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By LevantTime . - Published Sep 6, 2026 - 23:27
Massive explosion caused by an Israeli strike near the town of Al-Mansouri in southern Lebanon. (AFP)
While the United States had appeared to be relying solely on economic warfare against Iran, the US military abruptly carried out strikes on Iranian territory on Tuesday in retaliation for attacks targeting oil tankers, setting off a spiral of violence over the course of the week. In Lebanon, Israel released several civilians held in its prisons, while its army seized the strategic Ali el-Taher hill and continued its heavy strikes in the area it controls in the south of the country. The week from August 31 to September 6 was marked by a sharp acceleration of events in the Middle East, after the previous one had seemed defined by relative stagnation. On the Iranian front, the US military carried out targeted strikes inside Iranian territory as early as Tuesday evening, the first in nearly a month. This screen grab, made on September 6, 2026 from undated video footage released the same day by US Central Command, shows what CENTCOM says is one of the Iranian oil tankers it destroyed in response to attempted missile attacks on naval vessels. (CENTCOM via AFP) However, the relatively limited pace of the strikes suggests that the US administration has opted for an escalation that remains controlled, while continuing its blockade and economic pressure on Tehran. Even so, tensions continued to rise throughout the week. Explosions were heard on Saturday on the highly strategic island of Kharg, through which most of Iran’s oil exports pass. US President Donald Trump, for his part, threatened to strike the Kuh-e Kolang nuclear site — “Pickaxe Mountain” in Persian — a heavily fortified facility located deep underground, not far from Natanz, Iran’s main uranium-enrichment site. Earlier in the week, he had enshrined the “tanker for tanker” equation, pledging to target an Iranian vessel every time the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. That is precisely what the US military did on Saturday, setting two Iranian vessels ablaze. Politically, Donald Trump further hardened his tone toward Tehran. After saying in an interview that talks had been permanently frozen “because an agreement with them is not worth the paper it is written on,” he said on Saturday that the “conflict” with Iran was not a “war,” but “something ordinary” for the United States. A way of rattling the Iranians while at the same time reassuring the US public ahead of the midterm elections. A port, along with storage facilities and warehouses, was damaged following a US military strike carried out on September 6, 2026 in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province, which borders the Strait of Hormuz. (AFP) At the same time, the US news outlet Axios published a report on Saturday suggesting that the United States is already looking beyond this conflict, which began on February 28. Citing US officials and other informed sources, the outlet said the Trump administration is developing a broader strategy for the post-war Middle East. According to the report, it would be based on creating a regional alignment aimed at containing Iran, bringing an end to the regional fallout from Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks in Gaza, and expanding the circle of normalization between Israel and countries in the region. The threat against Kuh-e Kolang, which brings the Iranian nuclear issue back to the fore, echoes an announcement by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said on September 1 that Iran had still not reopened its sites to inspectors following the strikes of May 2025. It should be recalled that despite the scale of the Israeli-American offensive against Iranian sites, it is almost certain that the stockpile of enriched uranium remains intact and has been moved to a safe location by the Iranian authorities, which remain committed to what they consider their right to develop a nuclear program. Following the IAEA announcement, the United States, together with France, Britain and Germany, said they intended to submit a resolution to the UN Security Council condemning Iran’s failure to comply with its non-proliferation commitments. This display of unity stands in contrast to the chill that has prevailed between Washington and its European allies since the beginning of the conflict. For their part, the Iranians appear to be responding to the upheaval in much the same way as before: by striking neighboring countries, notably Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, without directly targeting Israel. Heavy strikes in southern Lebanon On the Lebanese front, Israel is intensifying its destruction operations in villages in the south, even using explosive barrels in some cases. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun urged Washington and the international community to “put an end” to Israeli attacks on Lebanese territory, which killed seven people on Sunday against the backdrop of a fragile truce. The strikes hit several localities in the Nabatiyeh region. Twenty people were also wounded, including children, according to the Health Ministry. One strike also destroyed the former Ghandour hospital, which had been out of service for years. Release of detainees and capture of Ali el-Taher But the major event of the week in the south was the Israeli capture of the strategic Ali el-Taher hill in the Nabatiyeh region. The site served as a major Hezbollah headquarters, consisting of an extensive network of tunnels from which fighters from the Shiite party operated, along with, according to some reports, Iranian fighters. On Thursday evening, the Israelis announced that they had taken control of the complex. On Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that