作者： admin

In a surprise announcement posted to his Truth Social platform Wednesday, former US President Donald Trump confirmed that Israel and Lebanon have reached an agreement for a 10-day ceasefire set to enter into force at 10pm local time Thursday, or 5pm EST. The announcement came after Trump held separate calls with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump wrote in his post that both leaders had agreed to implement the temporary truce to open a path toward long-term peace between their two nations, and he extended an invitation to both leaders to attend high-level peace talks at the White House. These talks would mark the first substantive negotiations between Israel and Lebanon since 1993, and the first planned White House meeting of its kind since 1993, Trump added, noting that both sides have expressed a desire for lasting peace and that he expects rapid progress.

The announcement caps days of behind-the-scenes US diplomatic efforts to arrange the first direct highest-level contact between the Lebanese and Israeli heads of state in decades. However, senior Lebanese government sources have pushed back on the narrative of coordinated direct talks, revealing that President Aoun refused to hold a direct call with Netanyahu before a ceasefire was formally put in place.

This diplomatic friction comes just two days after Washington hosted a first round of direct ambassador-level talks between Israeli and Lebanese envoys, the first such official direct engagement between the two nations since 1993. The senior Lebanese official explained that Lebanon had already demonstrated goodwill by participating in the Washington talks, but would not take an additional step that would grant Netanyahu a symbolic political victory he failed to achieve through military force on Lebanese soil. The official added that a pre-ceasefire call between Aoun and Netanyahu would carry severe domestic political consequences for Lebanon, warning it could trigger widespread internal unrest that would destabilize the already fragile country.

The current crisis erupted after US-Israeli strikes on Iran killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on March 2, prompting Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah to launch a retaliatory cross-border rocket strike against Israel. In response, Israel launched a sustained, large-scale military campaign across Lebanon. A truce agreement was reached to pause US-Israeli military operations against Iran starting April 8 that was meant to include Lebanon, but Israel continued its offensive, leveling entire towns and villages across southern Lebanon. Despite the ongoing fighting, Iranian officials have continued to prioritize a ceasefire in Lebanon as part of ongoing diplomatic negotiations with the US to end the broader regional conflict.

Even as news of the impending ceasefire broke Thursday morning, Israeli forces continued their military campaign. After Israeli media reported that a direct call between Aoun and Netanyahu would happen imminently, Israeli warplanes targeted and destroyed the Qasmiyeh bridge, the last remaining crossing connecting southern Lebanon to the rest of the country. Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency confirmed that enemy aircraft carried out two consecutive strikes on the structure, which connected the Sour and Saida regions, leaving it completely destroyed.

The Qasmiyeh strike is part of a broader Israeli campaign to sever transportation links across southern Lebanon. Last month, the Israel Defense Forces announced it would target all bridges and crossings along the Litani River, which cuts across southern Lebanon from east to west, a move designed to isolate large swathes of the territory from the rest of the country. In recent weeks, the military has carried out that plan, damaging or destroying at least nine spans across the river. The Qasmiyeh bridge had already been hit in late March, suffering major damage, but Lebanese military engineers had partially repaired it and reopened it to traffic just last week. According to Lebanese outlet L’Orient Today, Lebanese soldiers stationed near the bridge preemptively closed access roads ahead of Thursday’s strike, but the attack still completely shattered the crossing, leaving it irreparable, a Lebanese security official told Reuters.

The ongoing Israeli strikes have continued to claim civilian lives across the country. On Thursday alone, at least 11 people including women and children were killed in multiple Israeli strikes across southern Lebanon, while one additional person was killed in a strike targeting a vehicle on the highway connecting Beirut to Damascus, the capital of neighboring Syria. Official Lebanese government data puts the total death toll from Israeli attacks in Lebanon since March 2 at more than 2,190 people.

The violence has disproportionately targeted medical and humanitarian personnel. On Wednesday, Lebanese paramedic organizations confirmed that the Israeli military killed four rescue workers and wounded six more in three sequential targeted strikes on the southern village of Mayfadoun. The strikes deliberately targeted medical teams in waves: the first wave hit medics responding to a call for wounded civilians, the second struck responders who arrived to assist the first team, and a third hit medics rushing to support both groups. The Lebanese Ministry of Health reports that 91 healthcare workers have been killed by Israeli forces in the past six weeks alone.

Israel has not carried out large-scale strikes on Beirut since April 8, when the military conducted roughly 100 simultaneous strikes across Lebanon in a 10-minute window that killed more than 350 people. But deadly strikes against civilian and infrastructure targets across southern Lebanon have continued unabated, as Israeli ground forces push forward with their incremental ground invasion into the southern part of the country. Notably, the US announcement of the ceasefire deal made no mention of Hezbollah, the political and military movement that controls much of southern Lebanon and has been Israel’s primary opponent in the ongoing fighting.

