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displacement
Israel Strikes Lebanon Less Than an Hour After Trump Says It's 'PROHIBITED' From More Attacks
"This fragile truce must not be undermined," said the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Apr 17, 2026
Less than an hour after US President Donald Trump announced that Israel was "PROHIBITED" from attacking Lebanon under a 10-day ceasefire reached Friday, an Israeli drone strike reportedly killed at least one person in southern Lebanon.
Citing Lebanese media, The Times of Israel reported that an Israeli drone targeted a motorcycle between the southern towns of Khounine and Beit Yahoun. The Israel Defense Forces have not commented on the attack.
It was the latest in what the Lebanese Army said on Friday morning were "a number of violations” of the ceasefire within hours of it going into effect at midnight local time on Friday, as well as "intermittent shelling targeting a number of villages."
Lebanon's National News Agency reported that hours after the ceasefire went into effect, Israel struck an ambulance in the town of Khounine, near the Israeli border, which resulted in multiple casualties among the medical workers.
Israeli attacks on Lebanon since early March have killed nearly 2,300 people, according to Lebanese health officials and forced evacuation orders from Israel have resulted in the displacement of more than 1.2 million.
Trump said in a Friday social media post that under the framework reached Friday, "Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!!"
The US president has insisted that any agreement between Israel and Lebanon is separate from his ongoing two-week truce with Iran. Although Iran also announced on Friday that, following the Lebanon agreement, it stopped blocking travel through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi has specified that "the passage for all commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of the ceasefire" between Israel and Lebanon.
Trump has claimed that the Iranian government “agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” and that the US will maintain its naval blockade of Iran.
Israel's continued attacks on Lebanon have already put the peace deal between the US and Iran in jeopardy. After Iran briefly reopened the strait in response to the two-week ceasefire earlier this month, it began blocking travel again after Israel launched its most devastating attacks on Lebanon of the entire war, which killed hundreds of civilians.
Israel launched the attacks despite Lebanon having initially been announced as a party to the ceasefire, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Trump quickly rejected.
After another agreement with Israel was reached on Friday, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun urged that the opportunity "must not be squandered because it may not come again."
According to the US State Department, the agreement reached Friday still grants Israel the "right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks." However, it is not clear at this time what imminent attack Friday's strikes were intended to prevent.
Israel routinely violated its previous ceasefire with Lebanon that began in November 2024, with more than 10,000 air and land attacks over the first year, which the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said demonstrated a “total disregard of the ceasefire agreement.” It has done the same in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since a ceasefire began in October 2025.
Netanyahu said on Friday that despite the ceasefire, Israel will continue its occupation of Southern Lebanon, where satellite images show the military has totally razed several towns and villages in what Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has described as a continuation of the "Gaza model," which left most buildings in the strip totally destroyed.
Israel's military spokesperson Avichay Adraee issued an "urgent message" to displaced Lebanese civilians following the ceasefire, urging them not to return to their homes south of the Litani River "until further notice."
According to The Associated Press, thousands have begun heading home regardless to find their villages reduced to rubble.
"Across the country, roads are already congested with hopeful families trying to return to their homes. That alone shows how deeply people want this war to end," said Jan Egeland, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s secretary general.
"This fragile truce must not be undermined. We cannot afford a repeat of the ineffective 2024 ceasefire, which saw countless violations. Worryingly, there are already reports of violations by the Israeli army, which also issued a warning against civilians returning to their homes south of the Litani river, home to hundreds of thousands of people," Egeland said. "For this ceasefire to be meaningful for civilians, it must lead to a real and durable halt in hostilities."
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Trump Gaza Plan Condemned as ‘Concentration Camps Within a Mass Concentration Camp’
After previous plans by Israel for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, onlookers fear the proposal to house some displaced Palestinians in “compounds” they may not be allowed to leave.
Nov 26, 2025
A new Trump administration plan to put Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied parts of Gaza into "residential compounds" is raising eyebrows among international observers, who fear it could more closely resemble a system of "concentration camps within a mass concentration camp."
Under the current "ceasefire" agreement—which remains technically intact despite hundreds of alleged violations by Israel that have resulted in the deaths of over 300 Palestinians—Israel still occupies the eastern portion of Gaza, an area greater than 50% of the entire strip. The vast majority of the territory's nearly 2 million inhabitants are crammed onto the other side of the yellow line into an area of roughly 60 square miles—around the size of St Louis, Missouri, or Akron, Ohio.
As Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations' deputy special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, explained Monday at a briefing to the UN Security Council: "Two years of fighting has left almost 80% of Gaza’s 250,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. Over 1.7 million people remain displaced, many in overcrowded shelters without adequate access to water, food, or medical care."
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the new US proposal would seek to resettle some of those Palestinians in what the Trump administration calls “Alternative Safe Communities,”on the Israeli-controlled side of the yellow line.
