jane arraf

Journalist. happily back reporting for NPR, former NYT, Christian Science Monitor, Jazeera English, CNN, Reuters in lots of places. Currently based in Mideast

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

This doctor is in Lebanon, not Gaza.

People have no idea how bad it is in Lebanon right now.

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

In what lexicon is ethnically cleansing one quarter of a neighbouring state "taking a much tougher stance". Shameful complicity in war crimes by @SkyNews @adamparsons

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

The Israeli military says this operation involved +100 airstrikes and was aimed at establishing “operational control” over the area. It claims around 20 fighters were killed and weapons seized, but provided no evidence, and the claims can’t be independently verified.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

The Golani Brigade 51st Battalion flag was on display at the NYC Israel Day Parade on Sunday — the same unit that 👇

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Notice how they say “incursion” instead of invasion. It’s no accident.

Israel is a BELLIGERENT OCCUPIER in Lebanon, destroying homes and FORCIBLY DISPLACING civilians, as its INVASION deepens—all illegal under international law—and the whole of Western media is normalizing it.

[Yaakov Katz @yaakovkatz]

I hate to be the guy to pour cold water on the reports of IDF troops reaching the Beaufort Ridge in Lebanon, but I struggle to understand why this is being celebrated.

For anyone who lived here in the 1990s, the Beaufort is not a symbol of success. It represents Israel's long and costly presence in Lebanon - something that claimed too many soldiers' lives and ended without Israel achieving its strategic goals.

The fact that the IDF can reach the Beaufort today is obvious and - despite the media festival - is not even close to a victory. The real questions are different: How does Israel eventually leave? What is the political endgame? And are we possibly witnessing the beginning of another prolonged military presence in Lebanon without a clear horizon for how it ends?

Because here is what we already know way too well - getting into Lebanon is always easier than getting out.

[Sam Heller | سام هيلر @AbuJamajem]

Hizbullah’s drones – which Israel is so far unable to intercept – seem to invalidate the logic of any buffer zone, which Israel might have previously justified as a measure to frustrate anti-tank missile attacks and cross-border incursions: https://t.co/eQOSjanAZM

2/4

[jane arraf @janearraf]

@SpencerGuard what an astonishing and baffling analysis. More than 600 of the dead are women, children and first responders. Precision? The remaining figure would mean that almost every single man killed by Israel is Hezbollah which by no stretch of the imagination is the case.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

Breaking: The @IDF now report that they have eliminated 2,500 Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon during Operation "Roaring Lion" (since February 28, 2026).

This is a vital statistic to understand the current situation. Recently, the Lebanese Ministry of Health claimed 3,300 deaths since the beginning of the operation, making headlines in major news outlets across the world.

Assuming this statistic is accurate, it would mean the wide majority of deaths in Lebanon during this operation have been Hezbollah terrorists.

This isn't just a statistic - it is a clear sign that the way the reality in Lebanon is being presented does not reflect reality. The IDF is operating with immense precision, and the truth needs to be put out.

The IDF assessments to count terrorists eliminated, i.e. BDA, uses a wide range of intelligence capabilities, including aerial surveillance, human intelligence, cellular conversations conducted by terrorists and other technological means in order to estimate the number of eliminated terrorists at any given point in time. It's also important to understand in war, there's no such thing as 100% accurate intelligence and that's why the use of a wide range of information sources, provided by different units in the IDF (IDI, Northern Command, and others), is so important.

With Lebanese and IDF (which most media source don’t include) reported numbers, the picture is a lot different than the inversions of reality we continue to see pushed in media and by international institutions. The IDF target terrorists while taking many effective measures to mitigate harm to civilians. That’s what the numbers show.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.

The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.

It had fewer than 50 employees.

And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.

Here is the part the administration tried to bury.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.

One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.

A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.

This is public money. Your money.

Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.

And there is more coming.

A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.

This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.

https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE

[Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane]

Today, Israeli settler terrorists attacked the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank. One of them stormed a family's home, climbed onto the roof, refused to leave, and threatened to kill the family.

[Ghida Fakhry @ghida_fakhry]

An invading army doesn’t simply “cross into” another sovereign country’s territory. This isn’t an excursion.

Describing an illegal invasion as “crossing into” another country is exactly how media language sanitizes and normalizes actions that would be described far more bluntly in other contexts.

