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commander and key Israel target killed in Syria

When you’re a child, how do you get through a war?A lot of Monopoly, Scrabble, card games, candles and windowless bathrooms turned into family bomb shelters, almost like a big sleepover — if you can ignore the hard tiles and loud shelling of some group trying to kill you for reasons you don’t quite understand.

We grew up during Lebanon’s civil war and are now adults trying to live normal lives, raising our own families as the country crashes and burns yet again.

For my generation, emotional minefields can surround the most mundane activities even 32 years since the war ended.

he ferocity of Israel’s response to the murder of more than 1,400 Israeli citizens has been such that international concern for the Palestinians of Gaza—half of whom, or more than 1 million, are children under the age of 15—has now largely eclipsed any sympathy that might have been felt for the victims of the crimes that precipitated the war in the first place.

Israel has a right to defend itself, and it has a right to seek to destroy, or at least severely degrade, the primary perpetrator of the attacks of October 7,

I am worried that Israel has staked out maximalist objectives, not for the first time, and will, as it did in 2006 against Hezbollah in Lebanon, fall far short of those objectives, allowing the enemy to claim a victory—a Pyrrhic victory, to be sure, but a victory nonetheless.

In light of Friday's attacks on Paris, Facebook activated a feature allowing people to super-impose the French flag over their profile picture.

Some railed against this idea since the feature was not provided after an attack by ISIS on Lebanon just one day earlier.

One site called LunaPics began offering users the option to convert their profile picture into a show of support for Lebanese victims instead.  Now a website called the "All Flags Profile Photo Converter" cropped up.

Syria is a small, poor, and crowded country. On the map, it appears about the size of Washington state or Spain, but only about a quarter of its 185,000 square kilometers is arable land. That is, “economic Syria” is about as large as a combination of Maryland and Connecticut or Switzerland.

Except for a narrow belt along the Mediterranean, the whole country is subject to extreme temperatures that cause frequent dust storms and periodic droughts. Four years of devastating drought from 2006 to 2011 turned Syria into a land like the American “dust bowl” of the 1930s.

The most important physical aspect of these storms, as was the experience in America in the 1930s, was the removal of the topsoil. Politically, they triggered the civil war.

All three lost their lives in a double suicide attack in Beirut on Thursday, along with 40 others, and much like the scores who died a day later in Paris, they were killed at random, in a bustling urban area, while going about their normal evening business.

The first planeload of Syrian refugees from camps in Jordan and Lebanon will arrive in Canada on Thursday,

Another such aircraft will arrive in Montreal on Saturday, he told legislators.

The Liberal government plans to resettle 10,000 refugees from Syria’s four-year-old civil war by the end of the year and a further 15,000 by the end of February.

Paris, whose residual influence in the Middle East remains projected through Lebanon, remains tightly focused on reforms that could unlock more than $11bn (£8.4bn) in development money and has seen its demands for transparency to be introduced to state institutions ignored.

Lebanon’s other traditional backers are disinclined to help without fundamental reforms. The US and Saudi Arabia have largely conditioned any help on Iran-backed Hezbollah being defanged in a country where it holds sway over the political process, feeding off the state economy, while at the same time generating its own revenues.

The US’s “maximum pressure” policy towards Iran is also affecting Lebanon. “The Americans have told us we can sink into the sea as long as Hezbollah remains powerful,” said one Lebanese leader.

The second deadly car bomb to strike the Beirut area in less than a week exploded on Thursday in a southern suburb of residential apartment buildings that is home to top Hezbollah offices and heavily populated with the group’s supporters.

Despite the attack’s apparently political nature, it struck civilians hardest.

The explosion came six days after a car bomb killed a prominent member of the Future Movement, Hezbollah’s main political rival, who had openly criticized the group. And it came a day after reports of the arrest of a Saudi militant who leads a Lebanon-based affiliate of Al Qaeda, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, which claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in November near the Iranian Embassy in Beirut.

Lebanon is facing economic collapse. Since late 2019, the country's currency has lost over 90% of its value, and people's life savings are locked up in banks that have imposed discretionary capital controls. The financial meltdown has pushed half of Lebanon's population below the poverty line, according to the

Political turmoil has exacerbated the crisis. The government resigned after hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate -- neglected and mismanaged for years by Beirut port officials -- exploded, leaving more than 200 people dead and thousands more injured. The heart of the city still stands disfigured with countless buildings damaged and destroyed.

The latest political dispute is between Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri and President Michel Aoun. Hariri has promised, once he finally has a government in place, to stop Lebanon's collapse and restart negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over a desperately needed bailout.

Lebanon has been hit by an economic meltdown, mass protests, financial collapse, a virus outbreak and a cataclysmic explosion that virtually wiped out the country’s main port.

The country’s foreign reserves are drying up, the local currency is expected to spiral further downward.

But the two main Shiite parties, Hezbollah and Amal, accused him of acting on behalf of their local political rivals. They insisted on naming Shiite members of the Cabinet and on keeping the Finance Ministry for their sect. Adib refused and stepped down Saturday.

Lebanese police fired tear gas and water cannons at hundreds of anti-government protesters in downtown Beirut on Saturday, as the monthslong demonstrations turned violent in what is being called a "week of rage."

