标签： Asia

Diplomatic tensions have escalated across the Lebanon-Israel border this week after a senior anonymous Lebanese official confirmed that Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has ruled out any near-term phone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, quashing earlier reports of a planned historic first call between the two nations’ sitting leaders.

Beirut has already communicated Aoun’s firm stance to the U.S. government ahead of a scheduled Thursday meeting between the Lebanese president and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the official told Middle East Eye. This development comes just 48 hours after the U.S. hosted a landmark diplomatic meeting between Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors in Washington, the first formal diplomatic encounter between the two countries since 1993.

In explaining the decision to reject the call, the senior official noted that Lebanon had already demonstrated flexibility by participating in the Washington talks, and would not take an additional step that would grant Netanyahu a domestic political and moral victory that he has failed to secure through military operations on Lebanese soil. The official added that a first-ever conversation between the two leaders would carry severe domestic political ramifications for Lebanon, and could even spark widespread internal unrest described as “an explosion in the country”.

The planned call between Aoun and Netanyahu was first announced by U.S. President Donald Trump, shortly after Israel’s cabinet convened in a late Wednesday session to discuss a potential ceasefire agreement with Lebanese actors. For his part, Aoun has already clarified that any permanent ceasefire must act as a clear precursor to formal direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, a long-standing core position for the Lebanese government.

According to Israeli outlet Haaretz, senior Israeli military command has received orders to prepare forces currently positioned in southern Lebanon for an impending ceasefire, which local reports indicate could take effect between 7 p.m. and midnight local time.

Despite the ongoing ceasefire negotiations, Israeli military operations have continued and even intensified in some parts of Lebanon. On Thursday morning, shortly after Israeli media publicized reports of the planned Aoun-Netanyahu call, the Israeli Air Force carried out a strike that completely destroyed the Qasmiyeh bridge – the last remaining surface crossing connecting southern Lebanon to the country’s central and northern regions. Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency confirmed that two consecutive airstrikes hit the infrastructure, fully destroying the span connecting the Sour and Saida regions.

The Qasmiyeh strike is part of a broader Israeli campaign to cut off access to southern Lebanon. Last month, the Israeli military announced it would target all bridges and crossings along the Litani River, a waterway that runs east-west across southern Lebanon, to isolate large swathes of the region from the rest of the country. In recent weeks, the military has carried through on this threat, damaging or destroying at least nine crossings over the river. The Qasmiyeh bridge was first heavily damaged in an Israeli strike in late March, but the Lebanese army completed partial repairs and reopened it to vehicle traffic just last week. Prior to Thursday’s second strike, Lebanese troops stationed near the crossing had already closed access roads in anticipation of an attack, according to local Lebanese outlet L’Orient Today. A Lebanese security source told Reuters Thursday’s strike “shattered” the crossing, leaving it irreparable.

The ongoing violence has continued to claim civilian lives across Lebanon. At least 11 people, including women and children, were killed in a series of Israeli strikes across southern Lebanon on Thursday alone. A separate airstrike targeting a vehicle on the highway connecting Beirut to the Syrian capital Damascus also killed one additional person.

Since the start of the current conflict, more than 2,100 Lebanese people have been killed in Israeli attacks, according to official Lebanese government data. The violence has disproportionately impacted healthcare and rescue workers: on Wednesday alone, four Lebanese rescue workers were killed and six wounded in three sequential targeted Israeli strikes on the southern village of Mayfadoun. Lebanese paramedic groups reported that the strikes targeted three successive waves of medics: the first team responded to calls from wounded civilians, the second came to aid injured first responders, and the third arrived to support both teams after the initial attacks. To date, the Lebanese health ministry confirms that 91 healthcare workers have been killed by Israeli forces in the six weeks since hostilities resumed.

Hostilities between the two sides escalated in early March following a joint U.S.-Israeli strike that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, after which Lebanese armed group Hezbollah launched a cross-border rocket retaliatory attack on Israel. Israel has not carried out large-scale strikes on central Beirut since an 8 April attack that killed more than 350 people across Lebanon in a 10-minute wave of 100 strikes, but it continues to carry out daily deadly operations in southern Lebanon as its ground invasion progresses.

