Composed gaze

As the rhetoric of hatred and rancour deepens among Lebanese, questions multiply as to what can realistically be done to heal the political and media fracture that is taking root through social networks, now within everyone’s reach and allowing each citizen to voice an opinion (which is, in principle, a good thing) without exercising the minimum of self-censorship, with the result that communal and sectarian fanaticisms pour out freely, beyond any moral or political restraint. This social rift mirrors the vertical divide running through the country, a dangerous divide bound up with the major strategic choices that will define Lebanon’s identity and its regional role going forward, and that centres on such pivotal questions as how to confront Israel and its ongoing aggressions against Lebanon, and the issue of confining arms to the exclusive authority of the State, as prescribed by the Ta’if Agreement, under which all Lebanese militias had surrendered their weapons in the early 1990s, with the sole exception of Hezbollah, under the banner of the “Resistance.” If justifications could be put forward for retaining arms in order to liberate the territory (which was indeed achieved in 2000 in what might be described as a major historical accomplishment, marked by Israel’s unconditional withdrawal from the lands it had occupied), it is certain nonetheless that the function of those arms expanded well beyond liberation, creating a state within the Lebanese state and reinforcing Hezbollah’s political standing vis-à-vis the other Lebanese forces, which led to confrontations of the order of 7 May 2008, when Hezbollah swooped down on the capital and the Mountain in protest against two government decisions that were, in practice, in the interest of state-building. What is regrettable, indeed distressing, is that the very party that prides itself on having achieved the historic liberation of 2000 bears the greatest share of political and military responsibility for the destruction of that achievement, from the July 2006 war through the two support wars of 2024 and 2026, during which Israel was able to reoccupy the Five Hills in the first phase, and more than fifty-five villages in the second, to which it gave the name “Yellow Colour.” If the Party’s organic bond with Iran is no secret (the Party itself boasts of it and proclaims it openly), what frustrates many Lebanese is its eagerness to avenge Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and to declare its solidarity with the Islamic Republic, even as Iran had never lifted a finger in response to the successive wars Lebanon has endured in recent years, nor had it avenged the assassination of one of the most prominent figures of its axis, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. Naturally, none of these considerations can justify certain Lebanese turning their gaze entirely away from Israel’s unrelenting aggressions against Lebanon, its daily violations of Lebanese sovereignty, and the deliberate targeting of civilians, as occurred on 8 April last, bearing in mind that the death toll from these aggressions in the war of 2026 alone has exceeded two thousand six hundred. Some of these Lebanese appear, moreover, fully prepared to acquit Israel of its crimes beyond what Israel itself demands, and call for accelerating steps toward a cost-free normalisation; some go even further, denying Israel’s historical ambitions over Lebanon, at least as far as the Litani River line, and its deep-seated desire to advance toward that river in order to annex the region lying below it, under the pretext of protecting the settlements of the North and their inhabitants! These same Lebanese also turn a blind eye to the alarming developments through which Israel pursues the Lebanese by emptying zones on or around Mount Hermon, zones contiguous with territories it also occupies in Syria, where it has likewise extended its hold since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024. Eager to push Lebanon toward a peace and normalisation agreement with Israel, they do not hesitate to invoke, in order to convince public opinion of the soundness of such a step, the examples of Camp David between Egypt and Israel, and Wadi Araba between Jordan and Israel, notwithstanding the vast political and non-political differences separating those comparative cases from the Lebanese reality. Caught between American pressure, Israeli aggressions, and Iran’s exploitation of the Lebanese front, Lebanon stands at a crossroads in a moment of acute national division that portends grave consequences, unless some means can be found to establish a political dialogue that restores national questions to their proper footing: the monopoly of arms by Lebanese legitimacy alone, the laying of solid foundations for negotiation with Israel (ceasefire, military withdrawal, reconstruction…), with the understanding that all of these steps must take place under the sole roof of the State. Lebanon can no longer afford to outsource its national decisions, and that is precisely what it has suffered from throughout the decades past.