tunnels still had to be blown up. This military “success” may not have come as a surprise after weeks of bombardment, but Hezbollah’s reaction was more unexpected. After long insisting that it would refuse to give up this strategic hill — as had the Iranians, who had also threatened to intervene — the Shiite party ultimately sought to play down the significance of the development through its media outlets and allied networks, without officially confirming the loss of the site, which it had refused to preserve by handing it over to the Lebanese army. The other major surprise of the week was Israel’s release of five Lebanese and Syrian civilians held in its prisons. The move came following a visit to Tel Aviv by US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa. According to the Israeli prime minister’s office, Thursday’s announcement “follows efforts by Israel and Lebanon to locate and repatriate the remains of leaders of the Jewish community who had been abducted and killed in Lebanon” between 1984 and 1986. Here too, Hezbollah’s reaction raises questions. While describing the move as positive but insufficient, the party once again turned on the Lebanese authorities, accusing them of “submission to the enemy” and holding them “responsible” for the disaster in the south. It even warned them against “internal conflicts.” Could the party’s military setbacks push it to turn increasingly toward the domestic front? Finally, the Israeli army made an important statement on Sunday, saying it was considering reducing its occupation zone in southern Lebanon, moving from the current “yellow zone” to a “grey zone.” Such a development would, according to this assessment, reflect a reduced threat from Hezbollah. The measure has not yet been approved by Israel’s political leadership. Yemen and Palestine The week was also particularly tense in Yemen, where clashes between Houthi rebels and government forces continued to intensify, culminating in an especially deadly Saturday in which more than 60 people were killed in a single day, bringing the death toll since Thursday to around 200. The Houthi offensive is aimed in particular at taking control of areas bordering the Bab el-Mandeb passage, which would give this Iranian ally additional leverage over another major strategic chokepoint after the Strait of Hormuz. In Palestine, particularly troubling comments by Israel Katz on Gaza marked the week. He claimed, without providing evidence, that most of the territory’s residents wanted to leave, stressing that Israel was “ready for such an evacuation” on a mass scale. A sign that the ordeal of Gaza’s residents may be far from over. Finally, it is worth noting that the IAEA announced on September 1 that facilities discovered in Deir el-Zor, Syria, indicate that Bashar al-Assad’s former regime had secretly been preparing an advanced nuclear program that could have led to the production of an atomic weapon with the help of North Korean experts.
By Michel Hajji Georgiou - Published Sep 6, 2026 - 13:31
The Argentine player, who brought his international career to an end on August 31, 2026, was nothing less than a magician of the stadiums. His journey, made of wonders, falls and redemption, may tell us something about our undiminished need for enchantment in a world that nevertheless claims to have rid itself of it. Announced a few weeks after the 2026 World Cup final lost to Spain, Lionel Messi’s international retirement inevitably stirred an emotion for which it is difficult to find many equivalents in the recent history of football. One would probably have to go back to Maradona, or perhaps to Cruyff or Pelé, to recover that sense that, with the retirement of a player, something disappears that extends far beyond the sport itself, as though a certain way of inhabiting football, perhaps even of believing in it, were also coming to an end. Far from the glacis of reason Enough of the endless statistics and the unbearable, tedious and sterile quarrels over “who is the greatest of all time.” The author of these lines has never been a fanatic of the round ball, nor, for that matter, of vertical rankings or hierarchies of merit in general, and consequently appreciates the talent of each player with the same sense of wonder as an eleven-year-old child. Besides, this particularly contemporary obsession with numbers ruins all the pleasure of the spectacle. And with good reason: the approach that consists in adding up goals, assists, Ballons d’Or, Champions Leagues, Copa América titles, World Cups… can only be reductive. On another register, it is not entirely unrelated to German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin’s critique of the modern Gnostic temptation: that of a form of knowledge convinced that it can imprison reality within a system and abolish whatever resists it. Records are probably one indicator of Lionel Messi’s genius. Yet so many other great players who made stadiums and hearts tremble, without achieving half of what he did, nevertheless remain eternal in our memories. What made them truly singular lies elsewhere, far from the glacis of reason. Something else was at work around them. Something belonging to a certain profound sense of transcendence that understanding can never fully grasp. This has been true of Lionel Messi for more than twenty years, since the day when, under the gaze of the “icon” Diego Maradona, he made his first appearance, in June 2006, on the World Cup stage in the colors of the Albiceleste against Serbia and Montenegro. That ineffable element that constitutes Messi’s genius, as it does that of others, may indeed touch upon one of modernity’s strangest paradoxes: the persistence of magic in a world that has constructed itself precisely against it. The disenchanted world Max Weber used the expression “disenchantment