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Whether the Iranian ambassador designated to Lebanon, Mohammad Reza Sheibani, stays or goes is beside the point. What matters is the symbolic weight carried by two distinct stances, that of the Lebanese Foreign Ministry, which declared the ambassador persona non grata, and that of the "Shia duo" in response. Beyond the national considerations that compel Lebanon to take a courageous stance toward a state that incessantly interferes in its internal affairs and treats it as a mere vassal colony, the official Lebanese position speaks to the depth of the change that has taken place in the country itself, in the region, and far beyond. A depth that still escapes Iranian thinking, and that of the Lebanese sectarian militia in its service known as Hezbollah. It should never be forgotten that Hezbollah remains nothing more than a brigade of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, whose members are for the most part Lebanese nationals. A disarmingly simple question imposes itself on the "Islamic Republic" as much as on Hezbollah, which ought to try to answer it. Here it is: had the upheaval brought about by the "Gaza support war" not occurred, would Iran have accepted, through Hezbollah, that Joseph Aoun become president of the Lebanese Republic? The facts supply the answer. The change wrought by the outcomes of that war, including the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and his designated successor Hashem Safieddine, allowed Joseph Aoun to reach the Baabda Palace. Without it, Hezbollah would have clung to its own candidate, as it had done following the end of President Michel Sleiman's term in 2014. The country was then forced to wait long months before everyone bowed to the will of Nasrallah and Iran, electing Michel Aoun president at the end of October 2016, with his son-in-law Gebran Bassil in tow. Nothing better measures the scale of the change Lebanon has undergone than the repositioning of the Foreign Ministry. Now led by Youssef Rajji, the ministry has ceased to function as an annex of its Iranian counterpart, as was the case when Gebran Bassil and other figures from the "Shia duo" held the portfolio. They were, in effect, representatives of the "Islamic Republic" within the Arab League. Bassil, Michel Aoun's son-in-law, made no secret of his refusal to show solidarity with Arab positions when he served as foreign minister. Arab ministers did not hesitate to describe him as the foreign minister of the "Islamic Republic", which was not itself a member of the Arab League. What remains most puzzling is the position taken by the Amal movement, chaired by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri. Does this not reveal that Berri finds himself unable to break free from Iran's orbit and all that it represents, despite everything Iran has inflicted on Lebanon and the Lebanese, including the Shia, the people of the South and the Beqaa? In the end, what the Lebanese state's decision to demand the departure of the new Iranian ambassador, who had previously served in Lebanon, has most clearly revealed is that the "Islamic Republic" succeeded in radically transforming the very nature of the Shia community. It achieved this through relentless efforts dating back to 1982, when the first contingents of Revolutionary Guards entered Lebanese territory under the pretext of defending the country against the Israeli invasion. One must return to that period when the Guards worked to entrench themselves in the Sheikh Abdallah barracks, a Lebanese army installation in Baalbek. Iran's first act in Lebanon was thus to undermine the army, the backbone of the state. It should also be recalled that the founding of Hezbollah was accompanied by the establishment of educational institutions designed to impose the Iranian curriculum in the party's schools (the Al-Mahdi and Al-Moustafa schools). Beyond that, an entire formation was imposed on Shia youth grounded in values foreign to Lebanon. The "Mahdi Scouts" bear eloquent witness to this, preparing Shia teenagers to serve in the ranks of a sectarian militia with no connection to the Lebanese state or Lebanese society. From this vantage point, the position of the "Shia duo" toward the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador becomes intelligible. This ambassador was accredited to the "duo" before being accredited to the Lebanese state, which means the "duo" possesses a state of its own, separate from the Lebanese state, one over which Iran and its interests exercise full control. Be that as it may, the position of the Lebanese Foreign Ministry, inseparable from that of Nawaf Salam's government, remains one more step along a long road that should lead to the day when the Lebanese state recovers its sovereign decision-making... provided Lebanon emerges unscathed from the "Iran support war" currently underway. The journey toward recovering a sovereign decision, free from Iranian tutelage, began with the election of Joseph Aoun to the presidency and the formation of Nawaf Salam's government. The expulsion of the Iranian ambassador represents yet another step along that road. The Iranian behaviors voiced through the "Shia duo" betray a refusal to acknowledge that before and after the "Gaza support war" stand as two entirely different realities, and that Iran's influence has receded considerably. Beirut has ceased to be that Iranian city on the Mediterranean, that Arab capital under Tehran's thumb. It has shed Iranian hegemony, all the more so now that Iran has left Syria with no prospect of return, and Syria is once again an Arab state no longer governed by the Revolutionary Guards. On Lebanese soil, the "Shia duo" wages a war lost before it began. Its fortunes there will be no better than in the "Gaza support war." Sooner or later, the "Islamic Republic" will have no choice but to capitulate. Control over Lebanon's decisions of war and peace will not spare it that fate. Nor will headlong aggression against the Arab Gulf states, nor keeping its ambassador in Lebanon as an envoy accredited to the "Shia duo" rather than to the Lebanese Republic...