The political and electoral promises of President Donald Trump have evaporated, particularly in the realm of foreign policy, and the glittering headlines about ending wars have come to nothing — he who boasted, upon his election, of bringing “eight wars” to a close — while in return he has ignited two new ones, in Venezuela and Iran, and is now seriously threatening to make Cuba his third. The arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro did unfold without triggering any notable domestic reaction, as the regime abandoned its own leader and adapted with considerable pragmatism to American pressure, but the situation with Iran is an altogether different matter. Events on the ground have belied American and Israeli expectations, for it quickly became clear that eliminating the head of the regime, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with several senior commanders, had not caused the Revolutionary Guards to lose their grip on the country or loosen their iron hold over it. The bet on a popular uprising erupting from within Iran the moment war broke out has also proved a failure, for while a considerable segment of Iranian public opinion harbors genuine hostility toward the regime, it has no desire to ride the American wave. The role played by the United States and its CIA in overthrowing the Mossadegh government in the coup of 1953 remains deeply embedded in Iranian popular and collective memory, having likely entrenched the conviction that relying on the Americans cannot succeed or contribute to real change, especially since Trump himself has no genuine interest in political transformation for reformist reasons, but exclusively on the basis of self-interest. The American administration would have had no difficulty dealing with a new Supreme Leader had he shown the flexibility Washington expected, and it would not then have concerned itself in the least with the Iranian people’s aspirations for freedom, democracy, and human rights. The Venezuelan example remains vivid: Trump sidelined the opposition leader even after she had sought to flatter him by nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently believing that lending her name to the world’s most prestigious award might increase her standing in his eyes. He simply ignored the gesture and continued working with the very pillars of the Maduro regime, which he keeps in a cell at the federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, while securing what he wanted on the oil front. The Venezuelan people’s dreams of change have accordingly crumbled as well. Trump is now threatening Cuba, the island that has unsettled Washington for decades and long served as a thorn in its side, and appears determined to sweep away all the efforts at engagement and reconciliation undertaken by his predecessor Barack Obama to turn the page on the past, opening a new front against it instead. This confirms Washington’s indifference to the most elementary principles of international conduct and to any obligation to act through the United Nations. More than that, a clear drive is underway to undermine and weaken the international order built after the Second World War, of which the “Peace Council” (still faltering) established in the wake of the Gaza war is but one telling illustration. But who says that Washington’s disregard for the real interests of peoples actually serves its own? And who says that reinforcing its alliances with most of the dictatorial regimes in the Middle East and beyond serves them either? It is true that democratic systems do not come into being overnight, and it is true that democracy imported from the West may not take root in every society, but it is equally true that the repression of peoples invariably produces, at one point or another, a political and social explosion. If the experience of the Arab revolutions ended in painful outcomes, it did so because of complex circumstances, some related to the seizure of the revolution by regimes themselves (Syria being the clearest example), others to the inability of the revolutionary forces to organize, an inability itself attributable to the fact that dictatorial authorities had tamed their societies and drained them of the elites capable of leading a project of change. None of this, however, justifies the West’s retreat toward a policy of rehabilitating existing regimes or replacing them with others no less repressive than those they displaced. As for the Middle East, the question no longer concerns solely the nature of the political societies of the Arab region, but also Israel’s relentless pursuit of war, and, something new, its success in dragging the United States along into its multi-front conflicts, even when no real threat to American national security exists, contrary to what Israel works hard to sell. The latest of these wars is the one waged against Iran, which has itself not refrained from harming its neighbors in the Arab Gulf states, something that will make future coexistence a lasting challenge. This Israeli insistence on averting its gaze from any idea of peace, indeed on destroying it through wars and occupations, will have profoundly negative repercussions across the entire region for generations to come. On the Palestinian front, Israel does not content itself with destroying Gaza and bombing it daily even after the ceasefire (reaching a terrifying number of martyrs approaching 75,000!); it also pounces on the West Bank, planting settlements there that definitively foreclose any peaceful solution and bury the historic two-state project, which will never see the light of day if Israel persists in its regional policies. This policy of imposing facts on the ground is one Israel applies equally in southern Lebanon and southern Syria, portions of which it has occupied following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, in addition, of course, to its occupation of the Syrian Golan since 1967, a territory it refuses to relinquish and has formally annexed, with no intention of reversing that annexation. Unless the region manages to hold Israel to firm rules, including sustained pressure to abandon the policy of permanent and rolling wars and a genuine recognition of the Palestinian people’s legitimate rights, Israel will not be able to sustain its occupation project indefinitely. The Abraham Accords have shown that they did not defuse tensions in the region, on the contrary they exacerbated them, and that they did not provide Israel with the security it pursues from one war to the next. The smell of fire and gunpowder fills the Middle East, and new approaches as well as new policies are now inescapable.

