Lebanon's internet is famously terrible — and now, for the first time, there's a funded plan to actually fix it. Ogero signed contracts this⁠ week to bring fiber-to-the-home to more than 325,000 homes and businesses across the country.

• The FTTH project covers 25 central offices and is funded entirely from 2025 budget savings — meaning no new debt and no waiting on foreign donors, according to Telecom Minister Charles Hajj, who announced the contracts on X.
• Hajj framed it bluntly: "For years the question was: What is the alternative? To⁠day we have started to build this alternative" — signaling a break from years of stalled digital infrastructure promises.
• The ministry says faster internet will drive greater economic opportunity and strengthen Lebanon's digital economy — a pitch aimed squarely at the tech-diaspora crowd watching from abroad.

Why it matters: With Lebanon still patching generator schedules and rationing electricity, a nationally funded fiber rollout is the kind of concrete infrastructure move that could actually shift how the country is talked about in investment circles.

Israel declared a full lifting of war-related restrictions on its northern border communities effective Mon⁠day morning, Jun⁠e 22 — the clearest signal yet that the latest Lebanon ceasefire is holding, at least for now.

• The Israeli military announced that starting at 6:⁠00 a.m. Mon⁠day, Jun⁠e 22, the Confrontation Line area moves to "full activity level, with no restrictions" — up from the partial activity level that had been in place during the conflict.
• The move comes after a weekend of intense back-and-forth: fighting had flared up before winding down, and Trump warned Iran on Truth Social to rein in Hezbollah or face harder strikes.
• Border communities on the Israeli side had been evacuated or operating under restrictions for an extended period, making this announcement politically significant ahead of Israel's Oct⁠ober elections.

What to watch: Whether residents on the Lebanese side can return to the same border villages — and under whose authority — remains the central, unresolved question.

The Lebanon file just got elevated: an emergency session on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict was added as the opening item of the US-Iran negotiations at Burgenstock, pushing even the nuclear program to second place on day one.

• A diplomat participating in the talks told CBS that the Israel-Hezbollah session would come before nuclear and technical matters — a shift from Washington's previous insistence on keeping regional issues separate from the nuclear file, per An-Nahar, which reported the agenda change.
• The US delegation includes Vice President JD Vance, envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner; Iran's side is led by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf alongside Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, with Qatar and Pakistan mediating.
• The Telegraph, embedded with IDF troops in southern Lebanon, reported that the fate of villages like Majdal Zoun — where an 170-meter Hezbollah tunnel sits 20 meters underground — is precisely the kind of ground reality threatening to derail any deal.
• Nearly 4,000 people have been killed on the Lebanese side since Mar⁠ch 2 this⁠ year alone, according to The Telegraph, with more than 1 million displaced and roughly 6 percent of Lebanese territory under Israeli control.

Zooming out: Carnegie Middle East analyst Michael Young notes that linking Lebanon to the US-Iran framework may have inadvertently put Hezbollah's disarmament on the formal negotiating table for the first time — something Iran has historically refused to allow.

The first round of Iran-US talks in Switzerland wrapped Mon⁠day with more structure than expected: a 60-day roadmap to a final deal, a new mechanism specifically for Lebanon, and Iran's foreign minister calling it "major progress."

• A joint Qatar-Pakistan statement confirmed that the High Level Committee overseeing the talks agreed on a roadmap toward a final deal within 60 days, with technical talks continuing through the week at Burgenstock.
• The US and Iran agreed to create a "de-confliction cell" involving both parties and the Lebanese Republic, facilitated by mediators, to ensure the termination of military operations in Lebanon holds — Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi called it the "1st real test."
• Tehran and Washington also set up a "communication line" on the Strait of Hormuz to prevent incidents and ensure safe passage for commercial vessels during the 60-day MOU period.
• Araghchi posted on X that oil and petrochemical exports are now waived, the blockade lifted, and some frozen assets released — though the Qatar-Pakistan joint statement did not specifically mention asset unfreezing.

What to watch: With 22 South Korean-operated ships still stranded in the Strait of Hormuz — two having passed through after the MOU — how quickly commercial shipping normalizes will be an early indicator of whether the framework is holding.

At least 12 civilians, including 8 children, were killed in a US airstrike on the Somali town of Jamaame last Nov⁠ember — making it the deadliest US strike for civilians in Somalia during either Trump administration — and the US government has yet to offer any account of what happened.

• The Guardian's investigation, built from clan elder contacts, survivor testimony, photographs, X-rays of children's shrapnel injuries, and drone specialist interviews, reconstructed the strike after US authorities declined to respond to roughly 30 detailed questions.
• The airstrike targeted a densely populated family neighborhood; no official explanation has been given for who the intended target was or who authorized the strike.
• The US has not killed so many civilians in a single incident in Somalia for 18 years, according to the Guardian's reporting, and the campaign against al-Shabaab has grown increasingly aggressive under the current administration.

The bigger picture: The Somalia case illustrates a pattern identified by journalists covering covert US military campaigns — the combination of physical access restrictions, press freedom limits, and official silence that allows civilian casualties to go unexamined for months or years.

Colombia held its presidential runoff Sun⁠day between two candidates whose lives have been shaped, in opposite ways, by the paramilitary violence that claimed nearly half a million lives over decades — a contest that amounts to a referendum on how the country deals with its armed groups.

• Far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, 47, built his legal career defending paramilitary leaders; leftwing senator Iván Cepeda, 63, lost his father to a paramilitary-linked army assassination and spent years representing the groups' victims.
• de la Espriella favors full-scale military confrontation and has proposed building private "mega-prisons" in the Amazon; Cepeda advocates a modified version of outgoing President Petro's "total peace" negotiation strategy, which security experts say has broadly failed.
• The past year has been Colombia's most violent since the landmark 2016 peace agreement, with surges in armed group attacks, homicides, kidnappings, and forced displacement.

Zooming out: Whoever wins takes office Aug⁠ust 7 inheriting a country where the Gulf Clan — founded by former members of the now-dissolved AUC paramilitary — remains Colombia's largest and most powerful illegal armed group.