of the world” to describe the slow process by which Western modernity gradually subjected existence to rationalization, calculation, predictability and causal explanation. The world was no longer supposed to be traversed by obscure powers, signs, supernatural interventions or invisible wills; it was, at least in principle, to become intelligible. Unfortunately, modern sport, and more broadly the modern world inherited from globalization, fits perfectly within this dynamic. Today’s football, and not football alone, is probably one of the most quantified objects imaginable. The slightest gesture is measured, and everything is carefully calculated and modeled. From mathematics to artificial intelligence, raw talent now depends more on science than on enchantment. What is human in its spontaneous, even wild, relationship with the invisible that springs from the heart is disappearing before our eyes, in favor of the squaring of the VAR circle. It is, in a sense, the murder of sport in the name of greater rigor and fairness… even though the euthanasia of this share of sublime spontaneity ultimately produces glaring injustices of its own. One need only revisit some of the controversial decisions of the 2026 World Cup to see it. Paradox of paradoxes, Lionel Messi was himself, at the outset, a child of this technical modernity, to which he certainly owes part of his exceptional career. His body, too small by expected standards, was corrected through hormone treatment. Identified very early, his talent was taken in hand by an institution that organized his training, nutrition, physical development and integration into an already globalized sporting machine. Nothing, in appearance, could have been further removed from the old heroic narrative. At first sight, the story seems closer to dystopias in the vein of Gattaca than to myths and messianic narratives. And yet the old narrative did indeed return, and with an almost embarrassing insistence. Since the beginning of his career, Lionel Messi has been placed under the microscope. But the more people labored to explain and demystify him, the less they succeeded in entirely dissipating the impression produced by some of his gestures. The man simply cannot be circumscribed and reduced to an accumulation of data. At an age when most great players retreat into the shadows, he continues to surprise. To astonish, even, by bringing to sport that element of the senseless which escapes the quasi-robotic hypersystematization of the world. It is probably there that one must seek this elsewhere that characterizes Messi. In the survival of magic at a time when even the spaces that once allowed the positive expression of a humanity made of flesh and blood are gradually being “disciplined” by the hypnotic attraction of a new puritanical Gnosis in the name of modernity. The Messiah made by the machine Although he emerged, in a sense, from the machinery of the Matrix, Lionel Messi constitutes in himself a challenge to this ready-to-wear model. A kind of alter ego of Neo from The Matrix, thrown into a simulation governed by parameters that claim to calculate everything. The Argentine’s destiny gradually took on, almost despite himself, the form of a messianic narrative. The pun on his name would be too easy had it not been ceaselessly revived by his own story: that of the fragile child whose body seemed intent on denying him the fulfillment to which his talent destined him. Then that of exile at a very young age to Barcelona, adoption by a foreign city, an almost unreal ascent, worldwide recognition, followed by this strange difficulty in being recognized by his own… For a long time, Argentina maintained a relationship of hainamoration with its prodigal child. His results, his talent, his brilliance mattered little… he still had to answer one merciless question: why wasn’t he Maradona? The comparison was admittedly inevitable, but it was also profoundly unfair. Everything separated the two men in their way of being in the world. Maradona carried Argentina with everything in it that was passionate, contradictory, excessive and theatrical. He spoke, provoked, fought, fell, returned, mingled football with his private life, his anger, his political commitments… all the way to his own destruction. His very body seemed to become one of the places where the contradictions of his country were played out. Maradona was the very incarnation of what the world expected from football: a rebellious soul, sometimes pushing the game to the point of immorality, but within a kind of footballing gigantomachy. Maradona was epic. And, above all, he had placed his country at the summit of world football in 1986. Messi offered none of that. He was silent, at times almost absent from the story others were constructing around him, an absence long interpreted as a flaw. Almost erased, devoid of personality. That, moreover, was what the two giants Maradona and Pelé reproached him for: a lack of leadership, being too smooth. A kind of miracle test-tube baby of the stadiums. The boy from Rosario was also criticized for not singing the anthem loudly enough, for not being Argentine enough, for having been “manufactured” by Barcelona, and then, naturally, for failing to win with the national team what he won almost continuously with his club. The unfulfilled prophecy The dramatic loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup final, followed by the Copa América finals of 2015 and 2016, had gradually transformed that suspicion into an accusation. When he missed his penalty against Chile in 2016 and subsequently announced that he was leaving the national team, he was nevertheless already one of the greatest players in football history. Yet his story remained strangely unfinished. The sense of incompletion had little to do with his honors. It concerned instead that