing that Lebanon's political polarization has become so reflexive that citizens routinely assume anyone who wants peace is a traitor — a cycle the author says is destroying the country's capacity for honest debate.
• The piece draws a direct line between Lebanon's fragmented power structure — the official state, Hezbollah's parallel security apparatus, and a dysfunctional banking system — and the repeated failure to ask who actually authorizes war and who bears accountability when towns are destroyed.
• The author argues the current government inherited collapse rather than created it, but insists it must be judged on transparency and reconstruction — and that rebuilding state institutions is itself a form of resistance, equal in legitimacy to any armed alternative.

Zooming out: The essay captures a wider regional debate about the post-war moment in Lebanon: whether the exhaustion of conflict can translate into durable state-building, or whether the same political logic simply reassembles itself in new forms.

QUICK HITS

• Sunnis unite behind the table: Sunni MPs met and aligned behind a single position for the first time in years — state authority, diplomatic negotiation, and weapons exclusivity — with participants describing explicit "Arab blessing" for the initiative's regional dimensions.
• Druze, too, says enough: Sheikh Akl of the Druze community Sami Abi Al-Muna condemned the social media attacks on Maronite Patriarch Al-Rahi, calling it an attack on national dignity and reaffirming that Bkerke holds a unifying role across Lebanon's confessional landscape.
• Hezbollah picks up the phone: Hezbollah contacted Information Minister Walid Marqos on Saturday, engaging directly on his call to combat hate speech — the two sides reportedly aligned on containing incitement and preventing further internal tensions from escalating.
• Farming under fire: The Litani National Authority says technical teams are racing to rebuild destroyed irrigation infrastructure in the Arzi area near Saida, working under continuous airstrikes to restore the Qasmieh irrigation network before the agricultural season is lost entirely.
• War's invisible toll: A Megaphone investigation documents how Lebanon's war has reorganized labor relations — wages cut, workers sleeping near offices to avoid losing jobs, southern farmland lost to occupation, and women bearing the heaviest burden of unpaid care work.

INTERNATIONAL

Syria Puts Assad's Men on Trial—But Questions Loom Over the Process

• Syria held its first trials of Assad-era figures this week, opening with Atef Najib — the former president's cousin and the officer who ordered the torture of children whose graffiti helped spark the 2011 revolution — with more than 40 civilian claimants filing cases against him, according to Megaphone.
• Also called as a defendant was Bashar al-Assad himself, along with his brother Maher and five senior security officers from Daraa — a moment Megaphone described as foundational for Syria's new history, delivered by a judge who had himself been sentenced to death by the Assad regime in 2013.
• Critics note the new authorities published video clips of confessions set to dramatic music, raising concerns that spectacle is outpacing process — and that a transitional justice law, which human rights groups have demanded, has not yet been drafted.
• Separate settlements granted immunity to some figures implicated in massacres, including businessman allies of Assad, under what authorities described as measures to support economic recovery and civil peace.

What to watch: Whether Syria's new leadership moves to adopt a formal transitional justice framework before the trials expand — a gap that legal experts say risks creating different accountability standards for different factions.

WHO Approves First-Ever Malaria Drug Designed for Babies

• The World Health Organization has granted prequalification to Coartem Baby, the first malaria treatment specifically designed for infants as small as 2 kg — filling a critical gap in a disease that killed 610,000 people in 2024, roughly three-quarters of them children under five in Africa, according to The Guardian.
• Developed by Novartis and the Medicines for Malaria Venture, the drug comes as cherry-flavoured tablets that dissolve into liquids including breast milk, addressing a long-standing problem where infants were dosed with formulations designed for older children, raising risks of toxicity.
• In parts of Africa, up to 18% of children under six months are infected with malaria; the drug has already been introduced in Ghana, where an eight-month-old named Baby Wonder was among its first patients at 12 weeks old.

The bigger picture: The approval follows decades of research overturning the assumption that newborns were protected from malaria by maternal immunity — a misconception that left the smallest patients without a safe treatment option until now.

California's Proposed Billionaire Tax Splits Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party

• A ballot initiative campaign has gathered more than 1.5 million signatures — nearly double the required 875,000 — to put a one-time 5% tax on Californians worth more than $1.1 billion to a statewide vote, targeting roughly 200 billionaires, according to The Independent.
• Backers, led by the SEIU-UHW healthcare union, say the measure would offset an estimated $100 billion in health and welfare cuts to the state under the Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill; opponents, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin and investor Peter Thiel, have left California ahead of a January 1, 2026 residency deadline.
• Billionaire wealth in California has increased by more than 150% since 2023, according to UC Berkeley researchers, while a group of 20 billionaires has reportedly developed contingency exit plans if the tax passes.

Zooming out: The fight over the California Billionaire Tax Act is being closely watched as a preview of the broader national debate over wealth, taxation, and Big Tech's political influence heading into the 2028 presidential cycle.

GHER HEK

• From bedroom beats to Riyadh: Lebanese producer Jean-Marie Riachi — the man who made Elissa a superstar while recording hit albums in his Beirut apartment with his mother cooking for the artists — is now music director of the Joy Awards, bringing Robbie Williams, Katy Perry, and Hans Zimmer to the Arab world's answer to the Grammys.
• Pelé played Beirut first: Before the world knew New York Cosmos, Pelé made a week-long stop in Beirut in April 1975, drawing more than 35,000 fans to Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium — where Nejmeh SC still beat him 2–0 — and ran a training session with 44 young players on AUB's green field.
• A legend's final lap: Italian motorsport icon Alex Zanardi, 4-time Paralympic gold medallist and 12-time world champion handcyclist after losing both legs in a racing crash, died on May 1 aged 59 — exactly 32 years to the day after fellow motorsport legend Ayrton Senna, a coincidence that felt anything but accidental.
• Olivia's melancholic swing: Olivia Rodrigo debuted her new single 'begged' live on Saturday Night Live, performing the subdued ballad seated on a swing that mirrors the cover art of her upcoming third album — set for release on June 12 — continuing her run as one of pop's most compelling young voices.

That's your Sunday briefing — go enjoy the balcony coffee, you've earned it.