Long-sealed documents pulled from Israeli state archives have recently brought a long-rumored chapter of Zionist paramilitary history into sharp, new clarity, detailing repeated efforts by the radical Zionist Stern Gang to forge a strategic partnership with Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, when British forces held the Mandate of Palestine. First reported by leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the declassified files trace these secret outreach attempts directly to Avraham Stern, founder of the extremist armed group that split from the larger Irgun Zionist militia to continue anti-British resistance through World War II. The core ideological foundation for the proposed alliance, records show, was shared opposition to British rule in Palestine – the territory the wider Zionist movement targeted as the site of a future independent Jewish state.

The documents lay out how the Stern Gang dispatched member Naftali Lubenchik to meet secretly with German officials on the group’s behalf. A 1951 archival account notes that Lubenchik held the false belief that Nazi Germany did not aim for the total physical annihilation of European Jewry, but only sought to expel Jewish populations from the continent and concentrate them in a single territory. This misreading of Nazi intentions laid the groundwork for the militia’s diplomatic overtures.

Long before these contacts became public, the mainstream Zionist paramilitary Haganah – the dominant armed Zionist organization in Mandatory Palestine – was already aware of the Stern Gang’s actions. A 1941 Haganah intelligence document, titled “Contacts with the Axis” (a reference to the Nazi Germany-Fascist Italy alliance), contains previously unreported remarks from Eliyahu Golomb, the Haganah’s de facto commander at the time. Speaking to a small, closed circle of associates, Golomb acknowledged he had received intelligence that a high-profile Jewish militant codenamed “S” had been in contact with German enemy forces. The newly released records confirm the “S” in question was Avraham Stern.

A Polish immigrant who settled in Palestine in the 1920s, Stern held radical views: he pushed for unrestricted Jewish immigration to the region and demanded the full expulsion of what he called the “foreign” British presence from land he deemed inherently Jewish. His animosity toward British rule ran so deep that he was willing to set aside ideological differences with the Nazi regime to achieve his goal of a Jewish state, a stance that put him sharply at odds with the other major Zionist factions of the era. While the Irgun and Haganah had agreed to a moratorium on anti-British attacks for the duration of the war against Nazi Germany, the Stern Gang continued to launch assaults on British targets and even rival Jewish groups throughout the conflict.

Historical records compiled by Haaretz confirm multiple separate outreach attempts to German leadership. One formal proposal even outlined terms for “active partnership” with Nazi Germany in the war, framing the alignment as rooted in “shared interests between German policy and Jewish national aspirations” and calling for a formal post-war alliance between a newly established Jewish state and the German Reich. As late as 1943, Stern Gang member Natan Friedman – who later changed his name to Natan Yellin-Mor and went on to serve as a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset – wrote that “Germany has not yet been defeated and may still become our ally.”

Ultimately, the Stern Gang’s efforts to secure a Nazi alliance never came to fruition, but the Haganah closely monitored every step of the outreach, per Haaretz’s reporting. By 1942, after a string of deadly bank robberies and violent shootouts between the militia and British mandatory authorities, British forces tracked down Stern, killing him at the age of 34. At the time, Stern’s collaboration overtures were a major source of embarrassment for the mainstream Zionist movement, and the Haganah even joined British efforts to crack down on the Stern Gang, hunting down its members.

The newly declassified files also lay bare the full extent of Stern’s core worldview at the time. One document records his conviction that Britain had “betrayed the Jewish people and will never allow the establishment of a Jewish state.” In contrast, he argued, “Germany has no special interest in Palestine, and since the Nazis want to cleanse Europe of Jews, nothing is simpler than transferring them to their own state.” Stern firmly believed a practical agreement with the Nazis was achievable, writing, “negotiations should be opened, and Jews of Europe should be recruited into a special army that would fight its way to Palestine and conquer it from the British.” Additional files confirm Stern sought to “seize control of all of Eretz Yisrael [Greater Israel] by force with the help of a foreign power” – a foreign power explicitly identified as Nazi Germany.

For his part, Yair Stern, son of Avraham Stern, has pushed back on the framing of his father’s actions in an interview with Middle East Eye for a documentary focused on the militia founder. He downplays the Nazi overtures as a minor, context-specific episode intended to rescue European Jews from persecution, arguing his father could not have known the full scope of the Nazis’ planned Holocaust – which was not formalized until shortly before Avraham Stern’s death in 1942. He also dismisses confessions from former Stern Gang members about the collaboration efforts, claiming the statements were extracted under duress during Haganah interrogations and cannot be considered credible.