标签： Asia

An Iran-aligned cyber hacking collective known as the Handala Hack Team has announced it successfully breached the personal mobile device of Herzi Halevi, the former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, claiming to have exfiltrated upwards of 19,000 confidential files in the operation. In an official statement published to the group’s website on Thursday, the hackers revealed their infiltration of Halevi’s device was the result of a multi-year surveillance and cyber operation that granted them unfettered access to what they describe as thousands of sensitive images and video recordings from closed-door high-level security meetings.

In the bold statement, the group claimed that Israel’s most closely guarded national security assets — from top-secret military facilities and crisis command centers to operational strategic maps — have been fully exposed to their team for an extended period. The breach is being described as one of the most impactful cyber incidents targeting a senior leader in Israel’s national security establishment to date, with portions of the stolen data already circulated and reviewed by Middle East Eye. The released materials include visual evidence of previously unreported meetings between Halevi and Arab regional officials.

One undated photograph places Halevi alongside Michael Kurilla, the former head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom), at a meeting held in Qatar, where a large official portrait of Qatar’s ruling Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is clearly visible in the background. A second undated image shows Halevi visiting the iconic Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, while a released video recording captures a meeting between Halevi and Jordan’s Chief of the General Staff, Yousef Huneiti, on Jordanian soil. In the video, Halevi presents Huneiti with a historic dagger that originally belonged to a Jordanian soldier killed during the 1967 Six-Day War, a symbolic gesture that had not been reported publicly prior to the breach.

Alongside the diplomatic and security-related materials, the hacking group also released personal content pulled from Halevi’s device, including private family photos, national identification cards for Halevi and his wife, and what the group frames as embarrassing personal moments. One short video shows Halevi hiding under a piano in a private living room as a woman enters the space.

The Handala Hack Team says it is withholding a large volume of additional stolen data that has not yet been made public, including further visual proof of unreported secret meetings, detailed Israeli military strategic maps, and personal identifying information for senior Israeli military commanders. The group warned in its statement that all of this unreleased material, which includes clear, unobscured imagery of senior Israeli military personnel and combat pilots, will be published incrementally at a future time of its choosing.

This cyber breach is not an isolated incident for the Handala Hack Team, which has built a track record of targeting high-profile Israeli political and security figures. Previous claimed attacks include a breach targeting former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and a senior aide to long-time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Last year, the group claimed responsibility for hacking a personal device used by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, releasing hundreds of his private chat messages and a 141-page contact list that included contact details for multiple international heads of state and world leaders. Bennett acknowledged the breach of his Telegram account at the time, but noted that the released content included a mix of authentic and forged materials.

Herzi Halevi stepped down from his post as IDF Chief of Staff in March 2025, after leading Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip through the first 17 months of the ongoing conflict. He assumed the role of army chief in January 2023, while Kurilla held his position as Centcom commander from April 2022 through August 2025, placing the Qatar meeting between the two leaders within the timeframe of January 2023 to August 2025.

In a move that has deepened long-simmering tensions in the Middle East, Israel’s cabinet has quietly given final approval to 34 new Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank — a single decision that breaks all previous records for settlement expansion in one sitting, Israeli broadcaster i24NEWS has reported. The unprecedented step comes amid Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Iran, and marks a dramatic acceleration of territorial expansion that critics warn eliminates any remaining path to a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. The total number of settlements approved in this one vote already surpasses 63 percent of the all-time annual record set just last year in 2025, when 54 new settlements were greenlit.

Under international law, all Israeli settlements constructed in the West Bank, a territory occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War, are formally classified as illegal. This widespread international condemnation has done little to slow expansion under the current Israeli administration, which took office in 2022. To date, the government has approved a total of 102 new settlements since 2022, alongside the creation of nearly 200 unregulated settler outposts that have since been retroactively legalized by state authorities.

According to anonymous sources who spoke to i24NEWS, Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, attended the cabinet meeting where the vote took place. While Zamir did not issue an explicit formal objection to the settlement plan, he raised clear concerns about strained military personnel allocations to secure the new sites. He recommended that the government phase the rollout, authorizing a smaller number of settlements at a time rather than launching all 34 at once.