In a decision that has drawn international condemnation and reignited debates about systemic human rights violations against Palestinian detainees, the Israeli military has authorized the return to reserve duty of five soldiers linked to the severe torture and sexual assault of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility in 2024.

According to a Thursday report from Israeli outlet Haaretz, Israel’s army chief Eyal Zamir greenlit the return of the service members from Unit 100, the specialized unit tasked with guarding detainees in Israeli custody. The move comes just one month after all criminal charges against the soldiers were unexpectedly dropped, with no internal military probe ever launched into the brutal incident.

The full scope of the abuse was first exposed when surveillance footage of the attack was leaked to Israeli media in August 2024, one month after a far-right Israeli mob rioted to protest military police questioning of the implicated soldiers. The leaked footage shows multiple Palestinian detainees bound and blindfolded on the facility floor, before a group of reservists pulls one detainee aside and uses riot shields to block the camera view of their assault.

Following the attack, the detainee was rushed to hospital with life-altering injuries: broken ribs, a punctured lung, a ruptured bowel, and severe anal trauma. Initially filed in February, the original indictment detailed 15 minutes of unrelenting violence: the accused repeatedly kicked the detainee, stomped on his body, struck him with clubs, dragged him across the ground, and deployed a taser on multiple areas including his head. One soldier also stabbed the detainee in the buttocks, causing a full tear in the rectal wall. Two of the suspects failed polygraph tests when asked about inserting an object into the detainee’s anus and covering for the perpetrator, with examiners confirming their denials were deceptive.

Professor Yoel Donchin, a former medical officer at Sde Teiman, told Haaretz he was stunned by the brutality of the attack. “He arrived, and we saw he had a stab wound in the anus,” Donchin said. “I saw how the soldiers behaved there, how they brought in detainees and forced them to sing songs. I saw a wounded man who had been abused and beaten severely.”

Despite the overwhelming evidence captured on camera and detailed in the original indictment, Military Advocate General Itai Ofir ordered all charges withdrawn last month. Ofir justified the decision citing a “defense of justice” argument tied to what he called improper conduct by senior military prosecution and IDF law enforcement officials, as well as “complexities regarding the existing evidentiary basis.” He also noted that after the detainee was released back to the Gaza Strip, additional legal barriers emerged for the case.

This decision is far from an isolated incident. Human rights investigators and UN experts have documented that the Israeli military almost never holds service members accountable for accusations of abusing Palestinian detainees, and reports of abuse, torture, and sexual violence have spiked dramatically since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023.

Last month, a group of UN experts warned that torture has become “state doctrine” in Israel, enabled by decades of systemic impunity and political protection for perpetrators. “Since the onset of the genocide, the Israeli prison system has degenerated into a laboratory of calculated cruelty,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine. A UN inquiry has confirmed that “Sexual and gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilise, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people.”

Earlier this month, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor released a groundbreaking report compiling hundreds of testimonies from former detainees, concluding that the sexual torture of Palestinian detainees from Gaza constitutes an “organised state policy.” The report details widespread abuses including rape with foreign objects, the use of trained dogs to assault detainees, and repeated sexual assault. One 42-year-old female former detainee from northern Gaza, who was held at Sde Teiman, gave harrowing testimony of being bound naked to a metal table and raped repeatedly by two masked soldiers over two days. She was left shackled naked and bleeding overnight before the assault resumed, and the entire ordeal was filmed. During interrogation, while she was suspended by her wrists, soldiers threatened to release the footage publicly if she refused to cooperate. She described her experience as “another genocide behind walls” and said she repeatedly wished for death to end her suffering.

Multiple independent investigations by rights groups and media outlets, including Middle East Eye, have corroborated these claims, documenting widespread, systemic sexual violence against Palestinian detainees across Israel’s prison system.

