标签： Asia

After four rounds of US-mediated direct negotiations between Israeli and Lebanese delegations in Washington, a US-backed draft plan for a ceasefire between the two nations has emerged, but its path to implementation remains deeply uncertain, with multiple Lebanese stakeholders warning critical pieces are still missing and key regional players stand opposed.

The two days of talks concluded with a preliminary declaration that lays out a framework for a ceasefire and the establishment of pilot security zones in southern Lebanon. Under the proposed arrangement, the Lebanese Armed Forces would take sole control of these designated areas, barring all non-state armed groups from operating within their borders. The pilot zones are framed as an initial testing ground for a wider security arrangement that could be expanded across the region if successful.

However, a senior Lebanese official close to President Joseph Aoun told Middle East Eye that the draft proposal lacks any clear, binding implementation mechanism, and its entire fate now rests on whether Hezbollah, the powerful non-state armed group that holds significant sway in southern Lebanon, will give its approval. What is more, the official confirmed that neither Hezbollah nor Nabih Berri – Lebanon’s long-serving Parliament Speaker, a key Hezbollah ally and established intermediary between the group and Washington – were privy to the full details of negotiations as they progressed. Once the draft text was finalized, President Aoun circulated it to both Hezbollah and Berri to gather feedback before communicating Lebanon’s final position to US negotiators.

The senior official described the closed-door negotiations as grueling, noting that the Lebanese delegation threatened to walk out and suspend talks after Israeli negotiators pushed back against demands for a full, immediate ceasefire. It was this deadlock that led US mediators to put forward the pilot zone concept as a compromise middle ground to break the impasse.

Another sticking point emerged during the talks when the US delegation insisted on including language condemning what it called “Iran’s attacks on countries in the region”. Lebanese negotiators viewed the repeated push for this language as a deliberate attempt to decouple the Israel-Lebanon peace track from ongoing US-Iran negotiations. Iran has listed a full end to Israeli strikes on Lebanon as a core condition for its own ceasefire talks with Washington, and just days prior, Tehran suspended negotiations in response to Israeli threats to bomb central Beirut.

The situation on the ground in southern Lebanon has continued to deteriorate despite a nominal ceasefire declared on 17 April. Since that truce took effect, Israel has steadily expanded its military presence across the region, through territorial occupation, repeated air strikes, and mandatory evacuation orders for local residents. Roughly one-fifth of Lebanon’s total territory is now under direct or indirect Israeli control, a footprint that extends far beyond the initial buffer zone Israel declared when the truce was announced. Notably, the new US-backed proposal makes no mention of requiring an Israeli troop withdrawal or ending ongoing Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed Thursday that Israeli forces would “for the time being, continue its fire and operations on the ground”. Katz added that Israel would keep working to dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the region and retained US-backed “freedom of action” to strike targets in Beirut in response to any attacks on Israeli territory.

Hezbollah officials say they were not surprised by the outcome of the Washington talks. A source familiar with the group’s position told Middle East Eye that Hezbollah opposed direct negotiations between the Lebanese state and Israel from the start, predicting it would produce a framework that ran counter to the group’s core interests. “From the first statement issued after the first joint meeting that initiated the direct negotiations path, we knew this is where the Lebanese state intended to go,” the source said. “That is why we were against this track from the start.”

Hezbollah secretary-general Naim Qassem has since formally rejected the outcome of the talks, calling direct negotiations with Israel “shameful” for Lebanon and dismissing any attempts to tie a ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal to the group’s disarmament. Qassem stressed that any credible ceasefire must cover all of southern Lebanon, where Israel has seized a self-declared security zone, and argued that Israeli security in northern towns would never be achieved as long as Lebanese villages remain under attack, unsafe, and destroyed. “Towns in northern Israel would not be secure as long as our villages are unsafe, bombed, destroyed, and our people are being killed,” Qassem said. For Hezbollah, any discussion of the group’s weapons must only take place after a full stop to all Israeli attacks across Lebanon and a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from all occupied Lebanese territory – a position that directly clashes with the US framework, which centers on restricting Hezbollah’s military presence and activity south of the Litani River as a core condition for the ceasefire.

Criticism of the proposal has also come from other Lebanese officials not affiliated with Hezbollah. One senior Lebanese official not involved in the negotiations described the proposal’s wording as deeply ambiguous, saying it remains unclear whether the ceasefire and security arrangements would take effect simultaneously or sequentially. The official also called out a section of the draft that endorses US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that Hezbollah is “an enemy of Lebanon” in addition to being an enemy of Israel and the United States, calling the paragraph embarrassing for Lebanon even if it only reflects a US position.