The Israeli cabinet intentionally classified the decision initially, a move widely interpreted as an attempt to avoid sharp international backlash at a moment when relations between Israel and its key ally the United States are already strained over the war in Iran. Details of the secret approval were ultimately leaked to the public this Thursday after receiving formal clearance from Israeli military censors. While the full list of locations for the new settlements has not yet been made public, early reports indicate that several sites are located in areas of the West Bank that have never before hosted Israeli settlements, including remote zones that are rarely accessed even by regular Israeli military forces.

This aggressive push into unoccupied territory comes as settlement expansion has ramped up sharply since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war in 2023. Peace Now, the leading Israeli anti-settlement peace advocacy organization, confirmed that 2025 saw a record-breaking 54 settlement approvals, shattering the previous annual record of nine set just two years prior in 2023. Twenty-six of those 2025 approvals were retroactively legalizing unauthorised settler outposts that had already been built illegally on Palestinian land. The group’s data also shows that unauthorised outpost construction surged in 2025, with 86 new outposts erected — a 39 percent increase from 2024, working out to an average of one to two new unauthorised outposts per week.

A recent United Nations report released March 17 documents the severe human cost of this accelerating expansion and rising settler aggression. Between November 2024 and October 2025 alone, the UN recorded that more than 36,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from their homes in the West Bank amid a sharp spike in targeted attacks by Israeli settlers. Over the same 12-month period, 1,732 documented incidents of settler violence that resulted in Palestinian casualties or property damage were recorded — a 25 percent increase from the previous year.

In recent weeks, this violence has reached new levels of brutality. Dozens of Israeli settlers have carried out a wave of arson attacks against Palestinian property, including the burning of a Palestinian medical clinic, opened fire on civilian Palestinian residents, and vandalized a Palestinian school with hateful graffiti reading “Death to Arabs”. Data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, compiled by Agence France-Presse, shows that at least 1,050 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli military forces or settlers since October 2023, including six additional fatalities recorded since the beginning of March 2026.

Lior Amihai, executive director of Peace Now, told independent outlet Middle East Eye that the 34-settlement approval is no accident, but a deliberate step toward permanent annexation of the entire West Bank. “They’re not hiding it. They’re actually very clear about it, and this is the de facto annexation that they’re doing, taking over the territories and ethnic cleansing the Palestinians from Area C,” Amihai explained, referencing the 60 percent of the West Bank that falls under full Israeli security and civilian control. Even with the initial attempt at secrecy, likely driven by a desire to avoid international pressure amid US tensions over the Iran war, Amihai said the current Israeli government makes no attempt to hide its end goal. “This government at large does not hide its intentions to destroy the possibilities of a Palestinian state and peace between Israelis and the Palestinians.”

This latest approval marks the largest single batch of settlements ever approved by an Israeli cabinet, cementing the current government’s legacy as the most aggressively pro-expansion administration in Israeli history. The move is expected to draw sharp condemnation from the international community, though it remains to be seen if it will result in any meaningful diplomatic or economic consequences for Israel.

After weeks of devastating US-Israeli airstrikes across Iran, the announcement of a ceasefire has brought much-needed quiet to civilian communities across the country – but for a segment of Iran’s anti-establishment population that initially pinned hopes of political change on the foreign assault, the end of bombing has only delivered crushing disillusionment. For many who once framed external military action as a shortcut to systemic change, the destruction of civilian infrastructure and broken promises of targeted intervention have forced a painful reckoning.

Leila, a 25-year-old Iranian who requested a pseudonym for security reasons, is among those who now admit they were wildly wrong in their early assumptions. “I thought this was it – I thought the Islamic Republic was finally coming to an end,” she explained. Like many other opposition-aligned Iranians, she bought into the narrative that the strikes would be quick, decisive, and deliver immediate political transformation, even claiming she believed Washington and Jerusalem had already struck a post-conflict power-sharing deal with exiled opposition leader Reza Pahlavi. “I was wrong,” she says plainly.

