Articles

Once again, public opinion and the populations of the Levant, and the Middle East in general, are confronted with a cascade of contradictory statements and indiscretions leaked to the media, concerning the evolution of the war launched on February 28 in the region. President Donald Trump thus reaffirmed this Wednesday, April 1 st , the existence in Tehran of a «new regime», indicating that the «president of this new power has just asked us for a ceasefire». « We will decide on the expediency of this ceasefire when the Strait of Hormuz is reopened to free maritime circulation, President Trump declared. Otherwise, we will continue to bomb the infrastructure in order to bring Iran back to the Stone Age ».

Every war leaves behind its share of the forgotten. Yet one group is rarely mentioned – or poorly understood: animals. In a Lebanon, where abandonment is already widespread, war has only deepened a crisis long exacerbated by years of economic crisis. To human suffering is thus added a silent, invisible anguish – one that rarely finds a place in the collective narrative. This phenomenon also reveals a deeper fracture. Abandoning an animal in wartime is not always an act of deliberate cruelty, but sometimes the result of collapse. When everything is scarce – food, medicine, shelter – the hierarchy of needs asserts itself with brutal force. In such circumstances, the animal can come to be seen as an additional burden.

In moments of major crisis, confrontations are not confined to the military field alone; they extend to another arena no less decisive, that of narrative. In the current Lebanese situation, Hezbollah’s behavior is marked by an intensification of its internal threats and a saturation of the media space with a torrent of communiqués sometimes reaching dozens per day. This phenomenon deserves careful reading, free from emotional reflexes, in order to understand its motivations, objectives and consequences. What strikes one immediately is the unprecedented volume of communiqués referring to “special operations” and “battlefield heroics” in the south. This sustained rhythm cannot be explained by purely military facts; it belongs to what is known as “morale management.” Modern wars are not waged with weapons alone, but also through image, information and impression. When any party feels itself under pressure, whether militarily or politically, it resorts to amplifying its achievements in order to preserve the cohesion of its support base and prevent doubt from seeping into it.

The feast of Saint Joseph (March 19), patron of the university that bears his name, brought to the mind of its new rector, Father François Boëdec, SJ, the memory of Alban de Jerphanion, the first Jesuit martyr of the seemingly endless war that erupted in Lebanon in 1975 – whose latest chapter, hoped to be the last, began unfolding in early March. Five other martyrs of that conflict fell after Father de Jerphanion. In tribute to their sacrifice, and with the publication of a new biography devoted to one of their holiest figures – the Dutch priest Nicolas Kluiters, whose cause for beatification is under way – this work is presented here, revealing previously unpublished details about the motivations of those who killed Father Nicolas. At the same time, it sheds light on the broader meaning of the gift he made to Lebanon, so that the country might endure as a model of “freedom and pluralism” for both East and West, at a moment when a heavily militarized nation threatens to strip it of a vital part of its territory, marked by the memory of Christ’s passage.

Two strategically significant regions took center stage in overnight military operations from Monday, March 30, to Tuesday, March 31, amid the ongoing Middle East conflict that began on February 28: Isfahan in Iran and West Bekaa in Lebanon. In the overnight hours of Monday, U.S. air forces carried out particularly intense raids on Isfahan, targeting major weapons and ammunition depots belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. U.S. sources reported Tuesday morning that large bunker-busting bombs, each weighing over a ton, were used to destroy deep underground weapons caches. Video footage released Tuesday morning, following a night of devastation in the Isfahan region, captures scenes of apocalyptic explosions and towering columns of dense flames rising from the sites struck by American aircraft.

Lebanon has for years been subjected to this dual logic of violence and exclusion, that famous “escalation to extremes” — to borrow René Girard's expression, itself drawn from Clausewitz — punctuated by moments of objective collusion and a measured relaxation of hostility. It is the only country paying the price of a confrontation with Israel, no longer even in the service of an Arab cause, the just and legitimate Palestinian cause, but for the greater glory of the mullahs of Tehran. In that sense, Hezbollah's behaviour — having triggered three devastating wars in 2006, 2024 and 2026 — cannot be justified by any purported concern for confronting the Jewish state. Certain voices will invoke the villages of Shebaa and the Kfar Shouba hills to justify the continuation of the resistance, but that argument has been dismantled, maps in hand, since 2006, exposed as a fabrication designed to legitimise the continuation of the Hezbollah project and, at the time, as a pretext for justifying the perpetuation of Syrian occupation — namely, the struggle against Israel.