🌳 Ceasefire on paper only

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Explosions Near UNIFIL Headquarters in Naqoura Put Peacekeepers in Danger

• UNIFIL spokesperson Candace Ardiel announced that over the past 48 hours, peacekeepers recorded heavy gunfire and explosions in and around Naqoura, with bullets, shrapnel, and projectile fragments striking buildings and open areas inside the mission's main headquarters.
• Around midday, a projectile struck a building inside UNIFIL's compound; explosive ordnance disposal specialists were deployed, and UNIFIL stated it believes "a non-state actor" fired it.
• All peacekeepers were confined to shelters to avoid casualties, and UNIFIL issued an urgent reminder that all parties bear responsibility for the safety of its personnel under international law.
• UNIFIL reiterated its position that "there is no military solution" to the conflict and called on all parties to put down their weapons before more people are harmed.

Why it matters: An attack on UNIFIL's own headquarters—however attributed—signals that the buffer zone architecture underpinning Lebanon's south is fracturing dangerously, with the mission's mandate already set to expire at the end of 2026.

Lebanon's Ceasefire Agreement: Legally Alive, Practically Dead

• The monitoring committee linked to the November 27, 2024 ceasefire agreement was scheduled to meet Wednesday, March 25, but the meeting has been indefinitely postponed due to ongoing hostilities and stalled negotiations.
• International law professor and criminal lawyer Emil Awn told An-Nahar the agreement remains technically valid under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, since no party has formally declared its termination—but it has lost all practical effect, a condition known in international law as a "ceasefire in name only."
• Awn outlined three possible paths after UNIFIL's mandate ends in late 2026: a gradual transfer of functions to the Lebanese Army, replacement with a lighter UN monitoring mechanism, or a new Security Council framework—while stressing that UN Resolution 1701 remains binding regardless.

The backstory: The November 2024 ceasefire ended weeks of intense cross-border fighting and was supposed to be monitored by a joint mechanism including Lebanese, Israeli, American, and French representatives. It called for the Lebanese Army to deploy south of the Litani River and for Israeli forces to withdraw, but repeated Israeli violations and renewed fighting have made those terms nearly impossible to enforce.

What to watch: Whether any party formally invokes the Vienna Convention to declare the ceasefire void—or whether international mediators keep it alive as a legal framework to return to once conditions allow.

South Lebanon's Villages Are Being Emptied of Meaning, Not Just People

• Continuing Israeli evacuation orders threatening the demolition of border villages and barring residents from returning represent, analysts writing in Daraj argue, not a military measure but an attempt to erase the relationship between people and their land entirely.
• In villages like Ain Ebel, young men who carry no weapons and want none find even the bare minimum—staying—has become impossible; some families have had their homes destroyed and rebuilt more than four times.
• The essay traces a dual dispossession: Israel reduces land to a grid of targets and coordinates, while the logic of "resistance" subordinates civilian life and property rights to strategic function—leaving ordinary southerners squeezed between both frameworks with no space to simply exist.

Zooming out: What's unfolding in South Lebanon fits a broader pattern of modern conflict in which communities—not just territory—are the primary target, and the slow dissolution of daily life is itself a weapon.

QUICK HITS

• Hazmieh gets hit: An Israeli strike on the upscale, predominantly Christian Hazmieh neighborhood near Beirut killed at least one person, according to Lebanon's health ministry; Israel said it targeted an IRGC Quds Force operative in an apartment rented by a displaced family.
• Hezbollah's post-war threat: Senior Hezbollah official Mahmud Qamati publicly warned that "a confrontation with the political authority is inevitable after the war," vowing to "turn the country and government upside down"—a threat opponents say is designed to rally a displaced, exhausted base with nothing else to offer.
• Fertilizer famine incoming: Lebanon, which imports at least 85% of its food, now faces a double hit: global urea prices have surged 30–40% since March, and Bank of America warns the war threatens 65–70% of world urea supplies, with local agricultural production costs rising in parallel.
• Gas up, again: Fuel prices climbed again today—95-octane petrol now sits at 2,314,000 Lebanese liras per canister, diesel at 2,194,000, and cooking gas at 1,840,000—the latest in a string of increases tracking the regional war's impact on energy markets.
• War crimes, on the record: Human Rights Watch documented that Israeli evacuation orders now cover roughly 15% of Lebanese territory, displacing over one million people—separately from those displaced during the 2024 war itself—nearly a fifth of the population, and warns the tactics mirror those used in Gaza and the West Bank, which HRW has already classified as war crimes.

