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Israeli and US pressure on Lebanon’s army to speedily disarm militant group Hezbollah is intensifying, with the army chief cancelling a visit to Washington after officials snubbed him, a military official told AFP.Lebanon’s army has been beefing up its presence in south Lebanon near the Israeli border since a US-brokered ceasefire last November sought to end more than a year of hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group.Under a government-approved plan, the army is to dismantle Hezbollah military infrastructure south of the Litani river — some 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the border — by the end of the year, before tackling the rest of the country.The military official, requesting anonymity as the matter is sensitive, said “we respect the timeline approved by the government and which the United States and other concerned parties are aware of”.But the official expressed concern that “systematic US and Israeli pressure could pave the way for an escalation of Israeli strikes”, adding that “the demand to disarm Hezbollah across all Lebanon before the end of the year is impossible”.Israel has kept up near-daily attacks on Lebanon and still maintains troops in five areas in south Lebanon.Israel’s military has intensified raids on Lebanon in recent weeks, accusing Hezbollah of rebuilding its military capabilities near the border.The military official said the army was being pressured to search homes in southern Lebanon for Hezbollah weapons or tunnels under houses.The Lebanese army has beefed up troop presence near the border since the truce, with some 9,000 soldiers now deployed there, the official added.- ‘Weak’ -Lebanon’s cash-strapped army, which counts some 80,000 personnel and depends heavily on US aid, is seen as a pillar of stability in the crisis-hit country.President Joseph Aoun served as army chief before being elected as head of state in January with the backing of the international community, and his successor Rodolphe Haykal was scheduled to visit Washington this week.But the trip was called off after US political and military officials cancelled their meetings with him just hours before he was scheduled to depart on Tuesday, the military official told AFP.Those who cancelled included influential Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who in a statement on X slammed what he said was Haykal’s “weak almost non-existent effort to disarm Hezbollah”.Graham also criticised an army statement that referred to Israel as the “enemy” — a standard term even in official discourse in Lebanon, which has been technically at war with Israel since 1948.The statement in question condemned “the Israeli enemy’s insistence on violating Lebanese sovereignty” and was issued after the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said Israeli soldiers shot at its peacekeepers on Sunday.Since the ceasefire, UNIFIL said it “has recorded over 7,500 air violations, almost 2,500 ground violations north of the Blue Line, and over 360 left behind weapons caches that were referred” to the Lebanese army.A committee comprising the United States, France, Lebanon, Israel and UNIFIL, holds regular meetings to monitor the ceasefire.Since the truce, the army has been coordinating with the committee and UNIFIL to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure despite its limited equipment and means, with 12 soldiers killed during such operations in recent months.- House to house -“The Lebanese army is being asked to do what the Israeli army was unable to accomplish during the war with its missiles, aircraft and technology,” the official charged, referring to demands the army search houses in the south, and noting it lacks the personnel and expertise to do so.The army also seeks to avoid civil conflict in Hezbollah’s southern heartland, they added.A promised international donor conference to support the army has not materialised.Hezbollah, which was created after Israel invaded in 1982, is the only group to have kept its weapons since the country’s 1975-1990 civil war, doing so in the name of “resistance” against Israel.The group says it is respecting the ceasefire but has refused to surrender its weapons.An Israeli military official told AFP’s Jerusalem bureau that the ceasefire monitoring mechanism was working but “not as fast as we want, not in the places that we want”.”We see the way that Hezbollah is rebuilding themselves… we don’t let those kinds of threats grow in our backyard,” they added.Hezbollah still has long-range missiles, the Israeli official said, adding that “when we ended the war, we knew that they had between 20 and 30 percent of their fire abilities” left.”You can never do zero… In order to do zero, you need to go house (to) house — every place in Lebanon, which is kind of what we expect the Lebanese army to do, because we can’t do this ourselves,” they added.A Western military source told AFP that “the disarmament of Hezbollah will probably not happen. “Israel believes that after having its arm twisted by Washington over Gaza, it will have a free hand to deal with Hezbollah.”

