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'Ceasefire in Name Only': Israel Bombs Beirut With Approval From Trump Administration
"The Israeli government continues to drop US-made bombs in Lebanon," said one Democratic lawmaker. "Congress can and must put an end to the violence in the region."
May 07, 2026
The Israeli military on Wednesday bombed the suburbs of the Lebanese capital for the first time since a ceasefire agreement was announced in mid-April by US President Donald Trump, whose administration reportedly coordinated with Israel on the latest strike.
"This is a ceasefire in name only," US Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) wrote in response to the bombing, which Israel said killed a top Hezbollah commander. "Israel needs to adhere to the ceasefire and work in good faith toward a permanent end to the larger war with Iran and Lebanon."
According to the United Nations, at least 380 people have been killed by Israeli strikes on Lebanon since the ceasefire agreement took effect. Trump announced a three-week extension of the ceasefire deal on April 23.
The target of Wednesday's strike on Beirut's southern suburbs "appeared to be a 10-story building in the Haret Hreik neighborhood next to a school," The Washington Post reported, citing satellite imagery and open-source material. "Photos of the aftermath showed half the building leveled and excavator machines digging beneath the rubble."
The Israeli military also bombed the southern Lebanese town of Zelaya on Wednesday, killing at least four people, including two women and an elderly man, Lebanon's Ministry of Health said.
Early Thursday, the Israeli military issued new displacement orders for southern Lebanon, instructing the residents of Deir al-Zahrani, Bafroa, and Habush to leave their homes.
The Wednesday attack on Beirut's suburbs, according to an unnamed Israeli official cited by the country's broadcasting authority, was "carried out in coordination with the US."
"This would be a clear violation of the War Powers Act 8(c)—further strengthening the case for Congress to urgently pass Rep. Rashida Tlaib's (D-Mich.) Lebanon War Powers Resolution," said Erik Sperling, executive director of the US-based advocacy group Just Foreign Policy.
Tlaib unveiled her legislation in late March, demanding the "removal of all US Armed Forces’ participation in unauthorized hostilities in Lebanon, including involvement in targeting assistance and intelligence sharing for the Israeli airstrikes and ground invasion."
"We must act now to stop this campaign of ethnic cleansing," Tlaib said at the time.
US Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), who co-led the Lebanon resolution with Tlaib, said Wednesday that "the unaccountable, unlawful, inhumane campaign of death and displacement continues."
"The Israeli government continues to drop US-made bombs in Lebanon. More than 2,600 people have died, and over 8,350 people are injured," said Ramirez. "Congress can and must put an end to the violence in the region. We must Block the Bombs and pass the Lebanon War Power Resolution."
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The Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza—A Cry at Sea to the World's Dormant Conscience
Activists, representing the best of humanity, have come from all seven continents because history is being written beneath the stars and across the cobalt waters. They stand apart in a world that has chosen to look away.
Apr 30, 2026
While the world’s attention has been hijacked by the new American, made-for-Israel war against Iran, a quieter act of resistance is gathering on the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. An act of defiance determined to remind the international community that there is no pause in Gaza’s genocide, and there will be none for those fighting to end it.
The Global Sumud Flotilla, (sumud means "steadfast" in Arabic), is now on its 2026 spring mission. International activists boarding close to 100 boats, with Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise providing technical and operational support, are sailing to Gaza under the slogan: We sail until Palestine is free.
The goal is clear, and against all odds, to establish a direct maritime corridor to Gaza's shores, delivering what Israel's blockade has long denied the more than 2.2 million human beings. The 1,000 multinational seafarers carry something harder to quantify: the accumulated moral weight of a world that has grown tired of watching governments perform concern while doing nothing.
Before speaking of what the flotilla is sailing toward, the world must first reckon with what it has chosen to normalize: Israeli occupation of 53% of Gaza. Its suffocating blockade controls every calorie that enters the strip, so precisely, so deliberately engineered, that humanitarian organizations have documented an official daily intake for Gaza's children, a number calculated not to sustain life but to regulate its slow erosion. A supposed ceasefire that never ceased using food as a weapon in a war of starvation.
For all its firepower, Israel has not found a weapon capable of extinguishing people’s determination to stand up against injustice.
Since the October 10, 2025 ceasefire announcement, the headlines moved on, but Israel kept killing. Six months later, United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk reported that at least 738 Palestinians had been murdered since that ceasefire took effect, with airstrikes, gunfire, and shelling continuing daily across the strip. “Palestinians have no blueprint for survival… Whatever they do or don't do, wherever they go or don't go, there is no safety or protection afforded to them. It is hard to square this with a ceasefire,” he said.
