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War & Peace
'This Madness Has to Stop': Israeli Airstrike Totally Collapses Beirut Apartment Building
"All of Beirut shook," said one resident who was forced to take shelter in the city after an Israeli displacement order forced her from her home in the suburbs.
Mar 18, 2026
An Israeli airstrike totally demolished a large apartment building in central Beirut on Wednesday, following a night of attacks on densely populated residential areas, several of which reportedly came without warning.
Videos shared to social media and by local media outlets show the 10-story building, located in the Bachoura neighbourhood in central Beirut, suddenly collapsing into rubble in the early hours of the morning after being struck with a missile.
Israeli authorities issued a forced displacement order to residents of the building over social media around 4 am local time, roughly an hour before the strike. It warned residents of buildings in the Bachoura area that they were "located near Hezbollah facilities" and needed to move at least 300 meters away.
Israel has claimed the building was used by the militant group Hezbollah to stash large sums of money, but has provided no evidence publicly.
Citing Lebanon's Health Ministry, the Associated Press reported that at least four people were wounded in the attack, which sent emergency teams rushing to the scene through a plume of black smoke.
Residents of the collapsed apartment building have taken to social media to describe their horror at seeing their home suddenly destroyed.
"I am a US citizen and surgeon who took care of the Boston Marathon bombing victims in 2013," said Haytham Kaafarani, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. "I paid for seven years to own a small apartment in downtown Beirut for my three kids to enjoy summers there. Today, Israel reduced my dream home to rubble, with American weapons, paid by my taxes."
Another professor, Bilal R. Kaafarani, who teaches chemistry at the American University of Beirut, said something similar.
"Israel demolished the building I have an apartment in. It took 22 years of my work here and 20 years of my wife’s work to own this apartment," he said. "This madness has to stop."
The attack came after a night of intense airstrikes upon civilian areas in Lebanon's capital, which reportedly came without warning in the middle of the night and into the early morning.
According to Lebanese authorities, at least 20 people were killed in a series of attacks on Beirut and the southern and eastern parts of the country, while dozens more were injured.
Lebanon's health ministry reported that more than 900 people have been killed and 2,200 injured in Israel's latest round of attacks in Lebanon, which began on March 2 after Hezbollah retaliated against the US-Israeli war in Iran.
The attacks beginning Tuesday night came less than a day after Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that "deliberately attacking civilians or civilian objects amounts to a war crime,” noting that hundreds of homes and other civilian infrastructure, including health facilities, had been destroyed by prior Israeli attacks in Beirut.
Israel has issued evacuation orders that have forced more than 1 million Lebanese people from their homes as part of an expanding ground invasion into southern Lebanon.
Sara Saleh, a 29-year-old taking shelter in a nearby school after being forced from her home in Beirut's southern suburbs, told the Agence France-Presse that she and her family "were asleep" when Israel's warning came down early Wednesday morning. She said they were left to flee for safety in their pajamas.
She said the attack on the apartment "was terrifying... all of Beirut shook." Speaking with a face mask to protect herself from dust kicked up by the demolished building, she said her sister's children "started crying and panicking, it was heartbreaking."
The mass displacement of civilians in Lebanon and Iran has been met with increasing criticism from UN experts and human rights organizations.
As reports of the apartment bombing rolled in, Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that "international law is being openly ignored" and that "impunity reigns and disproportionate actions are being normalized amid the escalating conflicts in the Middle East."
"It is a vicious circle," he said. "The more violations, the stronger the culture of impunity becomes."
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Cuban President Vows 'Impregnable Resistance' to Any Trump Attempt to Seize the Island
"The US publicly threatens Cuba, almost daily, with overthrowing the constitutional order by force," said Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Mar 18, 2026
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on Tuesday condemned US President Donald Trump's open threat to forcibly seize control of the island nation and vowed that any such aggression would be met with "impregnable resistance."
"The US publicly threatens Cuba, almost daily, with overthrowing the constitutional order by force," Díaz-Canel wrote on social media. "And it uses an outrageous pretext: the harsh limitations of the weakened economy that they have attacked and sought to isolate for more than six decades."
"They intend and announce plans to seize the country, its resources, its properties, and even the very economy they seek to strangle to make us surrender," the Cuban president added. "Only in this way can the fierce economic war be explained, which is applied as collective punishment against the entire people. In the face of the worst scenario, Cuba is accompanied by a certainty: Any external aggressor will clash with an impregnable resistance."
Díaz-Canel's statement came a day after Trump said from the Oval Office of the White House that he believes he will have "the honor of taking Cuba" as it faces a grave humanitarian crisis fueled by the administration's oil embargo, which began shortly after the US abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in early January.
"I think I can do anything I want with it," Trump said of Cuba on Monday.
The New York Times reported earlier this week that Trump administration officials are demanding Díaz-Canel's ouster as part of any negotiated deal between the two countries.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a longtime supporter of regime change on the island, said publicly on Tuesday that Cuba "has to get new people in charge." Trump said earlier this month that he's "going to put Marco over there and we’ll see how that works out."