While the United Kingdom has drawn public attention to potential domestic food shortages linked to threats blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a far more devastating crisis is unfolding for the world’s most vulnerable populations, whose access to life-saving support has been crippled by the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran. The conflict has thrown global humanitarian logistics into disarray, and the international community has moved far too slowly to address the cascading harms hitting at-risk communities across the Middle East, South Asia and the Horn of Africa.

One of the least visible but most damaging outcomes of the conflict has been a sharp surge in the cost of delivering aid to crisis zones. As global oil prices skyrocket in the wake of regional instability, already tight international aid budgets have been squeezed even further, eroding the capacity of humanitarian organizations to reach people in need. In a new analysis released this week, UK-based international charity Save the Children laid out the staggering human cost of these rising costs: every $5 increase in global oil prices driven by Middle East conflict eliminates enough funding to deliver one month of life-saving aid to nearly 40,000 children. For Save the Children alone, the organization now needs an extra $340,000 per month just to cover the cost of shipping critical aid supplies.

One urgent case already unfolding is a stalled shipment of nutritional support bound for Afghanistan, where more than 21.9 million people rely on humanitarian assistance. The supplies, meant to serve 5,000 children and 1,400 pregnant and breastfeeding women, were sourced from a New Delhi supplier but have been held up by war-related disruptions to global shipping. Since March, air freight costs for the shipment have jumped from $240,000 to $435,000 — now more than double the actual value of the nutritional supplies themselves. Save the Children teams are currently scrambling to lock in lower-cost delivery options, but Willem Zuidema, the organization’s global supply chain director, warned that Afghanistan could run out of critical life-saving supplies by the end of the month. “This is a race against the clock,” Zuidema told Middle East Eye.

While the recent ceasefire in the region has offered a small measure of relief, Save the Children stressed that the economic and logistical ripples of the war will linger for months. Even if commercial shipping through key chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz returns to normal, freight operators have made clear that oil carriers will receive priority loading and routing, leaving humanitarian aid shipments waiting at ports. Compounding these pressures is the Trump administration’s “trade over aid” policy framework, which prioritizes private business opportunities over humanitarian resourcing, forcing non-profit organizations to adapt rapidly to shrinking budgets and growing logistical barriers.

Facing these constraints, aid groups have been forced to rethink longstanding supply chain routes to get critical support to where it is needed. For example, medical equipment and supplies bound for Yemen and Sudan — where Sudan hosts what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis — are currently stuck in Dubai. Save the Children is now pursuing alternative routes: driving aid overland into Yemen, or moving supplies across the border to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, before arranging final shipment to Sudan.

Even though U.S. officials have given repeated assurances that humanitarian aid will be exempt from its regional blockade, the indirect impacts of the conflict are still driving sharp increases in food and essential commodity prices worldwide. In Somalia, where 70 percent of the country’s food supply comes from imports or international aid, the World Food Programme reports that prices of essential goods have jumped by at least 20 percent since the war began, with the cost of key agricultural fertilizers such as urea surging by as much as 70 percent in just a few weeks.

This week, the international community pledged 1.3 billion euros (equivalent to $1.53 billion) in new aid for Sudan, as the country’s own internal civil conflict enters its fourth year. While the pledge was broadly welcomed by humanitarian groups, it comes as global aid efforts are already failing to keep up with the exploding demand for support across multiple crisis zones. Long before the outbreak of the war on Iran, global humanitarian funding had already fallen by almost a third since 2023, with major donor nations including France, Germany and the United Kingdom all scaling back their official aid commitments. The war has accelerated this crisis dramatically: in Iran alone, 3.2 million people have been displaced by the conflict since attacks began, and the first large shipment of aid to the country since February 28 only arrived this Tuesday, with aid workers on the ground reporting overwhelming unmet need.

Amid these growing gaps, independent observers note that the cascading effects of regional conflict are hitting vulnerable populations that are already reeling from years of underfunded crises, raising the risk of widespread hunger, preventable illness and child mortality in the coming months if the international community does not step up emergency support.