Based on information from US officials and European diplomats, the Times said these "model compounds" are envisioned as a housing option "more permanent than tent villages, but still made up of structures meant to be temporary. Each could provide housing for as many as 20,000 or 25,000 people alongside medical clinics and schools."
The project is being led by Trump official Aryeh Lightstone, who previously served as an aide to Trump's first envoy to Jerusalem. According to the Times: "His team includes an eclectic, fluctuating group of American diplomats, Israeli magnates and officials from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—the sweeping Washington cost-cutting effort overseen earlier this year by Elon Musk."
The source of funding for the project remains unclear, though the cost of just one compound is estimated to run into the tens of millions. Meanwhile, the newspaper noted that even if ten of these compounds were constructed, it would be just a fraction of what is needed to provide safety and shelter to all of Gaza's displaced people. It's unlikely that the first structures would be complete for months.
While the Times said that "the plan could offer relief for thousands of Palestinians who have endured two years of war," it also pointed to criticisms that it "could entrench a de facto partition of Gaza into Israeli- and Hamas-controlled zones." Others raised concerns about whether the people of Gaza will even want to move from their homes after years or decades of resisting Israel's occupation.
But digging deeper into the report, critics have noted troubling language. For one thing, Israeli officials have the final say over which Palestinians are allowed to enter the "compounds" and will heavily scrutinize the backgrounds of applicants, likely leading many to be blacklisted.
In one section, titled "Freedom of Movement," the Times report noted that "some Israeli officials have argued that, for security reasons, Palestinians should only be able to move into the new compounds, not to leave them, according to officials."
This language harkens back to a proposal earlier this year by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who called for the creation of a massive "humanitarian city" built on the ruins of Rafah that would be used as part of an "emigration plan" for hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians in Gaza.
Under that plan, Palestinians would have been given "security screenings" and once inside would not be allowed to leave. Humanitarian organizations, including those inside Israel, roundly condemned the plan as essentially a "concentration camp."
Prior to that, Trump called for the people of Gaza—“all of them”—to be permanently expelled and for the US to "take over" the strip, demolish the remaining buildings, and construct what he described as the "Riviera of the Middle East." That plan was widely described as one of ethnic cleansing.
The new plan to move Palestinians to "compounds" is raising similar concerns.
"What is it called when a military force concentrates an ethnic or religious group into compounds without the ability to leave?" asked Assal Rad, a PhD in Middle Eastern history and a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC.
Sana Saeed, a senior producer for AJ+, put it more plainly: "concentration camps within a mass concentration camp."
The Times added that "supporters insist that this would be a short-term arrangement until Hamas is disarmed and Gaza comes under one unified government." Lightstone has said that reconstruction of the other parts of Gaza, where the vast majority of the population still lives, will not happen unless Hamas, the militant group that currently governs the strip, is removed from power.
But while Hamas has indicated a potential willingness to step down from ruling Gaza, it has rejected the proposal that it unilaterally disarm and make way for an "International Stabilization Force" to govern the strip, instead insisting that post-war governance should be left to Palestinians. That plan, however, was authorized last week by the UN Security Council.
In addition to raising concerns that "those moving in would never be allowed to leave," the Beirut-based independent journalist Séamus Malekafzali pointed to other ideas Lightstone and his group want to implement. According to the Times, "It has kicked around ideas ranging from a new Gaza cryptocurrency to how to rebuild the territory in such a way that it has no traffic."
Malekafzali said, "Former DOGE personnel are attempting to make Gaza into yet another dumb tech experiment."
Like Katz's plan months ago, the new Trump proposal calls for a large compound to be built in Rafah, which Egyptian officials warned, in comments to the Wall Street Journal, could be a prelude to a renewed effort to push Palestinians across the border into the Sinai Peninsula.
But even if not, Jonathan Whittall, the former head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Palestine, said it hardly serves the humanitarian role the Trump administration and its Israeli co-administrators seek to portray.
"If plans for these 'safe communities' proceed, they would cement a deadly fragmentation of Gaza," he wrote in Al Jazeera. "The purpose of creating these camps is not to provide humanitarian relief but to create zones of managed dispossession where Palestinians would be screened and vetted to enter in order to receive basic services, but would be explicitly barred from returning to the off-limits and blockaded 'red zone.'"
He noted that there is a conspicuous lack of any clear plan for what happens to those Palestinians who continue to live outside the safe communities, warning that Israel's security clearances could serve as a way of marking them as fair targets for even more escalated military attacks.
"Those who remain outside of the alternative communities, in the 'red zone,'" he said, "risk being labelled 'Hamas supporters' and therefore ineligible for protection under Israel’s warped interpretation of international law and subject to ongoing military operations, as already seen in past days."