[Nada Maucourant Atallah @MaucourantNada]

The investigation is based on interviews with 17 paramedics and two doctors in southern Lebanon, survivor testimonies, embeds with the Lebanese Civil Defence, and a review of video evidence.
Data collected by The National identified at least 20 double-tap attacks targeting paramedics between March 7 and May 2.
At least 121 paramedics and first responders have been killed by Israel in Lebanon since March. 2/

[Mitchell Plitnick 🔥🕎 @MJPlitnick]

One of the ways you construct a false narrative is by shading the truth in as casual a manner as possible.
So, e.g., this brief sentence in a @nytimes article about the burgeoning deal between the US and #Iran references #Lebanon and says, "Despite a cease-fire there, both sides have continuously violated it."
In a sense that is true, in that both sides have shot at the other. But the scale and scope of #Israel's attacks are infinitely larger. More to the point, Israel remains in illegal occupation of Lebanon, has forced everyone in the south from their homes, has repeatedly bombed civilian areas, and started most of those practices before Hezbollah took any action.
You'd never know that from the Times' reporting.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

The British Museum has partnered with the genocide-denying Board of Deputies, on what they're billing as a new "Jewish culture month".

The main lecture intends to use museum artefacts to argue for an ancient Israelite kingdom – an oft-cited basis for Israeli claims of exclusive rights over all of historic Palestine and an implicit rationale for the current genocide in Gaza.

This is the same British Museum that, under pressure from the Israel lobby, recently erased the name "Palestine" and "Palestinian" from its exhibitions.

There's now a predictable "free speech" outcry that the lecture has been postponed till next month because a group of Jewish artists had booked to attend and were expected to challenge the evidence-free thesis that the "Israelites" were the original "owners" of Palestine.

Jewish Artists for Palestine issued a statement that it was “entirely legitimate” to expect a publicly funded museum to host conversations reflecting “different points of view” and that treating debate as “a security concern points to the event as a pro-Zionist propaganda exercise”.

Media coverage – like the Guardian's below – has, also predictably, buried all this context to promote another antisemitism moral panic.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Failure to vote for Israel at Eurovision is a sign of grave alarm and apparently warrants a Senate investigation in Australia.

Beyond parody at this point. They already eroded their free speech laws to protect Israel. Next: mandatory voting for Israel in song competitions.

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

Israel has declared 40% of Lebanon off limits to Lebanese. The Nazis had a word for this: lebensraum

[Nadim Kobeissi @kaepora]

The Israeli army blew up my aunt Zeinab’s house yesterday. She is the fourth immediate family member of mine to have her house destroyed by the IDF in the past two months, ours was destroyed in April.

The IDF knew that this house had no weapons or any sort of military presence, since as can be seen on the fourth photo, they had occupied it for a few days before destroying it: we’ve obtained a subscription to a satellite service, and have been monitoring the area daily to check on our family’s homes. The house was destroyed yesterday as part of a systematic and evil process of destroying every single house in the village of Bint Jbeil.

Israel has been making my family homeless for generations. My grandparents lost their homes to them once. My mother has lost her home to them three times, and myself twice.

None of us have ever been involved in any sort of “resistance” or military action against Israel. In every case, we have been uninvolved, innocent civilians: I am a cryptographer, my mother is a retired journalist, and my father a deceased philosophy professor. My uncles and aunts are history professors and homemakers.

May the world bear witness to this.

[Gregg Carlstrom @glcarlstrom]

We are so far into "mad king" territory that the White House may not even bother to clarify whether Trump just confused Oman with Iran or is indeed threatening to bomb Oman

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

BREAKING: Trump administration is reinstating sanctions against UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs, the world's leading investigator of Israeli apartheid & genocide in Palestine.

A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court just issued an administrative stay, allowing the Justice Department to restart punishing Albanese while the courts deliberate.

Judge Richard Leon had correctly blocked the sanctions, recognizing that Albanese's First Amendment rights are protected because she owns property in the U.S. and her daughter is an American citizen.

But the Justice Department is arguing that foreign nationals abroad have no constitutional rights—a dangerous precedent that would gut free speech protections globally.

The Court of Appeals has scheduled key filings for May 28 and June 2.

This isn't just about Francesca. It's about whether America will uphold free speech or become complicit in Israel's crimes through censorship and intimidation.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

White House comms director to former Trump Secretary of State