More than 80 people were hospitalized and 140 have been treated at the scene, according to the Lebanese Red Cross. Demonstrations over one of the country's worst-ever economic crises began in mid-October and led to the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who is now leading the country in a caretaker role.

Protests have been going on ever since, but had largely been peaceful. They erupted in violence this week as demonstrators began smashing bank windows and ATMs. Clashes with police have left dozens injured.

Lebanese security forces have arrested nine people, most of them Syrian nationals, over their alleged involvement in last week's twin bombings in Beirut that killed at least 44 people, the interior minister said.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group claimed responsibility for the attacks last Thursday, which hit a busy shopping street in Burj al-Barajneh.

The initial plan was apparently to send five suicide bombers to a hospital in the neighbourhood, he said, but heavy security forced them to change the target to a densely populated area.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has resigned, saying in a televised broadcast from Saudi Arabia that he feared for his life, while also fiercely criticising Iran.

Mr Hariri promised a "new era for Lebanon" after two years of political deadlock

The prime minister's resignation has opened up a chasm of uncertainty in Lebanon

The sun was rising on the Mediterranean one recent morning when the crew of an Iranian cargo ship heard an explosion. The ship, the Shahr e Kord, was about 50 miles off the coast of Israel, and from the bridge they saw a plume of smoke rising from one of the hundreds of containers stacked on deck.

But the attack on the Shahr e Kord this month was just one of the latest salvos in a long-running covert conflict between Israel and Iran. An Israeli official said the attack was retaliation for an Iranian assault on an Israeli cargo ship last month.

The Israeli campaign, confirmed by American, Israeli and Iranian officials, has become a linchpin of Israel’s effort to curb Iran’s military influence in the Middle East and stymie Iranian efforts to circumvent American sanctions on its oil industry.

With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin   c

Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.

The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.

European leaders should be ashamed by the paltry numbers of refugees from Syria they are prepared to resettle, human rights group Amnesty says.

10 member states have offered to take in refugees and even then only 12,000, it complains. The UK and Italy have offered no places at all, it adds.

European Union aid has reached 1.3bn euros (£1.1bn; $1.7bn), officials say.

What I find striking is the background assumption that whether the United States military has a role to play here is taken to be a simple function of how much we care about other people's suffering. One obvious answer is that caring or not caring simply doesn't come into it: That the function of the U.S. military is to protect the vital interests of the United States, and that it is for this specific purpose that billions of tax dollars are extracted from American citizens, and for which young men and women have volunteered to risk their lives. It is not a general-purpose pool of resources to be drawn on for promoting desirable outcomes around the world. A parallel argument is quite familiar on the domestic front, however. Pick any morally unattractive outcome or situation, and you will find someone ready to argue that if the federal government plausibly could do something to remedy it, then anyone who denies the federal government should act must simply be indifferent to the problem. My sense is that many more people tend to find this sort of argument convincing in domestic affairs precisely because we seem to have effectively abandoned the conception of the federal government as an entity with clear and defined powers and purposes. We debate whether a particular program will be effective or worth the cost, but over the course of the 20th century, the notion that such debates should be limited to enumerated government functions largely fell out of fashion. Most people—or at least most public intellectuals and policy advocates—now seem to think of Congress as a kind of all-purpose problem solving committee. And I can't help but suspect that the two are linked. Duties and obligations may be specific, but morality is universal: Other things equal, the suffering of a person in Lebanon counts just as much as that of a person in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Once we abandon the idea of a limited government with defined powers—justified by reference to a narrow set of functions specified in advance—and instead see it as imbued with a general mandate to do good, it's much harder for a moral cosmopolitan to resist making the scope of that mandate global, at least in principle.

Stipulate, purely for the sake of argument, that Americans do have some collective obligation to prevent suffering elsewhere in the world, and that this obligation is properly met, at least in part, via government. (Perhaps because governments are uniquely able to remedy certain kinds of suffering—such as those requiring the mobilization of a military.) Given that we have finite resources, surely the worst possible way to go about this is by making a series of ad hoc judgments about particular cases—the "how much do I care about Steve?" method. The refusal to consider whatever global duty we might have holistically is precisely what leads to irrational allocations—like spending billions to protect civilians and rebel troops in Libya when many more lives would be saved (again, let's suppose for the sake of argument) by far less costly malaria eradication efforts. Unless there's an argument that we have some specific or special obligation to people in Libya—and I certainly haven't seen it—then any claim about our obligation to intervene in this case is, necessarily, just a specific application of some broader principle about our obligation to alleviate global suffering generally. The suggestion that we ought to evaluate this case in a vacuum, then, starts to seem awfully strange, because if we are ever going to intervene for strictly humanitarian reasons (rather than to protect vital security interests), then the standard for when to do so has to be, in part, a function of the aggregate demands whatever standard we pick would place on our limited resources.

We all know that individuals often make quite different choices on a case-by-case basis than when they formulate general rules of action based on a longer view. We routinely make meta-choices designed to prevent ourselves from making micro-choices not conducive to our interests in the aggregate: We throw out the smokes and the sweets in the cupboard, and even install software that keeps us from surfing the Internet when we're trying to get work done. Faced with a Twinkie or a hilarious YouTube clip, we may predict that we will often make choices that, when they're all added up, conflict with our other long-term goals. Marketers, by contrast, often try to induce us to make snap decisions or impulse purchases when, in a cool hour of deliberation, we'd conclude their product isn't the best use of our money.