The dispute highlights the narrow, high-stakes path facing the Lebanese government. The presidency has framed the proposal as a last chance to secure a broad ceasefire, but Hezbollah views it as an attempt to achieve through diplomacy what Israel failed to win through military force. It also exposes a core contradiction at the heart of the US-led process: Washington is pushing for a formal state-to-state agreement between Lebanon and Israel, but the most powerful military actor on the Lebanese side – Hezbollah – has been excluded from the negotiations entirely.

Israeli and Lebanese delegations are scheduled to reconvene later this month for further talks on political and security arrangements. Even so, Lebanese officials openly acknowledge that without Hezbollah’s backing, the proposal is at risk of remaining nothing more than a non-binding diplomatic framework with no viable path to implementation.

In recent weeks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has directed the Israel Defense Forces to expand its territorial control in Gaza to 70% of the enclave, marking an 11% increase from the roughly 60% the military already holds. This new expansion aligns with an updated map distributed to Gaza-based aid agencies in late March, which draws a new “orange line” marking Israel’s newly claimed restricted military zone. This boundary extends 11% beyond the “yellow line” demarcation agreed upon during the October 2024 ceasefire deal with Hamas.

Compounding this territorial shift, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has publicly reaffirmed the Israeli government’s plan to relocate large numbers of Palestinian residents out of Gaza “when conditions are appropriate and the process is carried out appropriately.” These unfolding moves come amid heightened domestic political upheaval in Israel: the country’s parliament, the Knesset, voted to dissolve itself on May 20, clearing the path for a snap national election to be held as early as this September.

Experts and international observers have already flagged that Israel’s expanding push directly contradicts the 20-point Gaza peace plan brokered by the U.S.-led Board of Peace. That framework explicitly calls for a phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces from the enclave and includes explicit language guaranteeing that “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.” Even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged this mismatch during a recent congressional hearing, confirming that the peace plan “doesn’t call for” expanded Israeli military control over Gaza.

As Israel expands its hold, the 2.1 million Palestinian residents of Gaza are increasingly squeezed into a shrinking, war-ravaged, overcrowded strip of coastal land, with little meaningful intervention from the global community to halt the territorial shift. To understand the gravity of these actions, it is necessary to examine them through the lens of established international law, which places clear limits on military occupation of foreign territory. While international law permits temporary occupation to achieve legitimate wartime objectives, two core rules are non-negotiable.

First, an occupying force cannot assert a permanent legal claim to the territory it seizes. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter explicitly outlaws territorial conquest as an instrument of war, a principle the global community enforced firmly in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, where breaches were widely recognized as the crime of aggression. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) reaffirmed this principle in its 2024 advisory opinion on Israeli actions in occupied Palestinian territories, making clear that Israel cannot claim sovereignty over any part of Gaza.

Second, all occupying powers are bound by international humanitarian and human rights law, which requires them to protect the welfare of the civilian population under their control and preserve the existing demographic composition of the occupied territory. This means forced displacement of the local population and transfer of the occupying power’s own civilian settlers into the territory are strictly prohibited. These obligations have applied to Israel since it seized Gaza from Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War, launching a decades-long occupation that continued in a legal sense even after Israel withdrew its ground troops and dismantled settlements in 2005.

Despite these clear legal standards, enforcing compliance with Israel’s international obligations has proven slow, fragmented, and largely ineffective to date. After the ICJ’s 2024 ruling ordered a full Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Palestinian territories on the grounds that Israel’s presence violates the core principles of Palestinian self-determination and the ban on territorial conquest, the UN General Assembly endorsed the ruling and set a September 14, 2025 deadline for completion of the withdrawal. Israel simply ignored the deadline. Enforcement of ICJ rulings falls exclusively to the UN Security Council, where the U.S.’s permanent veto power has blocked any meaningful action to compel compliance.

Worse still, the clear legal prohibitions on conquest, forced displacement, and settlements are being intentionally muddied by the Trump administration-brokered 20-point peace plan and the Board of Peace overseeing its implementation. In November 2025, the UN Security Council endorsed the plan, which aimed to end the conflict, disarm Hamas, and establish a transitional Palestinian government overseen by the Board of Peace and a multinational International Stabilisation Force. But from its inception, the ceasefire deal was riddled with critical gaps: it included no binding provisions defining the scope of Israel’s military presence in Gaza, no mechanism for holding actors accountable for alleged war crimes, and no clear roadmap for demilitarization.

Unsurprisingly, the entire peace process has ground to a standstill since the ceasefire took effect. Israeli airstrikes and ground operations have continued, killing more than 900 Palestinians, aid deliveries remain drastically insufficient to meet the desperate needs of the civilian population, and Hamas has refused to disarm without concrete, binding guarantees for full Palestinian self-determination in the future.

This stalemate works entirely in Israel’s strategic interests. Under the original ceasefire map, Israel was allowed to maintain military control of all territory behind the “yellow line”, which already gave it control of just over half the enclave, squeezing the majority of Gaza’s population into a small coastal pocket. Within the territory it already controlled, Israel has already undertaken two key projects that reveal its long-term political goals.

