Lebanon marked the 26th anniversary of Israel's 2000 withdrawal from the south on Mon⁠day—except this time, Israeli forces still control parts of that same territory, and more than 1.2 million Lebanese remain displaced.

• Israel has held five points in south Lebanon since a ceasefire in late 2024, despite agreeing to withdraw, while continuing daily strikes; on Liberation Day itself, Israeli raids killed three people and evacuation orders were issued for 10 towns and villages.
• President Aoun marked the holiday with a speech insisting Lebanon won't compromise on a "full Israeli withdrawal," while P⁠M Nawaf Salam wrote there would be no celebration "until Israel's complete withdrawal from our land."
• Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem rejected direct talks with Israel and, for the first time, suggested the government should resign if it "cannot protect sovereignty."
• Since Israel's Mar⁠ch 2 reinvasion, Lebanon's Health Ministry counts 3,151 killed, while Hezbollah has deployed fiber-optic drones to counter Israeli ground assaults in the south.

What to watch: Whether the current US-brokered ceasefire extension into early Jul⁠y holds—and whether Beirut's direct talks with Israel produce any movement on the withdrawal the country is marking a holiday to remember.

A new first-person account in Daraj traces Hezbollah's slow transformation of daily life in Beirut's southern suburbs: not through sudden takeover, but through school wall magazines, dress codes, and neighborhood rituals that arrived before most residents had a name for what was happening.

• The writer recalls "Student Mobilization" taking over school celebrations and replacing content with religious material, then threatening principals of other schools to impose the same rules.
• Street by street: women in chadors began advising or scolding unveiled girls; water tanks printed with the Iranian flag appeared on roads; shop names shifted to Zahra, Batoul, and Hawra.
• Photography without party permission became a punishable offense; the nude model was removed from fine arts curricula at university branches under the party's control.
• The essay asks a pointed question: how can one's stance on Hezbollah not be personal, when "colors became an indictment, joy a sin, and smiling frowned upon"?

The bigger picture: The essay is part of a broader conversation about the emergence of a Shiite voice in Lebanon that rejects occupation but also refuses to reduce its grief to a political script.

A Lebanese cybersecurity team called Semicolon Security—founded by people aged 20 to 30—has been officially recognized by President Joseph Aoun, after quietly racking up over 3,000 discovered vulnerabilities in systems belonging to Meta, Google, and Apple.

• The team has earned more than $1 million in financial rewards through global bug bounty programs, and received a $50,000 reward from Apple for a recently disclosed vulnerability, according to Al Modon.
• Meta selected the team in 2022 to join its security researcher program; the team also won second place at a Meta conference in South Korea for bypassing two-factor authentication.
• The team's community now counts more than 10,000 members, and its CTF 2026 competition—open to anyone—offers prizes of up to $50,000 for the winning team.

Why it matters: At a moment when Lebanese government institutions are regularly losing sensitive data to the Dark Web, having a homegrown team of this caliber working alongside official bodies is a shift worth tracking.

Forty-six Palestinians — patients and companions — are effectively trapped in Baghdad's Medical City hospital, their passports held by Iraqi authorities months after completing treatment, with no legal path home and no financial support.

• A lawyer describes the situation as "undeclared detention": patients entered Iraq by official government decision for treatment, yet their documents are withheld and movement outside the complex requires security approvals or signed disclaimers.
• Of the 46 stranded, nearly 20 require continuous medical follow-up; some have been in Baghdad for nearly two years, and two members of the group died during the waiting period.
• The Egyptian crossing allows only 50 people to enter Gaza daily, against an estimated 75,000 patients waiting — a pace one Palestinian estimates would take 70 years to clear.
• Baghdad's own healthcare system ranked last globally in Numbeo's 2025 healthcare index, 309th out of 309 cities, compounding the strain on an already overwhelmed facility.

What to watch: Whether Iraq's Ministry of Interior returns the detainees' documents and whether the Rafah crossing reaches its announced capacity of 150 departures per day, which would determine when these patients can finally leave.

Pope Leo XIV has issued his first encyclical, declaring it "not permissible" to let AI make irreversible lethal decisions — a sweeping document that experts say will become a benchmark in global AI governance debates.

• The document, titled Magnifica Humanitas and signed May⁠ 15, calls for "robust legal frameworks" and independent oversight, warning that a "more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few," according to The Independent.
• Leo declared the Catholic Church's centuries-old "just war" theory outdated given modern technological warfare, and called for a shared international framework to curb the AI arms race.
• The Vatican launched the document alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah — a company currently suing the Trump administration after it demanded unrestricted military access to its technology.
• Leo also issued the first-ever papal apology for the Holy See's own historical role in legitimizing the enslavement of people by European sovereigns.

The bigger picture: With OpenAI and Anthropic each valued at hundreds of billions of dollars — more than the GDP of many nations — a papal document demanding external regulation of their work lands in an already charged political and legal landscape.

Vladimir Putin's lead peace negotiator on Ukraine, Kirill Dmitriev, grew up in Kyiv, has former classmates fighting at the front, and is now pitching the Trump administration on why it should accept Russian territorial gains in exchange for joint Arctic mining projects.

• Dmitriev heads Russia's sovereign wealth fund, the RDIF, and has been shuttling between Moscow and Florida to meet Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, according to The Atlantic.
• His personal real-estate holdings reportedly soared from roughly $5 million to $100 million over the past decade, according to an investigation by Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation.
• In 2015, the RDIF moved $1.75 billion of pension money to a petrochemical giant controlled by oligarchs, including Putin's son-in-law at the time, according to leaked documents published by iStories.

Zooming out: Dmitriev's trajectory — from pitching Western investors on Russian rule-of-law reforms to leading the Kremlin's diplomatic effort to legitimize territorial annexation — traces the arc of Russia's relationship with the West over the past fifteen years.