It cannot be squared, because it is a one-sided ceasefire. More than six months on, Israel continues to cordon 2.2 million Palestinians into 47% of their own land, an open-air prison shrinking by the day, its walls drawn not in concrete but by the calculated silence of the international community. Homes, or what had remained of them at the time of the ceasefire, have since been systematically razed to the ground. More than 1 million human beings are not permitted to return, not even to pitch a tent over the rubble of what was once their home.
They are separated from their homes and farms by the so-called yellow line. In reality, it’s a red bloodline, demarcated not by markings, but by the corpses of murdered Palestinians. A moving death trap that follows Gazans into their streets, their neighborhoods, their tents. A father walking his child to what remains of a school. A woman carrying water back to a tent. A man standing outside because his home no longer has walls. Any of them, at any moment, can fall within the “bloodline” death coordinates, and be shot.
To hide the story, Israel kills the witnesses attempting to document the murder. On April 8, the Israeli military murdered another journalist, Mohammed Wishah. Wishah, the 294th Palestinian journalist targeted by Israel in Gaza since October 2023. According to Brown University, Watson School, as of April 2025, Israel “killed more journalists in Gaza than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.”
Israel has exported the same tactic to Lebanon, where the targeting of journalists and media workers has brought the total number of murdered Lebanese journalists to more than 20. It is a regional Israeli strategy of silencing witnesses, not an isolated pattern of collateral damage. The number of murdered journalists in Palestine and Lebanon are not just a statistic. It is an Israeli methodology. Where the blue helmet and the press vest have become Israeli military priorities, not because journalists carry weapons, but because Israel fears the camera more than it fears the gun.
This is why Gaza remains sealed to a complicit international press. A blackout designed to conceal what Israel's killing machine is doing on the ground. When it cannot stop the truth from existing, it kills the locals who expose it. When it cannot stop the world from eventually seeing, it ensures the world sees as little as possible, as late as possible, and filtered through its own hasbara outlets. The camera is the enemy because the camera does not lie, does not accept military briefings as fact, and does not look away from a child pulled from under the rubble in Gaza, or a screeching cat rescuing its kitten from under concrete wreckage in Lebanon. Evidence is the one thing that cannot be bombed into rubble, or starved into submission, so it murders the bearers of the truth.
The Global Sumud Flotilla understands this. Among those sailing are journalists, documentarians, and human rights monitors. People of conscience who have chosen to place their bodies between Gaza and the world's forgetting. Israel has intercepted previous attempts in international waters many times before, jamming their signals, seizing their vessels, humiliating activists, and dragging them into custody. It’ll certainly try again. But the calculus of the world’s public opinion has shifted. Every interception is new proof, and every crew member taken in the dark Mediterranean night is a witness who will tell a story.
Israel has the most sophisticated military hardware American taxpayers’ money can buy. Its drones hunt journalists by name, and a diplomatic shield is held in place by Washington's veto. What it neither has nor can manufacture is the power to kill an idea whose time has come. The flotilla sails, again, because Gazans have not surrendered. It sails because the blue helmet and the press vest, though stained with the blood of nearly 300 journalists, still mean something to the people who wear them. Activists, representing the best of humanity, have come from all seven continents because history is being written beneath the stars and across the cobalt waters. They stand apart in a world that has chosen to look away.
Yet, and for all its firepower, Israel has not found a weapon capable of extinguishing people’s determination to stand up against injustice. Gaza will be free. The only question is, how many flotillas must sail, and how many witnesses must be murdered, before the world’s conscience awakens.
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Demanding End to Unlawful US-Israeli Attacks, Amnesty Says 'International Community Must Now Draw a Red Line'
"Civilians cannot afford another partial, selective, or short-lived pause that leaves them living in fear and bracing for a repetition of the atrocities they have suffered," said the human rights group's leader.
Apr 29, 2026
A week after blasting US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for carrying out "their conquests for economic and political domination through destruction, suppression, and violence on a massive scale," Amnesty International on Wednesday demanded "an enduring, sustained, and comprehensive regional ceasefire" in the Middle East.
Trump and Netanyahu launched their war on Iran on February 28, with attacks that violated the United Nations Charter's "prohibition on the use of force," noted Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard, "and they triggered unlawful acts by Iranian authorities in retaliation."
"Since then, more than 5,000 people have been killed," she continued, "and millions of civilians across the Middle East have had their lives upended as interrelated conflicts have escalated across the region and civilians and civilian infrastructure have come under attack."