Leila is far from alone. In the opening days of the conflict, a subset of Iranian opponents of the ruling government viewed former U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as unlikely allies who could clear the path for the change they had long demanded during years of internal unrest. But as the campaign dragged on and the full scale of civilian and infrastructure damage came into view, those rosy expectations evaporated almost entirely.

Leila questions the logic of targeting the country’s basic civilian networks, pointing to the destroyed bridges, demolished railway lines, and flattened oil depots that dot the post-strike landscape. “How does that help change a government?” she asks. The contradiction between Trump’s past messaging and his eventual threats hit especially hard: back in January, at the peak of widespread anti-government protests that had been met with a brutal security crackdown, Trump took to social media to promise demonstrators that help was imminent. Just weeks before the ceasefire, he issued a terrifying public warning to Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” before backing down to agree to the pause in hostilities.

“In the span of just two months, we went from ‘help is on the way’ to threats about the destruction of Iranian civilization,” Leila said. The fallout has not only been political – it has torn apart personal relationships, too. She says she lost friendships over her decision to trust foreign powers, after she dismissed warnings from peers that Trump and Netanyahu would not act in Iran’s best interest, even accusing doubters of being sympathetic to the ruling establishment. Many of those bonds have never healed. “Now I feel like everything I believed in just collapsed,” she admits.

Twenty-nine-year-old Ali shared a nearly identical arc of hope followed by disillusionment. In the wake of the January nationwide protests – sparked by soaring inflation that escalated into widespread anti-government unrest, with conflicting death tolls putting fatalities between 3,117 (per Iranian government figures) and at least 7,015 (per the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency) – Ali came to believe external military force was the only path to change. “We thought war would finish everything,” he said. Instead, the strikes destroyed his family’s home, leaving him and his relatives homeless, though they escaped with their lives.

Ali had bought into claims that U.S. and Israeli military technology would enable precision strikes that avoided civilian casualties, targeting only regime figures and military sites. “Maybe when they realised they couldn’t change the system, they started hitting everything. Or maybe I was just naive,” he reflected.

Not all anti-establishment Iranians shared the initial optimism that foreign intervention would bring freedom. Forty-seven-year-old Maryam says she always knew the campaign would end in disaster. “Only blind people could think that a war started by Trump and Netanyahu would bring us freedom,” she argued. “Didn’t we see Gaza? Lebanon? Syria? How could anyone think this would be different?”

By the end of the strikes, U.S. and Israeli attacks had leveled critical national infrastructure: energy facilities, transportation links, steel and petrochemical plants, a Tehran synagogue, multiple hospitals, universities, schools, and hundreds of small local businesses. “Maybe we should be relieved that the explosions have stopped,” Maryam concedes. “But how do you rebuild a country after this?” She remains sharply critical of Iranians who initially backed the strikes, many of whom she says are now trying to distance themselves from their earlier support. “I cannot forgive that,” she says.

Fifty-four-year-old Abbas goes even further, arguing that the war has permanently ended any remaining political relevance for Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last monarch and a leading exiled opposition figure. “Reza Pahlavi did everything he could to reach to power,” Abbas said. “But he never condemned any of the US or Israeli attacks on Iran’s infrastructure.” He pointed to Pahlavi’s public praise for Trump, noting the opposition leader used every form of flattery to win U.S. support, only to be cast aside once Washington reached a ceasefire deal with the Tehran government. “I hope his supporters understand now: you can’t rely on someone who is willing to see his own people killed and his country destroyed just to get to power,” Abbas added.

For many ordinary Iranians, the ceasefire has brought a long-overdue sense of relief, even as deep uncertainty lingers. Thirty-four-year-old Niloufar, a Tehran resident who spent 40 days sheltering indoors to avoid airstrikes, says the announcement of a ceasefire still feels surreal. “When the ceasefire was announced, it felt unreal. Like something had lifted off my chest,” she said. “For the first time in 40 days, I was able to sleep peacefully.”