“Baytuna al-khataru”, (peril is our dwelling), an expression borrowed from Saïd Akl. Michel Chiha was not fooled by our superficial national unity! Besides, who would have been? This essayist feared, above all, the demons of division and violence that haunted our Lebanese memory. His Lebanon was: “ a country that tradition must defend against force… ” National fragmentation and the historical legacy The confrontation, which has been ongoing before our eyes since October 2023, may appear to be an international or regional confrontation between Israel and Iran, but it is also, as far as we are concerned, the continuation of an ancestral domestic conflict between Lebanese factions. And in fact, it was written that the same nagging questions would always arise for us: which community is in control of the country, and which has the lion's share of the state's revenues? From this, no doubt, from this reality felt differently by political actors and other protagonists, stem all our internal conflicts, the intensity that characterizes them, and the blood that stains them! At this precise moment, there is grosso modo the Shiite community which, having somehow tied its fate to the politics of the ayatollahs, has positioned itself against the other Lebanese communities, coincidentally gathered in the sovereignist camp. Let us remember that there is a natural filiation between our current “historical time” and that of the violent crises or “small wars” of 1975, 1958, 1925-7. And one can thus go back to 1860 and 1845, or even further, to find the same confessional groups in conflict even if, from one time to another, alliances were made and unmade and some communities changed their stance. In Lebanon, war to change nothing As for today, if Israel wants perpetual war, if, according to some observers, its government intends to continue hostilities to stay in power, an opposite situation prevails here: it is war that has taken hold of us, that does not intend to let us go. The conflict is consubstantial with the Lebanese entity, whether it extends to the territorial limits of the double Qaimaqamate of the 19 th century or those of Greater Lebanon of 1920. Perhaps we were not meant to stay together, juxtaposed in this way. But yes, we would say! We had always survived crises. We had always bounced back thanks to political elites who had chosen paths of appeasement and compromise, like Bechara el-Khoury and Riad el-Solh in 1943 and like Fouad Chehab, Saeb Salam and Rachid Karame after the events of 1958. But there, we had wise leaders at the helm, great traditional bourgeois, who recoiled from the prolonged use of force and the perpetuation of insurrectionary situations. Neither ideologues, nor comitadjis, they managed as best they could and ensured the defusing of crises that their own policies could provoke. Mamluks, Bashi-bazouks and “vigilantes” But what do we have today? A party that, proclaiming itself revolutionary by the grace of God, advocates violence. Militarized and battle-hardened, it does not disdain shows of force. Taking its instructions from Tehran, it interfered in restoring order in Syria and plunged headlong into a regional war for the sake of its Iranian employer. Never had the country known such an occupation (1): no more under the Mamluks than under the Bashi-bazouks! It is through brutality, threat, and intimidation that it asserts itself in the Lebanese political landscape. To make matters worse, our national army, guarantor of our sovereignty, is reduced to playing the role of an interposition force between neighboring districts and belligerent communities. A gendarmerie ( jandarma ) as under the Mutasarrifate, but more mechanized, is still useful, but it cannot meet the demands of the hour! And then, according to the Americans, its primary suppliers of equipment, this legitimate force has not fulfilled its commitments regarding the demilitarization of South Lebanon and the disarmament of the inflamed militia. Dance on a volcano That said, how do you expect a civilian population to face the “divine party” and its fanaticized followers? Suffice it to say that pockets of resistance will form. “ Vigilantes ” as they say in Spanish, self-proclaimed irregulars, arrogating to themselves the right to ensure security, will appear, and above all impose their order. With the displacement of a million people into already overcrowded, wary, and guarded areas, we are imperceptibly sliding towards open conflict. The fire will spread. And this in various parts of the territory. 1 - When one considers that, contrary to diplomatic customs, the Iranian ambassador declared persona non grata refuses to abandon his post!