Dick Cheney, celebrated as a master Republican strategist but defined by the darkest chapters of America’s “War on Terror,” was honored Thursday in a funeral attended by Washington’s elite that pointedly left out President Donald Trump.Cheney’s career reads like a catalogue of American statecraft, even as his long shadow over foreign policy — as defense secretary during the Gulf War and the 46th vice president under George W. Bush — still divides the country.Bush and fellow former president Joe Biden were among more than 1,000 guests at Washington National Cathedral. But Trump, who hasn’t commented on Cheney’s death, and Vice President JD Vance were not invited.The Neo-Gothic Episcopal church, veiled in muted autumn gloom and fortified by tight security, set a tone of quiet gravity as a Who’s Who of luminaries gathered beneath its vaulted stone arches.”Colleagues from every chapter of his career will tell you that he lifted the standards of those around him, just by being who he was: so focused and so capable,” Bush told the congregation.”In our years in office together — on the quiet days and on the hardest ones — he was everything a president should expect in his second-in-command.”Every living former vice president — Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Al Gore and Dan Quayle — were in attendance, along with generals, foreign dignitaries and Supreme Court justices.Praised for his intellect and described by historians as the most powerful vice president in modern US history, Cheney was admired as a strategist of unusual clarity, and a steady hand through America’s darkest hours.His career spanned the Cold War, the Gulf conflict and the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.As vice president, he helped drive national security policy and drove an unprecedented expansion of presidential authority.He was said to embody the paradoxes of power: a meticulous operator often thrust into the spotlight, a staunch conservative who backed civil rights for his lesbian daughter and a statesman regarded as both indispensable and dangerous.Cheney’s daughter Liz — famously ousted from the congressional Republican Party over her opposition to Trump — spoke movingly about connecting with her father in his final years, watching sports and old movies, and hitting the road together.”We drove for hours. We talked about life and family history and America,” she said.- Darker legacy -Flags across states were lowered to half-staff after his death on November 3.But looming over every tribute was the darker side of his legacy: the expansion of executive power, the “War on Terror,” the invasion of Iraq and the debate over America’s use of torture.For critics, he was the architect of some of the nation’s most calamitous decisions, a politician whose belief in executive power left deep scars at home and abroad.Cheney was a key advocate for the 2003 invasion of Iraq — famously stating that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction” — a conviction that haunted him after the intelligence behind the claim unraveled.He championed sweeping surveillance powers under the Patriot Act and defended controversial “enhanced interrogation” techniques.Later in life he emerged as a critic of his own party’s populist drift. A vocal detractor of Trump, whom he called a “threat to our republic,” he even endorsed Harris, the president’s Democratic election rival in 2024.Trump’s absence reflected the ideological rifts that divided Washington during Cheney’s final years, and the demise of the bipartisanship valued by the oldest generation of power-brokers.The president has been silent on Cheney’s death, though his press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was “aware” of his passing.Responding to past criticism, Trump once described Cheney as an “irrelevant RINO” and a “king of endless, nonsensical wars, wasting lives and trillions of dollars.”

Ten months after he was forced out of the occupied West Bank’s Tulkarem refugee camp, Hakam Irhil doesn’t know if he will ever be able to return.Irhil was displaced and his home demolished after Israel launched a major military operation in mid-January in multiple northern Palestinian refugee camps, where the army says it is seeking to root out armed groups.Israel, which has occupied the West Bank since 1967, calls the ongoing operation “Iron Wall”.”Before the operation, in our house — even though it was in the camp — each child had a room. Our life was better,” the 41-year-old father of four told AFP.Irhil now lives in a nearby school, and fears the temporary refuge could well become permanent.The NGO Human Rights Watch warned in a report published Thursday that 32,000 Palestinians remain forcibly displaced due to Iron Wall.- ‘War crimes’ -Over the decades in Tulkarem camp — as with other Palestinian camps — tents gave way to concrete buildings, onto which new generations added floors to accommodate the growing population.But in the last 10 months, the military has demolished more than 850 homes and other buildings across three camps, HRW said, blasting large arteries through the patchwork of alleyways to ease access for military vehicles.The displacement of the camps’ residents, HRW concluded, was carried out through “violations of international law, including war crimes and crimes against humanity”.It added that preventing displaced populations from returning and demolishing homes amounted to ethnic cleansing.In a statement to AFP, the military said the camps in Tulkarem and Jenin had become “terror hubs, where terrorists operated from within civilian neighbourhoods”.It added that there had been “a significant decrease in terrorist activity” as a result of Iron Wall — but declined to say when the operation would end.Irhil’s family is one of 19 now living in the school.”There is no privacy at all. I’m living in a room that’s actually a classroom — me and the five with me,” Irhil said, adding he had put curtains up to give his daughter some space.In the covered outdoor corridors, Irhil and the other families have appropriated the space, setting up planters on ledges, a dish-washing station in a classroom sink, and clotheslines between the columns.