What will the situation of Lebanon and the region look like in the aftermath of the American-Israeli war against Iran? And what will become of the Lebanese-Lebanese rift, which has deepened to unprecedented levels under the combined weight of this conflict, of Hezbollah's engagement in it, and of the Israeli aggressions that continue to spread across Lebanese territory, as the death toll surpasses a thousand and climbs further with each passing hour? On the Iranian side, the regime's survival roughly a month after hostilities broke out constitutes an achievement in itself, and it is precisely what the partisans of what once styled itself the "axis of resistance" would readily describe as a "victory." The term, of course, remains relative, since what counts as a victory by the standards of that axis amounts to a resounding failure when measured against the actual course of the war. A regime that clings to power over ruins cannot genuinely lay claim to victory, and Iran will need many decades to recover from the collapse into which this devastating conflict has plunged it. Yet by the calculations of a theocratic and dogmatic regime deeply entrenched in its ideological certainties, the fact of having withstood the greatest power in the world, which boasts of its military might, as well as its regional ally that managed in a matter of months to overturn the balance of forces across the region, represents an undeniable feat. Beyond that, in the Iranian reckoning, Tehran succeeded in challenging the Iron Dome system, penetrating Israel's security shield and raining hundreds of missiles down on Israeli cities and towns, in coordination with Hezbollah, which itself fired hundreds of rockets at northern Occupied Palestine while simultaneously resisting the columns of the Israeli army that pressed relentlessly into southern Lebanon and advanced in the occupation of its villages, as a prelude to establishing a new fait accompli that would translate into an unprecedented ceasefire agreement. For the 2024 agreement appears to have been rendered void, having never been honoured by Israel since the moment of its signing, throughout more than fifteen months during which Lebanese sovereignty was violated hundreds of times without the "mechanism" committee ever managing to compel Israel to implement any of its provisions. On the domestic Lebanese front, those who had wagered on "the end" of Hezbollah can no longer afford to look indefinitely away from what is unfolding in Iran, nor can they deny that this "Iranian resilience," however costly, will sooner or later provide Hezbollah with some measure of breathing room. More fundamentally still, they cannot ignore the Israeli aggressions that strike innocent civilians, paramedics, doctors and journalists, while targeting civil infrastructure such as bridges and public installations in order to sever the region south of the Litani River from the rest of Lebanese territory, not to mention the wholesale razing of front-line villages with the aim of permanently displacing their inhabitants and preparing for a long-term occupation, one of a radically different nature from what occurred during the occupation of the South beginning in 1978, then during the great invasion of 1982 that reached Beirut, until the complete liberation of the territory in 2000. If this new reality compels those Lebanese who justifiably opposed Hezbollah's engagement in this war on behalf of all and without prior consultation to reconsider their certainties and their bets on the Party's elimination, it simultaneously demands that Hezbollah itself immediately renounce its language of threats, intimidation, accusations of betrayal and charges of "Zionization" levelled at one official or another. One cannot accept that this armed party, which has dragged Lebanon into a war from which the country gains nothing, should turn against the rest of the Lebanese people once the fighting subsides, as several of its leaders and certain media figures moving within its orbit have suggested, in a brazen challenge to the feelings of broad segments of society and to the very idea of the State, which is supposed to be the common ground shared by all components of the nation. What Israel perhaps derives the greatest benefit from is the stoking of discord and resentment among the Lebanese, the pitting of communities against one another, since this spares it considerable effort by keeping the Lebanese consumed with internal strife and turned away from confronting its expansionist project, which is now taking on alarming dimensions as voices rise from within Israel itself calling for a "Greater Israel" and the necessity of expanding northward into southern Lebanon in order to protect villages and settlements condemned to chronic instability. The Lebanese have already lived through the painful experience of 7 May 2008, which amounted to nothing less than an armed coup carried out against the idea of the living-together among the various components of Lebanese society, at the height of Hezbollah’s power and armed hegemony over the country's national, constitutional and political life. Such an experience remains unacceptable in any form whatsoever, for it would be a ready-made recipe for civil war and the repudiation of all the achievements of civil peace, reconstruction and stability, however fragile, made possible by the Taëf Agreement of 1989. What the Lebanese must cultivate in this historic moment is humility and a return to fundamental positions, so as to work toward ending the war and the aggressions, rebuilding the national climate conducive to consolidating stability and internal peace, and thereby defeating every project that seeks to fuel divisions through violence, the very violence that the country endured throughout fifteen years of devastating civil war.