In a recent interview given to an English-language television channel, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did not mince his words in describing the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — and, by extension, the mullah regime in general — as the “new Hitler of the Middle East”… Offering a particularly lucid reading of the geopolitical context of the current conflict, the Crown Prince noted without circumlocution that the Iranian regime clearly adopts an expansionist posture and seeks to extend “its own project in the Middle East, in the same way that Hitler had done” in Europe. “Several countries had not realized how dangerous Hitler was until it was too late,” MBS emphasized, adding — touching the nerve: “I would not want that to happen here.” To strip the parallel to its barest outlines, the comparison with Hitler does present some similarities, but only at the level of form, of behavior, perceptible on more than one plane: a regional expansionist strategy aimed at imposing on other populations a hegemony based on a fascistic ideology — theocratic in the Iranian case, moreover —; the extension of “occupation,” indirect , of territories across several countries by controlling local powers subservient to the colonizing power; the establishment in each country of vassal militia organizations (similar to the Gestapo) tasked with suppressing any contestation and relentlessly maintaining a climate of terror and oppression. But far beyond these manifestations of sectarian imperialism and the fascist militia practices in which those conventionally called Iranian proxies engage, the Khomeinist project afflicting the Middle East carries a danger of an entirely different dimension. It constitutes a threat of a fundamentally existential nature, one that bears not only on Lebanon but on all the countries of the region, Gulf states included. This political project, transnational by essence, advocates the construction of a warrior society — permanently “warrior” — whose foundations are values, a culture, a structure of thought, social customs, a way of life, entirely alien to the populations of the region. Worse still: brainwashing is practiced within this obtuse ideological framework from earliest childhood, as illustrated by the school curriculum applied in Hezbollah’s partisan schools, beginning at the primary cycle. The curriculum imposed on pupils in these establishments mirrors the Khomeinist ideology, which “teaches” young children the cult of martyrdom. It comes as no surprise, then — to cite only this example — that the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran fixed, just a few days ago, the age of recruitment into their ranks at… 12 years old! In this type of situation, however, the autocratic ideology underpinning an expansionist policy goes hand in hand with the construction of a military apparatus that barely conceals a belligerent posture toward countries or populations classified in the category of “enemies,” because they do not share the same values and civilizational foundations as the “mother” power. As an illustration of this point, the military operations that have been unfolding since February 28 have laid bare the full extent of the nuclear and ballistic arsenal that the mullah regime has developed with diligence over entire decades. The morbid obstinacy to enrich uranium beyond 60 percent, to construct ballistic missiles with a range of 4,000 kilometers — capable of reaching European capitals —, to pour monumental investments into destabilizing the countries of the region through para-state militias subservient to the Pasdaran, can only be explained by the will to apply a strategy of conquest, not only at the geopolitical level, but above all in the socio-cultural sphere and in the imposition of “divine” values that are, in every respect, reductive, obscurantist, and retrograde. President Donald Trump characterized the mullah regime on Friday evening as the “tyrant of the Middle East.” A “new Hitler,” a bloodthirsty tyrant sowing terror across the region, should under no circumstances benefit from any complacent or conciliatory attitude. He must imperatively be eliminated from the scene. Any half-measure in this context would be a grave strategic error. To refrain from carrying to its conclusion, all the way through, an operation of radical and total eradication of the regional tyrant would only sow the seeds of a new armed conflict in the near term. At the end of the Second World War, had the Hitlerite regime not been totally and definitively erased from the map, the specter of Nazism would have resurfaced without delay. In such circumstances, any elementary angelism displayed by the “right-thinking” or the pseudo-left-leaning wokists would amount to a vast and unspeakable crime against peoples in danger.

