Italian peacekeepers in Lebanon not pleased with Israeli actions, it appears, nor is the Italian government. Military context: there are about 7,500 personnel supporting UNIFIL in Lebanon, with Italy contributing roughly 750.

Despite their efforts, the conflict continues.

Some other context in the spoiler: armaments and mutual defense agreements.

Israel continues to flatten residential areas of Lebanon. An open war crime.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxkk1vnp57o

But we still mustn’t criticise them.

BV

There are currently talks on going between Israel's government and Lebanon's government, but as one peels back the layers of the onion Hezbollah isn't a party to the talks.
So I doubt those talks will amount to much, in terms of stopping the conflict.

I just saw an interview on NBC with an IDF member who claimed that every residence in the attacked area of Lebanon which IDF soldiers had entered had a rocket launcher. Every one.

I wonder what those rocket launchers look like.

Video​​​​​​​https://t.me/yigal_levin/95587

Translation:

"The Israeli Ministry of Defense has requested proposals from the defense industry for a system capable of intercepting fiber-optic drones.

According to the specifications published by the Armament and Technology Development Authority (MAFAT), the system must be able to intercept fiber-optic drones flying at speeds of up to 70 km/h and at altitudes of up to 100 meters.

The systems are needed for both mobile and maneuverable units, primarily tank divisions, and for protecting troop concentration areas or stationary infrastructure."

But how many residences have they actually entered? Most of them have already been flattened by bombs and shells - job done. .

Well Bob, you make a good go at that. The Israelies are their own worst enemies. I try to see both sides but the question "what did Hamas expect after the atrocities" wears very thin now. My mother would have said " six of one and half a dozen of the other".

LB, "a pox on both of their houses" takes care of that as well.

In the news today:
No idea of the time horizon involved: days, weeks, or the usual "you didn't meet our preconditions" crap that Hezbollah and the Israelis like to pull.

Video

ORAC, this thread seems devoted to fierce criticism of Israel, with much qualitative comment and bias from folk like Bob Viking, Sallyann1234, artee, Lonewolf50, and dead-pan to name a few. Your thread either needs moderating or terminating, as so many of the comments belong in Jet Blast. We all understand that many people do not like Israel and its retaliatory actions. But it is so tedious to keep reading their little snipes. They bring nothing to any informed debate.

Objection overruled.

Look at the drone video posted just above by ORAC.
Do you want us to believe that all those buildings contained terrorists?

How much of the "destruction" was caused by secondary explosions of stored weapons?

Same question as mine. If the widespread area shown in the video housed so many terrorists and their weapons, it must have contained a sizeable army. Strange they didn't come out fighting.
​​​​​​

They did, it was street to street fighting. Hence the level of destruction.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20...y-test-ground/

​​​​​​​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle...nt_Jbeil_(2026)

Most of the destruction coming from

Baby steps for a longer cease fire? But will Lebanese troops fire at Hezbollah formations who (it can be predicted) will violate the cease fire - as they have done every time there has been one for years. That's the big unanswered question, however this is a nice step forward to the current round of fighting to stop for much longer.

Since Lebanon does not have an air force worthy of the name, who will provide aerial surveillance for cease fire adherence, zone security?
IAF, probably.
(Not sure how UNIFIL fits into this, nor what air assets they have, but I think that most "observer" missions can be handled by UAVs and Drones).

How about normalization of relations?

Sometimes, what it looks like is what it is; who knew.

Israel has had numerous opportunities to work towards something resembling a peaceful resolution to their intractable differences of 2 different groups occupying the same bit of turf, and when there is a glimmer of hope, there is action taken to cancel that avenue. Accommodation or annihilation are the ends of the spectrum, and the latter looks pretty bad on a resumé. Hamas has not made it any easier, but empowering the support of Hamas through the inequities of the settlement plans that Benny brought to the bank in bulk is a self fulfilling act of stupidity. Looks good at the poll booth though.

Lebanon is unfortunate in its choice of geography, they would do better with some continental drift to be apart from their neighbours while they sort out their issues. Hezbollah still has more military capability in Lebanon than the Lebanese government, makes for a few problems with what passes for state policy. Shame, once it was a nice place, but then, once Jews and Arabs lived in some harmony until acted upon by great powers from without.

fdr: for harmony, insert dhimmitude...but we may be wandering off topic with that.

The Lebanese government's inability to handle the foreign-funded military organization within their borders will not change any time soon. That fact puts these prospective negotiations into jeopardy.
The IRGC's client, Hezbollah, is in what way incentivized to lay down arms?
Or, conversely, who will assist the Lebanese government in putting Hezbollah down?
At the moment, it seems that the only people interested in doing that are the Israelis...which takes us back to where we started, doesn't it?

Don't expect this ceasefire to last...heck, it's already being breached. UNIFIL has been around for a few decades. Hasn't stopped much.

The ceasefire for the IDF means that they have stopped airstikes on Beirut but they still consider air and artillery strikes on anything that moves in the south to be fair game.
The targetting of journalists who might report on the bulldozers that are using the lull to raze villages barely makes the news as they do it so regularly.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yvn036evlo
​​​​​​​

You seem to take the accusations as a fact.
How do you arrive at that news person being personally targeted?
(Rather than being in a dangerous place and getting hit as a result).
Is there evidence (or merely accusation) that their location/vehicles were known and explicitly targeted due to being in the media?

How many US journalists were killed in the 20 years of US involvement in Vietnam? 20. 63 reported for all reporting countries.

How many journalists have IDF killed in the last 3 years? Nearly 300; between a 3000% and 10,000% increase in killing journalists over the Vietnam experience.