quasi-archaic necessity continually imposed upon modern heroes: to bring their initiatory journey to completion. In Argentina’s colors, Messi shone, then fell heavily. But he did not rise again. He did not fulfill the prophecy. And, in the eyes of his people, this reinforced the sense of hainamoration: a fallen god remains a god, after all. But with the added burden of what his worshippers regard as an intolerable substratum of humanity and, therefore, something perfectly detestable: his flaws, his weaknesses. Argentines loved Maradona despite his spectacular downfall and his fallible humanity. But that was because he had “earned” the right to such a downfall, because it had somehow become acceptable after Mexico 1986. Messi, by contrast, did not yet have the right to fall, because he had not yet reached the summit. No, the prophecy had not been fulfilled. It was even becoming a caricature. So Messi returned. But he still had to wait for his redemption. It took the 2021 Copa América at the Maracanã for this relationship of suspicion, expectation and disappointment with his public and his people truly to begin changing. And above all it took the 2022 World Cup for the story to acquire that almost excessively perfect form that no one would have dared write without appearing to indulge in a screenwriter’s contrivance. Strangely, Maradona had died in 2020. It was as though a kind of oppressive national curse had been lifted. At the same time, the Argentine people needed a substitute father figure, and the pressure was thereby only redoubled. But perhaps mixed with a little tenderness this time? What happened in Qatar in 2022 is all the more interesting because Messi himself appeared slightly different. He protested more, answered provocations, lost his temper, spoke with a violence of which few had thought him capable, and even let slip that now famous “¿Qué mirás, bobo?” at the Dutch, to Argentina’s amusement. Buenos Aires finally discovered, belatedly, what it had always expected from him. A little Maradona in a great deal of Messi. But Messi did not become Maradona. And perhaps that was precisely where the true reconciliation occurred: Argentina stopped asking him to be. From 2022 onward, Messi no longer needed to embody another model of national genius. For his country too, he could finally become what he had already been everywhere else: Messi. Simply. The final act of the prophecy Granted, the triumph of 2022 could have constituted a perfect ending. But, as with Maradona, the final act of heroic prophecy is the fall. No one really expected anything extraordinary from Messi anymore in 2026. At 39, he was widely regarded as one of the “tired heroes.” The fall from the Capitol had come with the bitter episode of his departure from FC Barcelona and his misadventure at PSG. He was now playing only in the American league, in Miami’s colors… on the periphery of the footballing world, in the distant lands of soccer. And the new generation was already there, ready to send its ancestors off to Bicêtre. Yet this 2026 World Cup, which seemed destined to be nothing more than an epilogue, turned into one last sensational blaze of glory. Argentina reached the final once again, with Messi, at 39, restored as its “historic leader” and its recourse in decisive moments, achieving something not unlike what Roberto Baggio had done for Italy in 1994, at… 27: a perpetual deus ex machina. Baggio failed at the gates of triumph against Brazil after practically carrying Italy all the way to Pasadena. His penalty, sent over the crossbar, would leave behind one of the cruelest images in World Cup history: a man standing motionless, head bowed, hands on his hips, while Brazil celebrated its victory. The man who had “died standing.” The Italian imp never knew apotheosis. Yet this symbolic death, far from erasing his tournament, eventually became part of his legend. History was kinder to Messi, despite a campaign of hatred directed at him, mixed with accusations of cheating and favoritism, against a backdrop of controversial refereeing decisions and acts of unsporting conduct by his team, just as it had once been with Maradona. Kinder still, in fact. A final in a sixth World Cup on the verge of retirement, capped by an outstanding individual performance? That is precisely where the magic of the Messi phenomenon lies, and where it defies reason and its avalanche of statistics. Genius cannot be imprisoned within a sum of parameters and variables. Even optimal physical condition cannot by itself explain what the entire world witnessed. And what does it matter if his story reminds us that the hero, however mythical, cannot abolish the sinister influence of Saturn. The re-enchantment of the world For beyond the prophecy fulfilled, from ascent to fall, with its share of happiness and misfortune, the Argentine offered the world one final lap that belongs to art, if not to a form of Homeric poetry. With Lionel Messi’s withdrawal from the international stage, a little of the world’s magic disappears… until another providential hero returns to enchant the stadiums. For more than twenty years, Messi embodied the coexistence of two worlds we had thought incompatible: that of the extreme rationalization of modern sport and that, far older, of the hero, the sign, expectation and enchantment. When Messi leaves, something of this contradiction suddenly becomes visible. Other prodigies have already emerged, but perhaps, at the very moment when one of its last great representatives leaves the stage, we discover just how much we continue to need transcendence. The modern world has therefore probably not abolished enchantment. It has merely displaced it. For ninety minutes at a time, this man called Lionel Messi, who embodied it on football pitches, now leaves after having accomplished everything. And even more.