From the rubble of March 14, 2005, nothing emerged but further rubble, embodied most symbolically in the debris of the atomized port of Beirut on August 4, 2020. Hollowed out by wars, occupations and relentless waves of corruption, the Lebanese state has been transformed into a platform, its sovereign power usurped in turn by various de facto forces. With the state structure — even in the bygone time of its glory and splendor — Lebanon’s communities have all maintained a phantasmatic, almost libidinal relationship, shot through simultaneously with contempt, violence, something approaching BDSM. The Shiites, or the Journey to the End of De-statization The Shia community has always maintained, for its part, a relationship of hainamoration with the Lebanese state. Marginalized since the founding of Greater Lebanon, insurgent within the communist left and secular parties, then behind Moussa Sadr, its traditional project — that of Sadr, Shamseddine, Fadlallah, in the tradition of Jabal Amel — was nonetheless that of wilayat al-umma : statist in orientation, for whom Lebanon is a definitive homeland for all its sons (proof of which is that he who wielded this formula as a profession of faith was a Shiite, the former Speaker of Parliament Hussein Husseini), and the Lebanese state an end in itself — as against the Khomeinist innovation of wilayat al-faqih and Hezbollah’s pan-Iranian ambitions. But the culture of the Amilite Shia territory was progressively supplanted by a culture of space distilled by the Pasdaran and subordinated to Tehran. Hezbollah then acquired, under the compulsion of arms after 2005, progressive control of the state’s mechanisms — on top of Amal’s systematic institutional investment since the 1990s, under the Assad umbrella. The collapse of the Iranian empire, from Damascus to Tehran, has however marginalized the party and returned it to its original para-statal status, back below the Weberian line, in open war against a Lebanese state that now struggles, as best it can, to recover its authority in a particularly complex context. Nabih Berri, politically absorbed by the Hezb since March 8, 2005, finds himself fully responsible for the fate of the Shia duopoly within the institutions — in a position that is at once uncomfortable… and gratifying. If Berri continues to innovate in tightrope-walking, Hezbollah openly declares war on the state. But neither loses its compass when it comes to mulk — to power — charging against the institutions… while participating in them. The Amal leader solicits the Iranian ambassador to disregard an executive decision aimed at expelling him, while Hezbollah pulls off the feat of unleashing its attack dogs against the Salam cabinet… while keeping its ministers in it. It boycotts, but does not surrender its portfolios. The politics of the empty chair, since 2005, has always been its preferred instrument — causing damage without ever clearing out. The Shia community has thus reached the apex of its journey to the end of the de-statization into which Hezbollah has been dragging it since the 1980s. The myth of exporting the revolution has collapsed. The status of vanguard resistance guard has evaporated. There is no longer any special status. Psychically, political Shiism is in existential crisis. Sunni Ihbât and the Risk of the Border The Sunni community, originally hostile to the creation of Greater Lebanon owing to the pan-Arab dream, evolved undoubtedly toward Lebanism from the defeat of 1967 and the end of the Nasserist dream. Looking inward within the national borders and recognizing the injustice of the absence of Muslim-Christian parity, it anchored itself in the Palestinian resistance and the National Movement to obtain reforms and equitable participation within the institutions. This re-inscription in territorial culture occurred, however, in pain. First the pain of the Israeli siege of 1982, when, abandoned by the Arab world, it witnessed — after the fall of the pan-Arab dream — the departure of Arafat from Beirut: a double myth collapsing at once. Then the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005. The liquidation of Hariri completed this process of territorialization and gave rise to the Beirut Spring and the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon — the result of a cross-communal and proto-civic coalition gathered under the slogan Lebanon First. Since then, and especially with Hezbollah’s stranglehold on the institutions after May 7, 2008, the Sunni community has been passing through a deep ihbât. Its traditional leaders are disgraced or marginalized, its representation fragmented, its relationship to the state diffuse. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam represents an aspiration toward renewal, but an embryonic and fragile one, without a solid parliamentary or popular base. In this void, a familiar mechanism risks reactivating itself: the attraction exerted by Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa as a symbol of a politico-communal reconquista, or the temptation of Erdogan’s protective shadow — signs of confusion and an existential quest for internal anchorage. If the Lebanese state does not recover its authority and restore substance to its national project, this drift could consolidate, reproducing in a different context the mechanics of 1967: when the border of the state no longer suffices to contain the passions, those passions end up escaping outward. One can wager that Tom Barrack, the voice of the great decision-maker, did not let slip his negationist remark regarding Lebanon through ideological inclination alone. The Temptation of Little Lebanon: The Christian Community The Christian community, above all the Maronites, was Greater Lebanon’s pampered child until the civil war. After the war — and above all the inter-Christian fratricidal wars that accelerated the Syrian stranglehold — the Christians entered a deep ihbât, all their popular figures having been marginalized and exiled until 2005. But since then, the discourse of the deep Christian hinterland has drifted. It is no longer that of the Lebanese state and of Greater Lebanon — the function the community had always assigned itself, from Patriarch Howayek to Sfeir. There is a resurgence of the temptation of identitarian federalism — the old separatist discourses of the civil war dressed up in the pragmatics of administration. A portion — a particularly vociferous one — of Christians no longer wishes so much to defend the perimeter of Greater Lebanon’s sovereignty as to live in a small, well-administered Lebanon: homogeneous, Europeanized and tension-free, ignoring the fact that even a federated identity wishing to live in a haven of peace cannot coexist in tranquility with neighbors locked in permanent war. That is, should they not themselves be seized by the Mephistophelian impulse toward self-annihilation in the name of the pseudo-sacred unity of the community, as occurs cyclically. The irony is cruel: holding the Presidency of the Republic, command of the army, a Muslim-Christian parity respected by their Muslim partners despite demographic realities, Christians have lost faith in the state, and wish to ratify this disillusionment through another formula. A mirage. The Orphaned State At the moment when the Lebanese state is attempting, for the first time since the end of the civil war, to fully restore its sovereignty and authority, it has never been so orphaned of father and mother. The forces of fait accompli within the Shia community — committed to resisting any recentralization and to unconditional allegiance to a project of permanent imperialist war — want nothing of it. The Sunni community, in a state of perdition, looks upon it with the disabused and powerless eyes of the left behind. The Christian community, tempted by silent secession into an imaginary haven, lets itself be lulled by the poisoned call of the sirens. Even the United States and Europe seem to treat it as a pariah. And that is precisely, no doubt, because for once it truly belongs to no community or dominant component. The former Syrian Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam had a phrase of staggering cynicism: “We governed the Lebanese because they are tribes that hate one another.” Horrible as it was, the formula was not entirely false. But it was true at a time when each tribe sought in foreign tutelage the guarantee of its superiority over the others — not today, when each community is simultaneously orphaned and exhausted. There is a truth that generations of Lebanese politicians and thinkers from all communities have discovered, each on their own, at the end of different and often painful — sometimes broken — paths: Greater Lebanon is the only guarantee, the only salvation for all. It has been spoken by men who came from Arab nationalism and arrived at Lebanism, by men who came from the Islamic project and chose citizenship, by men who came from a Christian particularism and understood that isolation was a slow death. And these words were almost always, for those who spoke them publicly and without calculation, their last. This sacrifice deserves to be preserved. If the Lebanese — individuals and groups — finally wish to live in peace, there is no better moment than now to rally to the state, to surround it and recreate a Lebanist center of gravity — not to plunge into nihilism out of weariness or despair. But for that, the state too must cease — beginning with its Prince, guardian in principle of the Constitution and the Republic — to disappoint all its sons through omission, and must at last believe in itself. Orphaned of father and mother? So be it. It is high time it became the father itself.