- No access -Near Tulkarem city’s other refugee camp, Nur Shams, displaced residents organised a demonstration Monday to demand the right to return home.”We are trying to convey to the army that enough is enough. We are innocent, so why did they expel us from the camp?” said Nur Shams resident Umm Mohammad al-Jammal, who was displaced in February.”This is collective punishment… Why did they do this to us?”Hesitantly, the crowd of about 150 passed the newly-installed gate on the road to the camp, before stopping and chanting at its entrance, an ascending street now littered with rubble from damaged homes.The air was thick with the stench of a decomposing dog, left out to rot with no residents around to remove it.Gunfire rang out from inside the camp, where Israeli troops are stationed, and an Al Jazeera journalist was shot in the leg, sending the crowd running.The army told AFP that demonstrators “violated a closed military zone”, and acknowledged firing at “a key disturber”, accusing him of refusing to comply with soldiers’ commands.Refugee camps were created in the West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring Arab countries after the first Arab-Israeli war for Palestinians who fled or were expelled from what is now Israel at the time of its creation in 1948.The event, known as the Nakba, vividly lives on in Palestinian collective memory, and camp residents like Irhil fear the history of displacement — which many also thought would be temporary in 1948 — will repeat itself.Rumours about possible return dates now circulate among the camp’s residents.”They say ‘in January, you will return’. So in January we prepare ourselves, thinking we’ll return to the camp, return to normal life,” Irhil said.”Then another decision comes — February, March, April…”

The International Atomic Energy Agency board on Thursday passed a resolution demanding that Iran provide “full and prompt” cooperation including access to sensitive nuclear sites, but Tehran immediately rejected the measure.Long-simmering tensions with the UN nuclear watchdog flared anew after Israeli and US strikes on Iranian sites in June. UN inspectors have not had access to any of the damaged complex.IAEA chief Rafael Grossi on Wednesday renewed a call for Tehran to let inspectors into the key nuclear sites and the agency’s governing board passed a resolution proposed by the United States, Britain, France and Germany by 19 votes to three with 12 abstentions.The resolution “urges Iran to comply fully and without delay with its legal obligations” under existing UN Security Council resolutions “and to extend full and prompt cooperation to the IAEA, including by providing such information and access that the agency requests”.Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi condemned the vote.”With this action and disregard for Iran’s interactions and good will, these countries have tarnished the IAEA’s credibility and independence and are disrupting the process of interactions and cooperation between the agency and Iran,” said Araghchi in a foreign ministry statement.Araghchi on Wednesday refused to allow UN visits to the bombed sites, including the Natanz uranium enrichment plant and Fordo underground enrichment complex. “We only cooperate regarding nuclear facilities that have not been affected, in compliance with IAEA regulations,” he stated on Telegram.- Negative impact -Speaking after the vote, Iran’s envoy to the IAEA, Reza Najafi, also told AFP the resolution would have a “negative impact” on relations with the UN agency.”This resolution will not add anything to the current situation, will not be helpful, it is counter-productive,” Najafi said.Grossi said on Wednesday it would not be “logical” for a resolution to prompt less cooperation with his agency.The IAEA has called on Iran to let it verify its enriched uranium inventories, especially a study of the sensitive stockpile of highly enriched uranium that was “long overdue”, according to a confidential report seen by AFP.The IAEA has said Iran had some 44.9 kilogrammes of 60 percent enriched uranium when the Israel-Iran war began on June 13 — close to the 90 percent needed for a nuclear bomb and an increase of 32.3kg on May 17.According to the agency, Iran is the only country without nuclear weapons that enriches uranium to 60 percent. Western powers and Israel have long accused Iran of seeking to build a bomb. Iran denies the charge.”The stockpile of enriched uranium is still there, so we need to check on that,” Grossi said Wednesday.”We have performed a number of inspections, but we have not been able to go to the attack sites. I hope we will be able. Indeed, we have to go because this is part of Iran’s commitments,” Grossi added. “I hope we’ll be able to move in a constructive manner.” 

