Banque du Liban has finally named an auditor to scrutinize years of financial transfers that sit at the heart of Lebanon's economic collapse—billions of dollars that moved through the central bank between 2019 and 2023, and whose fate has never been fully explained.

• BDL awarded the forensic audit contract to Alvarez & Marsal, covering the period from Oct⁠ober 1, 2019 to Dec⁠ember 31, 2023—years marked by widespread financial interventions on behalf of public and private sector entities.
• The audit's scope includes a government-approved support program involving transfers and payments of several billions of US dollars, funds placed at public institutions' disposal, and international transfers made to commercial banks' accounts abroad.
• The work was conducted in cooperation with the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Justice, with findings on the support program to be formally submitted to both ministries upon completion.
• BDL stated it will regularly update the public on audit progress—a transparency commitment that will itself be closely watched given the institution's history.

What to watch: Whether the audit's findings actually reach prosecutors—and whether anyone with access to those billions faces legal consequences—will determine if this is accountability or another exercise in the appearance of it.

A Beirut hospital just did something no Lebanese hospital had done before: a fully robotic hysterectomy—and it signals that precision minimally invasive surgery is no longer just a Western import.

• The Department of Gynecology and Abnormal Placentation at Hôtel-Dieu de France performed the procedure using the CMR surgical system, led by department head Professor David Atallah.
• The robotic technology offers faster recovery, significantly reduced post-surgical pain, and fewer side effects compared to traditional approaches—without increasing operation duration versus conventional laparoscopic surgery.
• The hospital described the achievement as a "qualitative advance" in precise minimally invasive gynecological surgery in Lebanon, reaffirming its focus on excellence and patient safety.

The bigger picture: Even as Lebanon's health system strains under years of economic and wartime pressure, individual hospitals are still managing to introduce frontier surgical technology—a quiet counternarrative worth noting.

Lebanon's official exams have become the latest arena for political and sectarian jostling—and Education Minister Rima Karami is pushing back hard, arguing that the country's ability to hold credible national exams after the recent war is itself a statement worth defending.

• Karami defended her decision to hold three exam sessions without optional subjects, rejecting parliamentary pressure to change the format, and insisting that decisions rest with educational specialists, not MPs.
• Registration data challenged the "federalization" framing: students from the South disproportionately chose the first session, with roughly 87 percent of Sarfand Secondary School students and nearly all of Kfara Secondary School students opting in early.
• The ministry will not announce a national top-scorer until both sessions are complete—a deliberate move to avoid rewarding students who had more stable revision time over those who lived through displacement or war interruption.
• After 16 months in office, Karami called education "the most politicized ministry" in government, noting that political and sectarian interference expanded as state administration weakened.

Zooming out: The row over exam structure is really a proxy debate about whether Lebanese state institutions can apply uniform national standards after a conflict that hit communities very unevenly.

The woman who opened the ICC's Palestine investigation says Israel's spy chief warned her to stop—and that unidentified men showed up at her home to make sure she understood the message.

• Former ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told Al Jazeera that then-Mossad chief Yossi Cohen met her multiple times, confirmed he warned that proceeding could compromise her family's security, and that the meetings began friendly before hardening into explicit demands to halt the Palestine investigation.
• Unidentified men arrived at her home in The Hague and left an envelope containing $500; investigators later traced phone numbers associated with the visitors to Israel, though she said no further action appeared to have been taken.
• In Sep⁠tember 2020, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Bensouda—freezing assets, blocking her UN bank account, and causing Dutch banks to close her mortgage account—after she pursued investigations into both US forces in Afghanistan and Israeli forces in occupied Palestine.

What to watch: Bensouda has called on the EU to trigger its blocking statute to shield ICC officials from foreign sanctions, a request that puts European governments in the position of choosing between institutional solidarity and diplomatic convenience.

A $97 million partnership between the LEGO Foundation and the International Rescue Committee aims to reach 5 million children across East Africa and the Middle East over five years—with Lebanon among the countries currently under consideration.

• The five-year agreement will expand IRC's PlayMatters program, which trains teachers of children aged 3 to 12 to integrate play-based learning into lessons for kids traumatized by conflict, with Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda under consideration.
• IRC President David Miliband framed early childhood education as a humanitarian essential, warning that aid cuts—including the dismantling of US international development funding—have already contributed to consequences such as an under-detected Ebola outbreak in Congo.
• The LEGO Foundation previously committed $100 million in 2019 for "Ahlan Simsim," a program supporting children affected by the Syrian and Rohingya refugee crises, and separately announced a $30 million partnership with Co-Impact for locally led child wellbeing solutions.

The bigger picture: Education funding remains one of the most chronically underfunded parts of humanitarian responses globally, and this partnership is designed to be flexible enough to follow conflict wherever it moves rather than locking grants to fixed locations.

Since the ceasefire with the US and Israel, Iran has been scaling up a nationwide training program teaching Basij militia members to shoot down American and Israeli aircraft with shoulder-launched missiles—and a US Congressional report says at least 42 American aircraft were already destroyed or damaged during the recent war.

• According to France 24, videos and training materials for Iran's Misagh-series MANPADS—portable missiles effective within a 5 to 10 kilometer range—have been circulating widely among Basij members on social media since mid-Apr⁠il, with a PDF guide distributed to thousands of members.
• A US Congressional Research Service report published May⁠ 13 documented that among the aircraft destroyed or damaged, at least one F-15, one F-18, and one MC-130 were hit by Iranian MANPADS or low-altitude surface-to-air systems during the conflict.
• Iran's latest Misagh-3 missiles use laser proximity fuses that detonate near—not just on impact with—a target, reducing a pilot's ability to evade; training has since expanded to include VR headset simulators, with one IRGC Telegram channel captioning a session "training volunteers how to use the F-18 hunter."

Zooming out: Military analysts note the tactical threat is real but limited in scope—the greater risk would emerge in any future ground-war phase requiring aircraft to fly at low altitude in support of troops.