At a time when large swaths of Lebanese society are plunging into the hateful pitfalls of the friend-enemy divide, there is more reason than ever to reread Michel Seurat. The Barbarian State — his posthumous collection of articles devoted to the deconstruction of Assad's Syria — remains the most rigorous analytical landmark for anyone seeking to understand the deep structure of Arab politics, Lebanon's included. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun, recast here within a Deleuzian tradition, Seurat evokes the zaamat-state (the state of chiefs) and the jamaat-state (the state of communities) as constructions intrinsic to the Syrian stato-national model. Diametrically opposed, however, to Assad's tyrannical model, Lebanon is also the superimposition of both: the state of chieftaincies and the state of communal bodies — organized, however, into autonomous and rival entities — which makes it simultaneously… too much of a state and not enough of a state… "The Douweylat-State" To this must be added a third layer, inherited from the Eastern Question and the system of millets and capitulations: the absurd oxymoron of the douweylat-state — the state of micro-states with international ramifications, para-statal structures that recognize in the central state only what it can offer them, while disputing its monopoly on legitimate violence, which has been, since Max Weber, one of the very elements of the definition of the state itself. And this is where the struggle is knotted. Lebanon is the territory of dialogue under constraint — as in Geneva, Lausanne, Taif, Doha — which yields "agreement" only under the pressure of collapse or foreign tutelage, and relapses into mistrust the moment that constraint is relaxed, as witnessed by the failure of the national dialogue conference in 2006, barely a year after the Syrian withdrawal. It is also the terrain of mimetic rivalry for power as a sign of communal superiority, and of the caste consciousness of chieftaincies confronting any challenge to their authority. Revolutions there occur only through violence and within each community separately — and even then. Popular uprisings manage to coalesce against a common foreign oppressor, but struggle thereafter to produce a political contract, because the multiplication of allegiances and the persistence of residual legitimacies prevent any lasting centralization. The War Against Weber Political modernity rests in principle on a simple and revolutionary Weberian proposition that Lebanon has never truly traversed. It has produced Constitutions, institutions, ministries and embassies, while maintaining beneath the surface — in a state of quasi-organic preservation — pre-state residual legitimacies: charismatic chieftaincies, historical feudalities, militias, which have claimed and obtained an existence parallel to constitutional legitimacy. The demand for a politics of the countryside and the mountains against urbanization, of particularism against stato-national construction, anticipated by half a century the global identitarian movement we witness today — lending Lebanon's fate a significance that exceeds it. So long as the state has not been invested by a community through its party-force, it remains an object of distrust. The rivalry for power obeys a mimetic mechanics: it is coveted because another holds it, and becomes, consequently, far more a sign of communal superiority than a program of governance… Lacanian hainamoration in all its splendor… March 14, 2005, or the Royal Abortion There was, however, a singular moment in Lebanon's contemporary history… March 14, 2005. A superimposition of the new and the old, the modern and the archaic, of an authentic sovereigntist impulse and the communal apparatuses which, threatened by the emergence of a transversal civic dynamic, immediately set about recuperating it — to drain it of all reformist substance and re-communitarize it. A million and a half people in the streets of Beirut, moved by a demand for sovereignty, who were not responding to the summons of a zaim but to something stranger and more fragile — it was at once fascinating and unsettling. The zaamats had stepped back, and the movement was running on autopilot — or nearly so, led essentially by intellectuals, civil society cadres and students. As for the jamaat , its frame was overflowed. For a moment, the aspiration to a rational and national legitimacy had crossed communal lines rather than folding back within them. Only Hezbollah, loyal to Assad and quite content to inherit his legacy, had openly positioned itself in confrontation with the movement. It too saw in the stato-national construction that had become possible a threat to its weapons and its hegemony over its community. The moment was thus quickly smothered by its own bearers. The inability of March 14 to choose between its passage toward the state and the continued existence of enclaves within the state stems from the very nature of the movement — simultaneously a desire for a sovereign state, subsequently transmuted into a gathering of communities that wanted nothing of the other's state. Though real and exhilarating, the grace — that of a last chance? — was brief. Fleeting. A dream. And it is on the ruins of that singular adventure — deconstructed both under the hammer blows of the Assad-Hezbollah axis and by the petty power stakes of its own leaders — that Lebanon's current tragedy is now playing out.