In times of war and crisis, the Lebanese scene divides between those who drag every division and grievance back to the surface in order to inflame and worsen them, and those who work to build a climate of national unity capable of carrying the country through the difficult period, waiting for calmer days in which the great national questions might at last be addressed. It is certain that this is not the moment to plunge into questions as deep and fraught as the validity of the Taif Agreement, the nature of the political system, or the abolition of political confessionalism. This is a phase for ending the war, for tending the wounds, for finding a way out of the impasse into which the country has sunk — an impasse that nothing, for now, suggests will be easy to escape in the near term. There are axioms that cannot be abandoned if the country is to pull itself out of the deep rut it is in — axioms whose abandonment has already proven, in practice, to carry a very steep price: — The exclusivity of arms in the hands of the Lebanese State. There is no alternative but to reach this reality, which is taken for granted in every country in the world. No state agrees to "outsource" the defence of its territory to an armed faction that does not answer to its authority and is bound, in its relationships, its financing and its weaponry, to a foreign state. The Lebanese government has made meaningful advances in this direction, but neither the unrelenting Israeli strikes have helped it accomplish its mission, nor has the very nature of implementing this difficult decision — that of the arms monopoly, which touches on numerous internal complexities and sensitivities — provided it the means to do so. As for those counting on Israel to take care of this, the experience of the fifteen months between the ceasefire and the resumption of hostilities should make it hard to believe in that option, however devastating the blows dealt to Hezbollah have been. — The decision of war and peace. If the conviction has taken root in the minds of the vast majority of Lebanese that the State must hold the monopoly on arms and the defence function, the same applies to the decision of war and peace, of which the State alone must be the holder. The irresponsible invocation of the refusal of this reality, on the pretext that it is Israel which today decides war and peace with Lebanon, does not remove the necessity of settling this question on Lebanese terms — this argument is just as unacceptable as the claim once made that Israel would have launched the war regardless, even had Hezbollah not fired its six rockets at the occupied territories. — A defence plan. It is impossible to look away from the necessity for Lebanon to think seriously, going forward, about how to protect its territory from Israeli aggressions that have never truly ceased on its soil since the Nakba of 1948, ebbing and intensifying according to political and military circumstances. While Lebanon will certainly never be able, with its official forces alone, to face an Israeli army guaranteed regional military supremacy by unlimited American backing, it is nonetheless essential to devise more flexible arrangements capable of protecting its southern border and the frontline villages, as they have come to be known. It remains the case that the political and military challenges now facing Lebanon call for an active diplomatic mobilisation, led by the Lebanese government, to place the proposals of the President of the Republic on the table — through the intermediary of Lebanon's friends — even if those proposals have been met with an Israeli political coldness that stands in sharp contrast to the blaze on the Lebanese front. It is clear that the diplomatic paralysis that set in days after the start of the war stems from Israel's rejection of all proposals and its complete lack of urgency in extinguishing this front — all the more so as Hezbollah, driven by the anger provoked by the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has recovered something of the initiative, launching salvos of rockets that deprive the inhabitants of northern Israel, along the Lebanese border, of all security and stability, forcing them to seek refuge in underground shelters. If Israel shows no sign of haste in bringing the war against Lebanon to an end, the greater danger remains its intention to reoccupy large swathes of southern Lebanon — which would represent a major reversal of the liberation of 2000, wrested at the cost of great sacrifice, honour and defiance, and the loss of a considerable achievement that set Lebanon apart at the time as the only Arab country to have compelled Israel to withdraw from the territories it occupied, not only without a peace agreement, but without restriction or condition of any kind. Lebanon today faces a bitter truth: it is Lebanon that is offering negotiations to Israel, and Israel that is refusing them — whereas in the past it was Israel that repeatedly sought to conclude a peace treaty with Lebanon, and Lebanon that would not consent. Between that moment and this one, what matters is that the country not lose itself in the incendiary rhetoric coming from both sides: on one side, those who boast of their strength despite the strikes and ceaselessly threaten to descend on the Lebanese interior when the time comes; on the other, those ready to absolve Israel of all its aggressions and all its targeting, who seem barely capable of registering that more than a thousand martyrs have fallen in Lebanon in the space of two weeks alone!