This against a background of nearly a half-century of exponential improvements in electronic and optical surveillance, which IDF is using to ensure their kills which "minimize" civilian deaths.

Just bad luck eh, wrong place at the wrong time.
It is certainly possible but consider this

1. She was not killed in the initial strike on the car at 14:45. She took shelter in a nearby house and phoned where she was through various channels but was then targetted with an airstrike at 16:27. Even still alive under the rubble, the IDF prevented an ambulance from providing aid which may well have saved her.

2. The IDF have supposedly agreed to a ceasefire. Even if they did not know that she was a journalist, what is their justification for firing at any unarmed civilian?

3. As pointed out by MechEngr, how is it that so many other journalists have developed such bad luck in the last two years? Why are the journalists in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza so much unluckier that their counterparts in Ukraine or any other conflict? https://cpj.org/issue/israel-gaza-war/

Ps: The link in my previous post is not alone in describing this killing as "targetted"
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation...-khalil-israel
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2963337.html
https://news.sky.com/story/israel-ac...alist-13535269

Maybe.
1. The Israelis are better shots than the Russians. (If intentional)
2. The Russians are better shots than the Israelis. (if not)
3. They think that they have a physical immunity and take greater risks because of that attitude.
(Probably not the case here, since journo tried to take cover...)
4. The increased lethality of modern weapons.
5. Too close to another target to avoid the frag pattern.
6. other possible factors all ending with
7. A cock up.
But:
Whether or not they knew who it was in there, or cared, is a piece of this story that would take more evidence to confirm, but that underlined bit sure isn't what I'd expect from our forces in a similar situation.

In any event, thanks for the reply and amplification.

Mech, those are interesting numbers, but think for a minute: how many journos on that list were covering the war from the North Vietnamese side?
You aren't making an apples to apples comparison.

So much for the cease fire.
Not sure if it was airstrikes or their combat engineers who did the underground infrastructure destruction.

Making Gaza and southern Lebanon reminiscent of the atrocities set upon the Jews of Europe in the 30's and 40's doesn't seem to be a smart play for international sympathy or support of their actions.

Right - it's not apples to apples. In Gaza the Israelis have near total observational dominance; at least they claim to and claim they only target Hamas fighters. They seem to know that Hamas fighters are in the ambulances and other rescue teams that arrive to help injured civilians, They should know exactly where every journalist is at every moment and I have a fair belief they do,

There should be nearly zero journalists killed in Gaza.

Your assumptions of omniscience are over the top, but I feel that their very lax RoE is what is at the root of the casualty count and feel that a more disciplined RoE would result in a lower body count. This was discussed in detail a couple of years ago in the JB Gaza thread (one of them) before as usual they got shut down. Not gonna rehash that here. (And no, they do not have triple canopy jungle as an explanation for "no, I didn't see them before the bomb hit, why do you ask?").

Between drones and a lot of way better ISR assets in the modern age, target identification isn't as hard as it used to be, nor is identification of non targets as hard as it used to be.

Way back, the two groups lived peacefully with respect for the religion of the other, until mid post WW-I, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of both Zionism and Arab Nationalism. Given Balfour's thumb print, not really surprising.

Worth reading Menachem Klein’s book Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron
It gives a glimpse of the level of cooperation that existed before the 20th century started to unravel. The pogroms in Europe by our most prominent fascist at that time, led to higher migration and instability in Palestine, aided by the politicisation of the Grand Mufti who knew how to break crockery. All up, an own goal, and the dismantlement of the pommy "empire" that added more fuel to the fire. The bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, is not so different to what has happened ever since, including the situation where the political leaders involved are publicly outraged by their military counterparts actions, and in a scene very reminiscent of today, one of the paramilitary groups (Haganah) has initially intended to do a bombing of this sort, and then decided against it, and then another group (Irgun) went ahead anyway and did it.

History, it may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

And so it continues. What cease fire?

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: you go to war with the air power that you have, not the air power that you wish you had.

Didn't take them long to learn from Ukraine.

How long before swarms of these are patrolling southern Lebanon on a continuous basis?

Video

Precise and effective.
 

That’s excellent. So no need to take out an entire building or street to kill a couple of bad guys.

Noted.

BV

Both sides ramping up drone operations.

Warfare is becoming like the scenes at the start of terminator aren't they?

It is generally unwise to assume that the other team has less competency, commitment and ability to adapt than we have. The use of drones works both ways, and the lesson in Ukraine that stands out hidden in plain sight is, Russia and Ukraine have drone technology on both sides, the effectiveness of the drones is differentiated by the status of the user, whether they are the attacker or the defender. It seems that drones massively increase defender capability, and that should concern Israel which continues a strategy that places attack as a higher priority than defence.

We live in a new world WRT tactics, and those will alter the strategic balances once the penny drops with those of exalted stature that bring us the entertainment that passes for diplomacy today. I still hanker towards the ancients manner of dispute resolution, a la Helen of Troy, (the bit before it got messy with horse poop) where on the plain of troy party A and B send out their leaders and they have a bit of a doo; place Bibby in a paddock with the Ayatollah on his gurney, and see what happens, with Trump as the second course. With drones, the outcome is less certain than we would have expected I'd wager.

Source: Wall Street Journal; May 6, 2026
Whether they hit him or not, this will make coordination and accommodation between Lebanon and Israel more difficult, and may walk back the progress recently made in open negotiations between Lebanese and Israeli governments.

Here in Canada the national broadcaster is clutching its pearls in horror than IDF soldiers razing entire villages à la Gaza are taking casualties from drones launched by folks defending their homes from destruction.

The IDF has long basked in an extremely low casualty rate operating against local populations. With drones we may see an evolution towards a military balance aka MAD.

Tell that to the population of GAZA !!