The war in the Middle East, triggered on February 28 by an Israeli-American attack against the Iranian Mullahs' regime, seems to be settling in for the long haul, and as a result, the fate of potential negotiations between Iran and the United States remains unknown. Following a verbal escalation by the Iranians, who stated their refusal of the fifteen-point plan proposed this week by Washington, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul contradicted the official statements. He told the German press on Friday that the United States and Iran are preparing for direct talks in Pakistan. In parallel, US President Donald Trump extended his ultimatum (threatening to destroy Iran's energy facilities) until April 6, seemingly to give a chance to the ongoing negotiations. Although this initiative gives the impression of a lull, the situation on the ground is quite different, and the war is intensifying on all fronts. According to the American media outlet Axios, the US army is preparing a vast operation that would consist of invading strategic Iranian islands. At least 10,000 additional American soldiers are expected in the region in the coming days, according to American media. On the Israeli side, the language of threats dominates. Defense Minister Israel Katz promised an intensification of strikes against Iranian territory. Attacks against Iranian territory have not ceased, even as Iranian missiles continue to fall on Israel, particularly Tel Aviv, causing injuries. Iranians themselves seem to be hardening their position. AFP quotes the “Soufan Center,” a specialized institute based in New York, which believes that “the assassinations of high-ranking officials have not only allowed radicals to remain in power, but they have also marginalized the political leadership and placed the Revolutionary Guard Corps at the center of the game.” This analysis would explain the hardening of certain positions currently expressed by Tehran. In practice, the Revolutionary Guards are now threatening to target hotels in Gulf countries and elsewhere, where Americans would be present. They also announced that the Strait of Hormuz is practically closed, having forced three container ships to turn back. Even Chinese container ships, despite belonging to an ally, had to turn back. The closure of Hormuz would be joined by that of the Bab el-Mandab Strait, which connects Asia to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, if another ally of the Iranian regime, the Yemeni Houthis, decide to enter the scene as they have claimed in recent days. In this context, the global economic repercussions of this war are becoming increasingly clear. The price of a barrel of oil has surpassed 110 dollars, and it continues to rise despite the postponement of Donald Trump's ultimatum. The economic consequences are at the center of the G7 foreign ministers' meeting in France on Friday, with the presence of US Minister Marco Rubio. He is expected to be questioned by his counterparts about war plans, while he himself, according to his own statements to the journalists accompanying him, is expected to ask them once again to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In this context, Mr. Rubio reportedly informed his peers that the Iranian war would continue for “a few more weeks,” further specifying, during a meeting with journalists, that “Russia is not in any way hindering our action in Iran.” Israeli advances in South Lebanon On the Lebanese front, fighting continues to rage in South Lebanon on several fronts, particularly those of Marjayoun and Bint Jbeil. Information from various sources reports an advance of Israeli troops on the ground and massive destruction in border villages. The Israeli army even posted a video on its X account showing the flushing out of Hezbollah arms caches in the village of Khiam, in a school, with the intention of showing that the militants are hiding among civilians. The Khiam tunnel The Israeli army also released a video showing a large tunnel that the pro-Iranian militia had built and developed in the immediate vicinity of the local church. The dissemination of these videos illustrates that the IDF now completely controls the town of Khiam. In this tense atmosphere, a statement by an Israeli army spokesperson, Effie Defrin, intervenes: he assured on Friday that Israeli troops are “in more advanced positions in South Lebanon,” and that Israel was committed to disarming Hezbollah if the Lebanese government did not do so. Hezbollah plays the same media game, posting videos, notably of Merkava tanks being targeted in South Lebanon. The party also intensified its strikes against Israeli territory overnight from Thursday to Friday, reaching a new record for missile launches since the beginning of this new conflict. Israeli advances in South Lebanon are beginning to raise fears of an annexation of Lebanese territories. A risk against which Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam alerted UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday, based on explicit threats made by Israeli officials. On the other hand, the humanitarian catastrophe in Lebanon is taking on gigantic proportions: according to the Ministry of Health, the number of deaths has exceeded 1100 and the injured 3200. The UNICEF office in Lebanon has just published a damning report in which the UN organization indicates that approximately 20% of the Lebanese population is currently displaced, that more than 370,000 children are among them, and that 121 children have been killed and nearly 400 injured since the start of the war. UN Women , for its part, specifies that a quarter of women and girls have had to flee their homes.