With the eruption of the second Israeli-American-Iranian war, questions and observations crowd around this great conflict that will, beyond any doubt, reshape the face of the region and the world, leaving in its wake profound consequences for the future of the Middle East and the nature of its political relations. The following are perhaps the most significant observations: — It is clear that this war was not well prepared. Despite the elimination of the Supreme Leader, Iran's Defense Minister, and the supreme command in the very first hours, Iran's command-and-control architecture is equally clearly decentralized — as evidenced by the uninterrupted volleys of missiles fired in every direction. The inability of the United States and Israel to strike Iran's Second Strike Capability confirms this impression. The wager on a wave of protests sweeping across Iran has likewise failed and cannot be relied upon. Nor can one overlook the fact that the Iranian fighter operates from a religious doctrine in which martyrdom is not feared but sought as both goal and gain. — Alongside Iran's considerable losses, one cannot avert one's gaze from the fact that Iranian missiles have already destroyed all American military bases in the Gulf states, according to a striking report published by The New York Times — a fact that raises the serious and probing question of whether American immersion in this war truly serves "the national interest of the United States." Political commentary has multiplied, asserting that Israel has "entangled" Washington in this battle, informing it of its decision to go to war rather than seeking American approval, as previous Israeli governments habitually did before launching any military operation. This glissement, in turn, raises questions about Trump's pledge to stop all wars and his boast of having ended at least eight of them. — There is no political or legal cover for this war, neither at the international level — with a deliberate bypassing of the United Nations and all its bodies — nor at the domestic American level, President Donald Trump having entirely circumvented Congress without seeking its approval, disregarding America's political institutions and its Constitution. — The debate within the United States is widening over the true objectives of the war and whether Iran genuinely poses a threat to American national security. Tehran has long raised the banner of "Death to America" and stands accused of numerous attacks against American forces — that much is true. But the serious discussion turns on whether Iran actually threatens American domestic security, and whether going to war is the optimal response to the challenge it represents. This debate returns, inevitably, to Israel: the threat is aimed at Israel, not America, and it is Israel that has drawn the United States into this conflict. Washington is paying a far higher price than Israel itself. — Iran's bombardment of the Gulf states ought to impel the United States to think deeply about its ramifications, and to make an unavoidable comparison: the Gulf states contribute to the American economy through arms and non-arms deals worth billions of dollars, while Israel has cost Washington tens of billions of dollars annually since the Nakba of 1948. Is there not a growing American sense that Israel has become more of a "strategic burden" than a genuine "strategic ally"? It is a serious political debate circulating in many American circles. Whatever the case may be, the region is open to every possibility. Israel's ambition to dominate the region and bite off its lands one by one may prove no easy task, given the sweeping transformations now unfolding across the Middle East. Its policy — built on the refusal to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, on the perpetuation of the occupation of the 1967 lands, on decades of complete indifference toward every peace initiative, and on the rejection of every proposed solution — cannot endure forever. Who said that Arab acceptance — and non-Arab acceptance — of Israel's total dominion over the region would come within easy reach, even if Arab performance over the past decades has been disappointing and inadequate in confronting the mounting challenges posed by the Israeli project at each of its stages — from the establishment of the Zionist state on the lands of historical Palestine, to the progressive encroachment on other Arab lands, to the refusal to establish an independent Palestinian state, to the prevention of refugee return or any understanding on arrangements for Jerusalem, up to the collapse of every political and moral barrier in the recent war on Gaza, where the number of martyrs has approached seventy thousand civilians and innocents? The region has entered a painful labor, and emerging from this war will be far harder than entering it. The events to come will bear witness to that.