A YouGov poll out this week shows that more Americans disapprove than approve of the US embargo on Cuba. The same survey found that only 13% of US voters would support attacking Cuba, and a mere 18% would support using military force to overthrow the country's government.
Trump's threats came as his oil embargo and the broader, decadeslong, and illegal economic warfare against Cuba continued to take their toll on the island's population, most recently in the form of an island-wide blackout that lasted nearly 30 hours.
On Wednesday, the first delegation of the Nuestra América Convoy arrived in Havana as part of an effort by individuals and organizations to deliver critical humanitarian aid to the Cuban people as the US besieges the island's economy and threatens its sovereignty.
Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Skopic, editors of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs, announced Wednesday that they are heading to Cuba to cover the mission, which they characterized as part of a "proud tradition of internationalism" on the American left.
"Beyond food, medicine, and energy infrastructure, this mission sends a message," Robinson and Skopic wrote. "As Americans, we want to make it crystal clear that the Trump administration does not speak for us when it talks about 'taking over' Cuba, and we’re sickened by what Trump and Rubio are doing to the Cuban people in the name of U.S. foreign policy. But we’re determined to do what we can, and we’re going to make sure the people of Cuba do not stand alone."
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'We're Wiping Them Out': Netanyahu Shows Off Kill List 'Punch Card' to a Fawning Mike Huckabee
"I’m extremely creeped out," said one journalist in response to the staged video between the Israeli prime minister and the US ambassador. "Just going to go ahead and say it."
Mar 17, 2026
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday posted a video of himself showing off what he said was a list of kill targets to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
In the video, Netanyahu informs Huckabee that he recently "erased" two names off the punch card, while noting that there are "many more to go."
Huckabee then expresses relief to Netanyahu that his name is not on the punch card, to which Netanyahu replies that the former Republican Arkansas governor was on a "list of the good, good guys."
Netanyahu then says that he's "proud to stand shoulder to shoulder" with the US military in "getting rid of these lunatics" that the two countries started bombing more than two weeks ago in Iran.
"We're wiping them out," the Israeli prime minister boasts.
"I love it," Huckabee responds. "Thank you, mister prime minister."
Crossing names off the list is good - doing it shoulder to shoulder with our American friends is even better.
Good to see Ambassador @GovMikeHuckabee. Always a pleasure.
🇮🇱🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/FZrZN03IZI
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) March 17, 2026
Journalist Noga Tarnopolsky expressed disgust at the two men being so jovial about matters of life and death.
"PM Netanyahu and US Ambassador Huckabee amuse themselves with a kill list," she wrote. "Yes, really."
Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone expressed a similar sentiment.
"I’m extremely creeped out," Andreone wrote. "Just going to go ahead and say it."
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‘Iran Posed No Imminent Threat’: Trump’s Counterterrorism Director Resigns in Protest
"I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people," the far-right former Army Ranger and CIA officer said.
Mar 17, 2026
National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent announced his resignation Tuesday, accusing President Donald Trump of being manipulated by Israel into launching a war on Iran.
"I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby," Kent—a former Army Ranger and CIA paramilitary officer often described as a white nationalist and conspiracy theorist—wrote in his resignation letter to Trump.
"Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage war with Iran," Kent continued. "This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory."
"This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women," he claimed.
While there is no solid evidence that Israel "drew" the US under then-President George W. Bush into invading Iraq and toppling longtime dictator and erstwhile US ally Saddam Hussein, then-Israeli opposition leader Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2008 that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States—which Iraq had nothing to do with—were "benefiting" Israel. He also said two years later that "America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction."
Kent, whose first wife, Navy intelligence officer Shannon Smith, was killed in a 2019 bombing targeting US forces invading Syria, said that "I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives," said
"I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for," he told the president.
Trump decided to attack Iran despite Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testifying before Congress last year that it "is not building a nuclear weapon," and that late Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei—who was assassinated last month by an Israeli airstrike—"has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
US intelligence agencies have repeatedly come to the same conclusion since the George W. Bush administration.
Kent—who has been a staunch Trump loyalist—is the most prominent US official to resign as the president, who infamously campaigned for reelection on a promise of no new wars, has attacked seven countries since returning to the White House and 10 over the course of his two terms.
In contrast to his vehement opposition to waging war on Iran, Kent led an effort to rewrite intelligence so that it did not clash with Trump's dubious claim that the government of Venezuela was involved with the Tren de Aragua drug trafficking gang ahead of the recent US invasion of the South American country and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro.
While Kent's resignation drew praise from many opponents of Trump and the illegal US-Israeli war of choice in Iran, others focused on his troubling record and associations.
Iran war was a bad idea from start. But Joe Kent is not the right messenger on this. See his alleged associations with Nick Fuentes and live streamer who said Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand” @splcenter.org @westernstatescenter.org 2025 letter:
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— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) March 17, 2026 at 7:25 AM
"Joe Kent isn't suddenly a good guy," former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said on X. "He's a straight-up white nationalist. But there are fissures in the MAGA base."
MeidasTouch News CEO Ron Filipowski also took to social media, writing, "Just for the record, I'm glad Joe Kent resigned but he is still a POS."
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