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Atlanta Must Put Equity at the Heart of City Planning
Unless residents are meaningfully included from the start, we’ll continue to pay the price for decisions that will be made without us.
Sep 21, 2025
On some streets in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods, you can smell the flood before you see it. Gray wastewater rises into the roads, seeps into homes and cars, and lingers long after the storm has passed. Residents step onto their porches, hands over their faces, taking in the now-familiar scene. All it takes is a strong rainstorm to overwhelm a system that was never built to support the people who live here.
In one area, flooding became more severe after new construction added housing density without adequate upgrades to drainage infrastructure. A developer installed a retention pond across from a residential block as part of the deal, but it hasn’t been enough. This pattern is not unique to Atlanta. Many cities with legacies of redlining, highway expansion, and racially unequal investment are now experiencing the cumulative toll of decades of neglect and the rising cost of excluding communities from the decisions that shape their neighborhoods.
The flooding that plagues Atlanta’s Westside isn’t just a weather issue. It’s the result of decades of disinvestment, shortsighted planning, and infrastructure that was never designed to serve the communities that live here. And while other cities long ago updated their water systems to separate drinking water from wastewater, Atlanta still runs both through the same outdated pipes. When a heavy rain hits, the system overflows, and neighborhoods are submerged in sewage.
Many of Atlanta’s historic Black neighborhoods are situated at the base of hills, downhill from the wealthier, whiter parts of the city. That’s not a coincidence. It reflects a long history of redlining, highway construction through Black communities, and the repeated exclusion of Westside residents from decisions that shape our lives. We live in the lowlands, and we’ve been treated like an afterthought for generations.
Atlanta often celebrates its civil rights legacy, and as someone who calls the Westside home and works to support communities across the region, I understand the weight of that history. But legacy alone won’t stop the floods.
Now, as the city rushes to accommodate new developments, from Mercedes-Benz Stadium to the Gulch, we are told that flooding will finally be addressed, but only because it now threatens new investment. Downtown Atlanta sits atop massive concrete structures built 50 feet above what was once an industrial rail hub. These platforms were funded with public money, including half a billion dollars to support a luxury development in The Gulch.
Developers were handed city resources and made a promise to include affordable housing and community benefits. As part of a nearly $1.9 billion incentive package, developers agreed to make 20% of the new housing in Centennial Yards affordable. Instead, builders opted to pay an $8 million in-lieu fee, thereby avoiding any affordable housing options altogether. It’s a legal way to sidestep the promises used to gain public support in the first place. And without strong accountability, that money rarely flows back into the communities that were supposed to benefit.
Existing Westside neighborhoods are absorbing the infrastructure demands created by new development. One of many examples is Georgia Power's proposal to build a new electrical substation just two blocks from an elementary school to power nearby luxury developments. These decisions are made without our input, yet our neighborhoods are left to manage the fallout at once: an overwhelmed watershed system, expanding energy needs, and the strain on roads and public services that were never built to support this kind of growth.
This kind of development process is reactive and extractive. It’s a pattern I have seen over and over again. A developer shows up. A problem is discovered, and the community raises concerns. At that point, the city scrambles to hold a few meetings or patch together a short-term fix. But the damage has already been done.
This isn’t just inconvenient. It’s disruptive to our lives and our stability. It undermines property values, displaces long-time residents, and increases the financial burden on families already stretched thin. I have seen neighbors leave not because they wanted to, but because living here became unsustainable.
Living through the consequences and working inside the systems that produced them, I know change is possible, but only if we change how decisions are made. My journey, shaped by life in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods and a career focused on building community power, brought me to lead the national Just Communities initiative. The Westside is where so much of Atlanta’s civil rights legacy was born. That history of resistance and resilience is not just part of the past. It’s what drives me, and many others, to continue fighting for justice.
Just Communities is grounded in the belief that equity is a forethought. It shapes the process, not just the outcomes. The Just Communities Protocol offers a practical road map for doing exactly that. At its heart is the Declaration of Collaboration, a tool designed to formalize shared governance among community members, city officials, and developers. It’s not about public input after the fact. It’s about building structures where residents shape decisions from the beginning: what gets built, where, and how.
Right now, the City of Atlanta is updating its comprehensive plan, zoning ordinances, and watershed infrastructure. These are opportunities to finally do things differently. However, unless residents are meaningfully included from the start, we’ll continue to pay the price for decisions that will be made without us.
Atlanta often celebrates its civil rights legacy, and as someone who calls the Westside home and works to support communities across the region, I understand the weight of that history. But legacy alone won’t stop the floods. Honoring it requires more than symbolism; we need a new process, one rooted in justice and shared power. If we want different outcomes, we must change how decisions are made. Until that happens, communities like mine will continue to pay the price.
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