The dangerous juncture through which the Palestinian cause is passing is perhaps the most critical since the Nakba of 1948 — not only because of the erasure of the principle of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, the confiscation of their land, and the establishment of another state on that land, but also because of the nature of the Israeli project, which has assumed an expansionist colonial character and relentlessly seeks to devour ever more territory, thereby nullifying the two-state solution and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state even within its minimum borders — those of 1967. The settlement projects successively approved by the Israeli government represent merely the tip of the iceberg of what is being planned; these projects aim to transform the face of the West Bank, in which more than 800,000 settlers have spread to this day, with the dual purpose of fulfilling the expansionist objective and eliminating any serious prospect for the establishment of a Palestinian state. As international rejection of settlement expansion recedes to the level of verbal condemnation alone, the situation in the West Bank grows ever darker: settlers, shielded by the Israeli army, storm villages and towns, wreaking destruction upon homes, property, and crops. It is true that Arab and Islamic positions condemning these successive measures have not subsided, yet they remain incapable of changing the prevailing reality — or even freezing it at a minimum — particularly since they continue to reiterate their adherence to the Arab Peace Initiative adopted at the Arab Summit in Beirut in 2002, to which Israel has paid no meaningful attention since that date. On the contrary, Israel has sought to weaken its presumed Palestinian "partner" — the Palestinian National Authority born of the Oslo Accords (1993) — and has deliberately averted its eyes from the rise of its historical adversary, the Hamas movement. As successive American administrations boast of their alignment with Israel and compete over who has rendered it the greatest political, military, and material support, the current president, Donald Trump, considers himself to have covered considerable ground in this domain. It was he who, during his first presidential term, decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — dismissing the city's pluralistic nature and its religious and historical symbolism — and transferred his country's embassy there; he also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied since 1967. Though the Palestinian cause has garnered widespread popular sympathy, expressed in protest demonstrations that swept through numerous European capitals over consecutive months, this popular indignation has not been fully reflected in the policies of Western governments, which have turned a blind eye to the massacres committed in the Gaza Strip. They have thereby exposed a policy of double standards toward the situations in Ukraine and Palestine, suggesting as though Palestinian blood were cheap, while Ukrainian blood deserved every form of support in the world. Naturally, every drop of human blood is precious, and its shedding must never be treated lightly. These policies have, in practical terms, led to the "demonization" of the Palestinian — branded with the charge of terrorism even as he strives to liberate his land — while "humanizing" the Israeli, invariably framing his conduct within the context of "self-defense," even though it is he who occupies the land. While the targeting of civilians is an act rejected, condemned, and denounced in every time and place, what is happening in Palestine did not begin on October 7, 2023 — a fact noted by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who declared that these events "did not come from a vacuum," an observation that has since earned him considerable political and media harassment from Israel and its supporters inside and outside the United Nations. Israeli propaganda, backed by its enormous capabilities across the globe, has managed to invert many truths and even to fabricate narratives serving its interests and those of the overriding discourse it has persistently advanced — namely, that it is defending itself in everything it does, even if this has resulted in the death of more than 70,000 civilians in Gaza, some of whom died deliberately of hunger and thirst, and even if it has bombed hospitals, medical and healthcare centers, schools, universities, cultural clubs, and sports facilities. Social media platforms, which constitute the broadest space for youth and adolescents, have likewise failed to rectify the narrative — also because of the stringent censorship exercised by the corporations that own and operate those platforms, which have blocked hundreds of accounts and sites reflecting pro-Palestinian opinion and dissenting from the prevailing current that supports Israel and its relentless war against the Palestinian people. Here, too, the problem of narrative presents itself — if the expression is apt: Israel has always claimed that it is fighting the Hamas movement, whereas in reality it has been waging war against the Palestinian people as a whole, as evidenced by the fact that the rate of destruction in the Gaza Strip has exceeded 80 percent. Likewise, the slogans raised about liberating the captives by force proved hollow: despite total devastation, Israel was unable to achieve this, and was compelled to resort to political mediation in order to secure the release of its captives — both living and dead — through exchange deals. Figures published by the Institute for Palestine Studies indicate that the number of hospitals destroyed or rendered non-functional in the Gaza Strip has reached 38; the number of universities and educational institutions destroyed, 165; the number of schools destroyed, 670; and the number of mosques destroyed, 835. The alarming statistics continue: 1,670 members of medical staff were killed; 140 from civil defense teams; 787 from the police and those securing humanitarian aid; 203 from UNRWA employees; 254 journalists; and 1,023 scholars, academics, and teachers. It is clear that the conflict has taken new directions under the shadow of impunity and amid an unprecedented violation of international laws and norms — placing the entire world on trial and raising fundamental questions about the slogans that certain states have long brandished and celebrated: human rights, democracy, equality, and justice. It raises equally profound questions about the nature of the new international order, dominated as it is by the survival of the strongest and a contemptuous disregard for the fundamental rights of oppressed peoples.