Hezbollah declared a military campaign against Israel on Wednesday night in what Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps described as a “joint and integrated operation,” launching more than 100 rockets, drones, and missiles at over 50 Israeli targets as Jerusalem retaliated with heavy strikes in Beirut and warned the confrontation is now “headed toward a serious escalation.”
The Israeli military said on Sunday that it targeted commanders from the Quds Force, the elite foreign espionage unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), with airstrikes on Beirut.
Pope Leo XIV departed Lebanon on Tuesday after an emotional day that began with a visit to the site of the 2020 Beirut port explosion and Mass attended by over 150,000 people — and concluded with an event in which the Catholic leader heard the testimonies of the nation’s youth, encouraging them to retain hope.
Upwards of 150,000 people came together at Beirut’s waterfront Tuesday morning for mass with Pope Leo XIV.
Police in Bulgaria have arrested Russian national Igor Grechushkin 5 years after a ship he owned was linked to the Port of Beirut explosion.
Monday marked the fifth anniversary of the Beirut Blast, the incredibly powerful explosion that devastated the Port of Beirut and killed over 220 people on August 4, 2020.
Lebanon’s newly-installed President Joseph Aoun on Monday named the sitting head of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Nawaf Salam, as prime minister on Monday.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari published a short video Wednesday explaining that the Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyeh, where it has focused its airstrikes on the city, is not like the rest of the city.
Iranian officials insisted on Monday that Esmail Qaani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, is in “good health.” Qaani has not been heard from since Israel’s airstrikes on Hezbollah in Beirut last week.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was welcomed in Doha, Qatar, on Wednesday for a meeting with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, where they reportedly discussed the dangers of regional escalation.
Israeli warplanes targeted more than 300 Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon on Monday and Israel warned civilians to evacuate the area as more intense strikes are on the way.
The Lebanon National News Agency reported that rooftop solar arrays in Beirut exploded at the same as Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies.
The day after thousands of Hezbollah terror suspects were injured, and reportedly a dozen people killed, by their pagers almost simultaneously exploding, Lebanese and Iranian media reported a second wave of radio device detonations.
Staffers at the Rafik Hariri International Airport in Lebanon on Sunday blew the whistle on Hezbollah for putting their lives in danger by stockpiling smuggled Iranian weapons at the civilian facility.
The State Department says the man accused of opening fire on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, was wearing ISIS insignia.
A drag show in Lebanon’s capital of Beirut was shut down by “an angry crowd of conservative Christians screaming homophobic chants.”
A Lebanese-Canadian academic who is the lone suspect in a 1980 bombing outside a Paris synagogue will go on trial Monday.
Hundreds of protesters, including large numbers of retired soldiers and police, marched in downtown Beirut on Wednesday to protest Lebanon’s deteriorating economy. When the protesters attempted to breach a fence and storm the government headquarters building, security forces used tear gas to disperse them, and some of the demonstrators responded by throwing rocks.
A crowd of several dozen angry protesters went on a rampage in Beirut on Thursday, blocking roads and vandalizing bank offices to protest the collapsing Lebanese economy and rules which prevent depositors from withdrawing their money.
Reports this weekend indicated that Lebanese citizens are increasingly turning to sit-in blockades, and outright armed robbery, to pry their savings out of frozen bank accounts as the national economy continues its trajectory toward total collapse.
89-year-old Michel Aoun, president of Lebanon since 2016, vacated his office on Sunday with no successor standing by. Aoun’s departure leaves a country in even more turmoil, as one of his final acts was accepting the resignation of interim Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s government.
Another significant section of the devastated Beirut Port silos collapsed on Tuesday morning in a cloud of dust.
Beirut – A customer armed with a rifle and threatening to set himself ablaze held bank workers hostage Thursday in Lebanon’s capital, demanding to withdraw his trapped savings to pay hospital fees, security sources and a family member said.
A section of Beirut’s grain silos collapsed on Thursday, the same day that Lebanon marked the second anniversary of a deadly explosion at the Port of Beirut that devastated the city and damaged the very same grain silos, the National, a U.A.E.-based newspaper, reported.
Sections of Beirut’s grain silos collapsed on Sunday after weakening during a weeks-long fire caused by recent high temperatures that fermented the silos’ grain stores, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, noting that the silos were infamous for shielding much of western Beirut from an August 2020 port explosion and sustaining partial damage from the blast themselves.
Lebanese Trade Minister Amin Salam warned on Sunday that Lebanon faces a major food crisis, especially a severe shortage of wheat.
A man wanted by Swedish police in connection with a gang-linked murder in Stockholm in September 2020 has been located and arrested in Lebanon.
At least six demonstrators were reportedly killed, and dozens more wounded, in Beirut on Thursday as tensions grew over the stalled investigation into the August 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut.
Lebanese Judge Tarek Bitar, the second judge to oversee the investigation of the titanic explosion that devastated the Port of Beirut in August 2020, has survived an effort by several targets of his investigation to remove him and effectively kill the probe.
Protests erupted across Lebanon on Wednesday, the first anniversary of the gigantic explosion at the Port of Beirut, against Iran and its proxy terrorist organization Hezbollah, reportedly leaving dozens injured.
Lebanon on Wednesday marked a year since a cataclysmic explosion ravaged Beirut, with a mix of grief over lost lives and rage at the impunity for its worst peacetime disaster at a time when its economy was already in tatters.
The people of Lebanon noted with dismay on Tuesday that the first anniversary of the huge and deadly Port of Beirut explosion has arrived without any real progress in the much-touted probe to determine who was responsible.
BEIRUT — Ibrahim al-Dika had raised his Belgian shepherd Lexi since she was a tiny pup, but then Lebanon’s economic crisis made him jobless and he had to sell her to repay a bank loan.
(AFP) — A German firm has treated 52 containers of hazardous material at Beirut port and will ship them out of Lebanon, the German ambassador said Saturday, months after a monster port blast.
Hundreds of highly qualified doctors are leaving Lebanon following some of the most turbulent years in the country’s history, undermining its reputation as the medical capital of the Middle East.
The Beirut Bar Association on Wednesday presented Lebanon’s public prosecutor with nearly 700 criminal complaints from victims of the Beirut port blast in August.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — With no new government in sight to adopt reforms that would release urgently needed international aid, poverty is growing in Lebanon, with a pervasive fear that it’s going to get worse.
Lebanese President Michel Aoun used his address to the 2020 U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday to thank the international community for assisting Lebanon after an explosion rocked Beirut, but also insisted on his country’s sovereignty.
A weapons depot belonging to the Hezbollah terror group in southern Lebanon exploded on Tuesday, sending shockwaves through the nation just weeks after a similar explosion decimated the port of Beirut.
Residents of Beirut, Lebanon, were dismayed on Thursday to see a plume of smoke rising from their seaport only a month after a titanic explosion killed over 200 people and damaged much of the city.