Despite the pause, sporadic explosions continue to be reported, and a recent Israeli strike in Lebanon that killed dozens has already been labeled a violation of the ceasefire terms by Iranian officials. Many Iranians remain skeptical that the truce will hold, and distrust runs deep on all sides. Thirty-one-year-old Mehdi says he trusts neither the U.S. and Israeli governments nor his own country’s ruling establishment. “I don’t trust the US or Israel. Honestly, I don’t even trust them more than our own government,” he said. He notes that negotiations were already underway before the strikes began, leaving him wondering why this round of talks should be trusted more than past efforts. “We were negotiating, then suddenly they attacked,” he said. “What if they negotiate again and then strike even harder?”

That sense of profound, widespread disillusionment defines the current moment for many opposition Iranians. Ali sums it up bluntly: “Before the war, we used to say things couldn’t get worse. Now we know they can. We thought war would solve everything. Now we know it’s not that simple.” He adds a final, sharp judgment: “And we learnt something else, too: Reza Pahlavi is a stupid and ineffective politician who shows little real concern for the lives of those of us still living inside Iran.”

Just days after former U.S. President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran, the Middle East has been plunged back into deadly violence after Israel carried out the most destructive and lethal wave of air strikes on Lebanon since the start of 2024.

The scale of the attack was unprecedented in recent months: Israeli military officials confirmed they launched 100 separate strikes across Lebanon in just a 10-minute window on Wednesday, with the heaviest bombardments concentrated in the capital Beirut. Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health confirmed Thursday that the assault left at least 200 people dead and more than 1,000 others injured, marking the single deadliest day of Israeli bombing in Lebanon in months.

Israeli officials have repeated longstanding justifications for the large-scale attack, stating that all operations target only members of the armed group Hezbollah, with the stated goal of weakening the organization’s capacity to launch cross-border attacks against Israeli territory. In a video address released Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed that “more than 200 terrorists were eliminated yesterday” in the strikes.

However, on-the-ground reporting and multiple verified accounts confirm that a large share of the fatalities are innocent civilians, including children caught in the sudden, widespread attacks. Multiple reports document that children being collected from schools by their parents were among those killed in the surprise bombardments. Outlets including Middle East Eye have begun profiling the civilian victims of the assault, whose lives spanned multiple professions and communities across the country.

Among the dead is Ghada Dayekh, a veteran radio presenter and reporter with the independent Sawt Al-Farah radio station. Dayekh had worked at the outlet for nearly four decades, reporting from southern Lebanon continuously since the 1980s, before an Israeli strike destroyed her home in the southern city of Sour.

Another journalist, Suzanne Khalil, a presenter and reporter for Al-Manar TV, was killed in an Israeli strike targeting the village of Kaifoun in Lebanon’s Mount Lebanon Governorate. Khatoon Salma Kershet, a respected poet and researcher who was an alumna of the American University of Beirut, was killed alongside her husband Mohammed in a strike on the Tallet al-Khayyat neighborhood of central Beirut; her death was officially confirmed by the university.

Two young people affiliated with Al-Karama High School in Choueifat — student Talin Ahmed Hamzi and recent graduate Yasmin Hussein Allam — were also killed in the strikes, the school announced via its official Instagram page. In Kaifoun, Rana Hessaiki Mlaheb was killed while on a mission to purchase medication for people displaced by previous Israeli air raids, local outlet L’Orient Today confirmed.

In one of the most devastating individual losses reported, physician Nadim Shamseddine was killed alongside his wife Asrar and their three young children when a strike hit their family home in Kaifoun — a space where Shamseddine also saw patients for his medical work. In Beirut, Ola Attar became the latest member of her family to die from violence: her husband Hamad Attar was killed in the catastrophic 2020 Beirut Port explosion, and she leaves behind two orphaned children.

The deadly attack comes at a moment of fragile hope for de-escalation in the region, following Trump’s ceasefire announcement between Washington and Tehran just 48 hours before the strikes. It has already drawn widespread condemnation from humanitarian groups, who have called attention to the rising civilian death toll and the growing displacement of Lebanese communities amid escalating cross-border violence.