INTERNATIONAL

Turkey Pushes for US-Iran Ceasefire as Both Sides Run Out of Off-Ramps

• Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan held a series of phone calls on Sunday with his Iranian, Egyptian, European, Saudi, Qatari, Iraqi, and Pakistani counterparts, and separately spoke with senior US officials, possibly including envoys Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner, to build a unified diplomatic front, according to Middle East Eye.
• Ankara is pushing for a brief, temporary ceasefire to create space for negotiations, with Turkish sources warning that Israel "appears determined to continue the attacks" and may act as a spoiler to any deal.
• Iran has two core demands, according to sources familiar with the talks: guarantees against future attacks and compensation for losses—with one proposed solution involving access to funds from its oil trade, potentially linked to keeping the Strait of Hormuz open.
• Trump ordered a five-day pause on planned strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure after describing "very good and productive conversations" with Tehran, though the pause's durability remains unclear.

What to watch: Whether Russia emerges as a credible guarantor in nuclear negotiations—Ankara's sources suggest it may be the only party with enough trust on all sides to bridge the gap between Washington's zero-enrichment demand and Tehran's survival calculus.

Iran's Own Surveillance Cameras Helped Israel Track and Kill Khamenei

• Israel used Tehran's own network of street cameras—most of them hacked and feeding data to servers in Israel for years—as a key intelligence tool in the operation that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, according to an Associated Press review of leaked data and interviews with intelligence officials.
• Iran had installed tens of thousands of cameras in Tehran to monitor dissent and enforce hijab laws using facial recognition; a senior Iranian MP warned publicly as recently as last September that "all the cameras at our intersections are in the hands of Israel."
• AI-powered analysis allowed Israel to process vast amounts of footage in real time, identifying people's addresses, daily routes, and personal security details—tasks that once took analyst teams weeks or months.
• Cybersecurity researchers estimate nearly 3 million unprotected cameras are currently exposed worldwide, with close to 2,000 in Iran alone, all trivially easy to access.

The bigger picture: The operation illustrates a defining paradox of modern authoritarianism—the surveillance infrastructure states build to suppress their populations can become the most precise targeting system their adversaries possess.

US and Iran's Options for Ending the War Are Shrinking Fast

• Iran launched two missiles toward the joint US-UK base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean—a distance of approximately 3,800 km—on Saturday, well beyond the roughly 2,000 km range previously attributed to Iranian missiles, raising new concerns about Tehran's undisclosed capabilities.
• New Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has not appeared in public since being named to the post; beyond two written messages, nothing has been seen or heard from him, creating deep uncertainty about who holds actual decision-making authority over Iran's IRGC and armed forces.
• Iran struck Dimona in Israel's Negev desert—an area linked to Israel's undeclared nuclear programme—following Israeli strikes on Iran's energy infrastructure near Bushehr, signalling that neither side considers key strategic sites off-limits any longer.

Zooming out: With air power alone unable to force Iranian surrender, and no credible negotiating counterpart clearly identified in Tehran, both the US and Israel face a structural dilemma where continued escalation risks catastrophic outcomes for the roughly 170 million people across the region who depend on stable energy and essential services.

GHER HEK

• Dearborn shows up: The Lebanese American community in Metro Detroit gathered Sunday at the Bint Jebail Cultural Center in Dearborn, raising money and collecting clothing donations to send to displaced families back home—proof that no matter how far the diaspora scatters, the balcony coffee ritual of looking out for each other never stops.
• Serena's maybe-comeback: Tennis's greatest entertainer has officially rejoined the doping-test pool after being reinstated by the ITIA on February 22, and has been hitting with world No. 105 Alycia Parks in Florida—at 44, Serena Williams is keeping the entire sport on tenterhooks, and honestly, we wouldn't have it any other way.
• Broadway's Dahl moment: John Lithgow's John Lithgow-iest performance yet opened March 23 on Broadway in Giant, a West End transfer about Roald Dahl's turbulent afternoon being confronted over a controversial book review—critics are calling it staggering, and Aya Cash makes her Broadway debut opposite him.
• Art for the overlooked: The Cheng-Lan Foundation, a new Hong Kong-based initiative dedicated to artists from African, Asian, Indigenous and Latin American backgrounds, launched this week during Hong Kong art season with its inaugural solo exhibition by Manila-based artist Cian Dayrit, aiming to reshape a Western-centric art world one commission at a time.

Thanks for reading—see you tomorrow.