The Levant Files

Nournews, an outlet linked to Iran's Supreme National Security Council, argues that the current standoff between Tehran and Washington is better described as a “threshold of decision” than a “threshold of agreement,” casting Donald Trump's negotiating posture as a “diplomacy of suspension” — an imaginary weapon meant to wear down Iran's resolve. In the Iranian state-aligned outlet's telling, the two sides have never appeared closer to an understanding, yet have also never been mired in such deliberate ambiguity, where neither war nor peace is certain and neither a deal nor a breakdown has materialized. According to the analysis, Washington keeps signaling that an accord is near, with American media citing drafts and preliminary understandings and senior Trump officials describing the talks as hopeful. On the ground, however, Nournews contends that U.S. pressure has not fully eased, a naval blockade has not ended, and Washington has shown no willingness to pay the polit...

A nation cornered between a war it cannot win, a collapse it cannot fund, and a fracture it cannot close Lebanon is no longer merely in crisis — it is being dismantled in plain sight, and the world is treating its agony as a diplomatic footnote. Since Israel intensified its war on March 2, 2026, more than 3,000 people have been killed and over a million displaced — more than a fifth of the entire population driven from their homes. The southern third of the country lies in ruins; Israeli forces occupy Lebanese soil and continue to raze entire border villages. A so-called ceasefire signed on April 16 exists only on paper: children are still bein g killed at a rate of several a day, paramedics are bombed in their ambulances, and Beirut's suburbs have been struck again. If this is peace, it is the peace of the graveyard. And the bombs are falling on a country that was already bankrupt. Lebanon's financial collapse — branded by the World Bank as one of the worst the world has seen ...

On the night of May 28, 1453, the light of an eleven-hundred-year-old empire began to fade. Inside Constantinople, a coalition of Greek defenders and Italian volunteers prepared for a final stand against Sultan Mehmed II’s massive Ottoman army. This was not merely a battle for a city, but the collision of two eras. For centuries, the triple-layered Theodosian Walls were deemed impregnable. However, they faced a new reality: early modern gunpowder warfare. Orban's massive bronze super-cannon systematically fractured the stone defenses, while Ottoman forces executed the remarkable feat of dragging seventy warships overland to bypass the harbor's defensive chain. The city’s defense, coordinated by the Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani, held for seven weeks. But in the pre-dawn hours of May 29, fortune shifted. Giustiniani was gravely wounded and evacuated. Simultaneously, Ottoman scouts discovered the Kerkoporta—a minor tactical sally port left unlocked in the chaos. Realizin...

A critical assessment of renewed Greek–Turkish air confrontations and the diplomacy unraveling beneath them The Aegean is once again echoing with the sound of fighter jets locking onto one another. On Monday, armed Turkish F-16s, escorted by CN-235 maritime-surveillance aircraft, breached Greek airspace ten times and were drawn into a simulated dogfight with intercepting Greek jets. It was the second such mock engagement of 2026, after a March incident, and a sharp reminder that the much-advertised Greek–Turkish "thaw" rests on very thin ice. The numbers tell a more careful story than the alarm suggests. Greece has logged 159 airspace violations since January — already on pace to exceed the 225 recorded across all of 2025, when only a single dogfight occurred. Yet both figures are dwarfed by 2023, when Greek data counted 1,172 violations and 87 dogfights. Read against that benchmark, 2026 is not a return to the worst days of the rivalry; it is a controlled escalation, calibra...

For two years the world was told Israel sought a “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon — a temporary security margin to keep Hezbollah’s rockets away from northern towns. That story died this week in the rubble of Tyre. On 26 May, just two hours after ordering some 200,000 residents of one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities to flee north of the Zahrani River — roughly 40 kilometers from the border — Israeli aircraft began pounding the city, damaging a UNESCO World Heritage site. The same week, ground troops pushed north of the Litani, past the very “Yellow Line” Israel itself drew at the start of the ceasefire. A buffer zone does not advance. An occupation does. The military map no longer matches the military rhetoric. Five divisions now operate inside Lebanon, and officials decline to say how deep they intend to go. The Litani — long treated as the red line of Lebanese sovereignty — has been crossed. The method is deliberate strangulation: since March, at least nine bridg...

Israel's Defence Minister Israel Katz used the assassination of a Hamas military commander on Wednesday to reaffirm, without apparent embarrassment, that his government intends to depopulate Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants. The plan, dressed in the bureaucratic euphemism of "voluntary emigration," would proceed, he said, "at the proper time and in the proper manner." The timing and the manner may be unspecified. The intent, at this point, is not. Katz made the statement in a post on X alongside Israel's announcement that it had killed Mohammed Odeh, the head of Hamas's armed wing, in an airstrike in Gaza City on Tuesday night. The juxtaposition was telling: a killing and a demographic program, announced in the same breath, as instruments of the same policy. Israel's security cabinet formally approved a proposal by Katz in March to establish a dedicated directorate within his ministry to facilitate "migration" from the enclave. This is n...

In a development that has sent shockwaves through the international diplomatic community, The Jerusalem Post learned exclusively on Wednesday night that the United Nations has officially added Israeli entities to its blacklist of parties suspected of committing patterns of sexual violence in armed conflict. The decision places the State of Israel on a list that includes designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas and ISIS, marking a historic and highly controversial shift in the UN’s stance toward the Middle East’s only democracy. The Israel Prison Service (IPS) is slated for inclusion on the 2026 list, while other Israeli authorities have been placed under a monitoring framework for potential future inclusion. This follows a period of "notice" initiated by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in August 2025, during which he cited "significant concerns" regarding alleged patterns of abuse. Under UN protocols, any entity added to this blacklist remains for a mi...

Three months into the most reckless military adventure of the twenty-first century, the architects of the 2026 Iran war — the Trump administration in Washington and the IRGC-dominated government in Tehran — have achieved something remarkable: they have turned a regional conflict into a genuine threat to the global economic order. Congratulations to both. Let us dispense with the euphemisms. On February 28, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — a coordinated air campaign against Iran conducted, astonishingly, while nuclear negotiations were ongoing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had warned President Trump that striking Iran could prompt the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump dismissed those warnings, telling advisers that Iran would simply capitulate. It did not. Within days, Iran sealed the strait, choking off roughly 20 percent of the world's seaborne oil trade and 25 percent of its LNG exports. The International Energy Agency has since called it 'the gre...

Lebanon finds itself engulfed in a deepening military crisis as Israeli forces intensified ground operations and airstrikes across southern Lebanon this week, effectively shattering a U.S.-brokered ceasefire that had been in place since mid-April. Over a period of barely 72 hours, the conflict escalated dramatically, leaving dozens dead, hundreds of thousands newly displaced, and diplomatic efforts in Washington hanging by a thread. On Monday, May 25, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in a video message posted to Telegram that his military would intensify its campaign against Hezbollah. "We are at war with Hezbollah, and we will intensify our strikes," Netanyahu declared, vowing to "crush" the Iran-backed armed group. The announcement came on Lebanon's Liberation Day — the anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 after an eighteen-year occupation — lending particular symbolic weight to the escalation. Netanyahu's...