A 19-year-old Syrian went on trial in Berlin on Thursday over a knife attack on a Spanish tourist at the German capital’s Holocaust memorial days before February’s general election.The suspect, partially named as Wassim Al M., is accused of being a supporter of the Islamic State group who intended to “target a person of the Jewish faith”, according to the court.He allegedly approached the 30-year-old victim from behind among the concrete steles of the memorial and “inflicted a 14-centimetre-long (more than five-inch) cut to his throat with a knife”, the court said in a statement before the trial.The victim, who was visiting the memorial with two friends, was badly injured but managed to stagger out of the steles before collapsing in front of the memorial.A police officer told the court he was on duty outside the US embassy, near the memorial, when he heard people crying for the police.”I went over and saw the victim clutching his throat,” the officer said, recalling that a passer-by had phoned emergency services.”The attacked tourist turned pale and his eyes closed” while they were waiting for an ambulance, he said. Prosecutors told the court that Wassim Al M. had “internalised IS ideology, rejected the Western way of life, and was convinced that a holy war against infidels must be waged worldwide”.He shouted “Allahu akbar”, or God is the greatest, after the attack, the court was told.The suspect had travelled to Berlin from his home in the eastern city of Leipzig, according to the court, motivated by his support for IS and “driven by the escalation of the Middle East conflict”.- ‘Religious mission’ -Shortly before carrying out the attack, he allegedly sent a photo of himself to members of IS via a messaging service and offered his services as an IS member.Wassim Al M. “wanted to kill”, prosecutor Michael Neuhaus told AFP on the sidelines of the trial.”He had become radicalised in line with IS ideology…, believed he had a religious mission, wanted to send a message against liberal society and against Jews,” Neuhaus said.The suspect was arrested at the scene with blood stains on his hands. He was carrying a copy of the Koran and a prayer rug, police said at the time.The assault shocked Germany two days before February’s general election after a campaign centred heavily on immigration and security fuelled by a series of deadly stabbing and car ramming attacks carried out by migrants.Germany is home to around a million Syrians — many of whom arrived during the huge influx of refugees that peaked in 2015 under former chancellor Angela Merkel. Since the overthrow of president Bashar al-Assad in December, debate has grown heated around whether they should return to Syria.The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in particular has called for them to go home, highlighting a recent spate of high-profile violent crimes.The government is in talks with Syria’s new Islamist-led government to resume deportations of violent criminals.

Marina El Khawand was 18 when she saw her home town of Beirut shattered by the giant 2020 port explosion and decided she needed to help.Today, at 24, she is among five laureates at Thursday’s Young Activists Summit awards at the UN in Geneva, and described how the trauma of that day spawned a movement that has helped provide free medication and consultation to thousands in need.”I needed to do something,” said Khawand, who was starting her second year of law school when the explosion ripped through large parts of Beirut.In the chaos of the blast, which claimed more than 220 lives, her family urged her to leave the country to continue her studies abroad.But she told AFP in an interview that she decided to volunteer at the explosion site for a few days before leaving.”I was traumatised… I walked between dead bodies, there was blood everywhere,” she said, describing feeling powerless — unable to offer much help.- ‘War zone’ -But one day she ventured alone to one of the heaviest hit neighbourhoods, Karantina, which was like “a war zone”, and went into a building in search of a sick, elderly woman who had refused to evacuate.Now a lawyer, Khawand recalls hesitating outside the door, fearful of what she might find inside.”I entered and I saw an old lady, pale and not moving,” she said, describing the relief she felt when she saw a slight movement in the woman’s chest.She noticed an empty medication distributor in the woman’s hand, and recognised it as the same asthma inhaler her mother used.Khawand quickly snapped a picture of the dosage and rushed to get a new one.But Lebanon’s healthcare system had taken a hit after the country’s economy went into free fall in 2019, plunging many into poverty and sparking medication shortages.She visited three pharmacies without any luck, shocked to find that such a common medication was so hard to come by. She thought: “This woman survived the explosion… I cannot accept that she will die because she doesn’t have her medication”.Her mother did not have the same dosage as the woman, so Khawand determined that her best shot was to post an appeal on Instagram.An influencer she had tagged called her two hours later to tell her she had secured 12 boxes. – ‘Health beyond borders’ -“I was stunned,” Khawand said, describing her panicked rush to get the medication to the woman in time. After taking a few puffs on the inhaler, the woman gave Khawand “the most heartfelt hug”. “She whispers in my ear: Thank you for saving my life”, Khawand said, tears glistening in her eyes.”That sentence changed me,” she said, describing it as the moment she realised “my purpose in life would be to save lives”.After that experience, Khawand founded the Medonations non-profit aimed at providing free and equal medical assistance to vulnerable communities in Lebanon.Growing in the past five years to have collection points in over 65 countries, it says it has served more than 25,000 families across Lebanon with medical supplies and surgeries.Khawand’s team also provided oxygen machines during the Covid-19 pandemic, and during last year’s deadly war between Israel and Hezbollah, helped provide displaced people with sanitary products, diapers, and medication. She has also set up the Free HealthTech Clinic, with kits containing advanced AI-integrated devices enabling doctors to examine patients remotely, assess their prescriptions and adjust their medication.”The doctor can be in Switzerland, the patient can be in Lebanon, and they can see the vital signs in real time,” Khawand said.”It’s health beyond borders.”