"We are witnessing a continued dangerous erosion of the global international legal order and of respect for international humanitarian law," Callamard warned. She declared that "the international community must now draw a red line: There must be a durable and genuine ceasefire; this requires a full halt in armed hostilities by all parties, across all affected countries."
Amnesty's leader further called for investigations of all crimes and ensuring that "states and individuals are held accountable."
On the first day of the war, the United States' bombings across Iran included an "egregious" strike on a school in Minab that killed at least 155 people, mostly children. As Amnesty pointed out, subsequent US-Israeli attacks have "caused extensive destruction and damage to civilian infrastructure, including power plants, bridges, universities, schools, residential buildings, medical centers, steel factories and petrochemical facilities, endangering the lives and livelihoods of millions and harming the environment."
The strikes on Iran killed at least 3,375 people, and injured another 25,000, while Israel's renewed targeting of Hezbollah in Lebanon killed more than 2,200 and wounded over 7,500. Retaliation from Iran and Hezbollah killed at least 21 civilians in Israel, four Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank, and 29 people across the Gulf, including 13 US service members.
"All parties, including the USA, Israel, Iran, and Hezbollah, have launched unlawful attacks displaying a chilling disregard for human life," Callamard said, "while the US president has issued brazen threats to commit war crimes and even genocide, threatening to wipe out 'a whole civilization' in Iran."
Just hours after Trump's genocidal threat against Iran on April 7, the involved parties reached a ceasefire agreement regarding Iran, which has since been extended. Despite Pakistani negotiators' claims that the initial deal was supposed to include Lebanon, Israel ramped up its attacks on that country, killing and wounding over 1,400 people on April 8 alone.
An existing truce was also ultimately reached for Lebanon. However, like a November 2024 deal related to Hezbollah's support for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip suffering a genocidal Israeli assault, and an October 2025 agreement with Hamas in Gaza, Israel has repeatedly violated it.
"The so-called ceasefire agreements reached in Gaza in 2025 and Lebanon in 2024 demonstrably failed to stop Israeli attacks on civilians, with as many as 765 Palestinians killed since then, and near-daily airstrikes and extensive destruction of civilian property in southern Lebanon," said Callamard. Overall, Israel has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023.
"In a region long scarred by conflict, amidst long-standing impunity for crimes under international law, and the constant threat of renewed violence, civilians cannot afford another partial, selective, or short-lived pause that leaves them living in fear and bracing for a repetition of the atrocities they have suffered," she stressed.
Amnesty described the current ceasefire agreements in the region as "fragile, temporary, and in danger of collapse at any moment."
US-Iran talks are "stalled," and Trump has both maintained a naval blockade over Iranian restrictions on ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and signaled that he's willing to resume the war. Just after 4:00 am ET on Wednesday, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform an image created with artificial intelligence that shows him holding a gun, as bombs fall on what appears to be Iran, and wrote: "Iran can't get their act together. They don't know how to sign a nonnuclear deal. They better get smart soon!"
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said last week that his country is "prepared to resume the war" and is "awaiting a green light from the United States." He pledged a "far more lethal" assault that would "push Iran back into a dark age."
Callamard said that "a ceasefire that is not accompanied by long-term solutions that safeguard human rights and address root causes is little more than a temporary patch over a deep wound. This is particularly true in Iran, where the population remains at risk of further atrocities at the hands of the Islamic Republic authorities, and in Lebanon, where civilians face the prospect of renewed conflict, indefinite displacement of civilians, and destruction of their homes."
Alongside her remarks, Amnesty on Wednesday released a brief detailing how "people in Iran are trapped between unlawful US and Israeli attacks and deadly domestic repression." The publication emphasizes the need for not only a ceasefire, but also "international engagement to actively support Iranian civil society calls for a rights-respecting constitution-making process."
As Callamard summarized: "In a country reeling from the combined impact of devastating US and Israeli bombings and state-orchestrated massacres, the risks of atrocity crimes by the Iranian authorities against the people in Iran remain significant. They face the threat of renewed airstrikes and mass killings if the truce collapses and the prospect of a deadly repression and another severe wave of killings by 'trigger-ready' security forces targeting protesters and dissidents they label as 'enemies.'"
"The international community must recognize that Iran's human rights and impunity crisis, now compounded by the US-Israel[i] unlawful attacks and vast suffering of civilians, requires a dual, people-centered diplomatic response," she said. "This means combining efforts to investigate the UN Charter violations, protect civilians, and uphold international humanitarian law with action to prevent atrocity crimes by the Iranian authorities, and support Iranian civil society's calls for a rights-respecting constitution. It also means establishing pathways for international justice, including the UN Security Council's referral of Iran's situation to the International Criminal Court."
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