First, the military has completely flattened entire residential neighborhoods and hundreds of civilian structures, turning large swathes of northern and eastern Gaza into uninhabited wasteland cleared of all civilian infrastructure and residents. On this cleared land, Israel has since built an extensive network of permanent military infrastructure, including new access roads, fortified outposts, barriers, and tall earthen berms. This creates a de facto permanent Israeli-controlled zone emptied of its Palestinian population, a status quo that amounts to unlawful forced displacement and territorial conquest under international law.

Day by day, the area available to Palestinian residents of Gaza shrinks, as Israel reshapes the territory’s borders through bulldozers and permanent fortifications. Netanyahu has already indicated that Israel has no intention of stopping at 70% control and depopulation. The Israeli government may seek to establish a large permanent buffer zone across much of Gaza, mirroring similar permanent Israeli military presences it has built in southern Lebanon and occupied Syrian territory, or it could even revive plans to establish new Israeli settlements in the strip – a project already being aggressively expanded across the occupied West Bank.

All of these unfolding moves violate clear international law and the text of the very “peace plan” that was supposed to resolve the conflict, while offering no viable long-term path to justice or self-determination for the Palestinian people. This analysis is by Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Professor of International Law at La Trobe University, republished with permission under Creative Commons license.

A heated debate has erupted across British politics after two senior party leaders added their voices to growing demands that the UK government track and monitor British citizens who have served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), following allegations of widespread war crimes and genocide in Gaza.

Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn were among the high-profile signatories of an open letter coordinated by investigative outlet Declassified UK, addressed to UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper. The letter calls on authorities to systematically track the movements of British nationals who have served in the IDF, and implement mandatory secondary screening for these individuals at UK ports of entry when deemed necessary. It also pushes for full, rigorous war crimes investigations that adhere to both domestic UK legislation and international legal frameworks.

Current data suggests that approximately 2,000 British-Israeli dual nationals have served in the IDF during Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, a conflict that a United Nations commission of inquiry formally ruled constituted genocide in 2024. Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that killed roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel, Israeli military operations in Gaza have killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians, injured more than 170,000, and left thousands more unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of destroyed civilian infrastructure.

In the text of the open letter, signatories — a cross-group coalition of politicians, legal professionals, human rights advocates, journalists, and other public figures — argue that monitoring the entry of IDF-serving dual British nationals into the UK and investigating potential ties to war crimes serves a clear public interest. The letter notes that many of these individuals have returned to the UK after fighting in Gaza and now reside in British communities, even holding positions in public institutions including hospitals, law enforcement agencies, and schools. It adds, “Nobody wants to live next to a potential war criminal – not least members of the Palestinian community in the UK who have family or friends who have been subjected to war crimes.”

This latest push for action comes after London’s Metropolitan Police sparked outrage in April 2025 when it announced it would not open investigations into 10 British nationals accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their service with the IDF in Gaza. The decision came more than a year after the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the UK-based Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) submitted a 240-page evidence dossier to the Metropolitan Police’s dedicated War Crimes Team. The dossier outlined detailed allegations that the 10 British nationals, a number of whom hold dual UK-Israeli citizenship, participated in targeted killings of civilian bystanders and humanitarian aid workers, carried out indiscriminate strikes on densely populated civilian areas, attacked hospitals and other protected civilian sites, and aided in the forced displacement of Palestinian civilians. In justifying its refusal to move forward with the case, the Met claimed there was no realistic prospect of securing a conviction and that a thorough, effective investigation could not be completed.

Alongside Polanski and Corbyn, the open letter has secured support from multiple sitting UK parliamentarians, including independent lawmakers and high-profile Labour Party rebels John McDonnell and Diane Abbott.

The move has drawn fierce condemnation from opponents on the opposite side of the political and ideological spectrum. Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake criticized the initiative in an interview with The Telegraph, arguing that “At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise, Zack Polanski should not be stoking further division and hostility in our society.” The Board of Deputies of British Jews, a leading UK Jewish community organization that has publicly backed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, echoed that criticism, saying the letter represented “another attempt to demonise Israelis and promote an atmosphere of intimidation against British Jews.”

In response to the backlash, a spokesperson for Polanski defended the call for action, noting that the IDF has faced credible, well-documented allegations of catastrophic war crimes in Gaza from leading global human rights bodies including the UN Human Rights Council, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. The spokesperson emphasized that “the UK Government should be taking robust action against any British citizen complicit in these crimes.”

The renewed debate comes amid escalating Israeli military operations in Gaza. Data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health recorded 119 Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israeli forces in May 2025, marking the highest single-month death toll since November 2024. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has confirmed that the IDF continues to expand its territorial control across Gaza, currently holding roughly 60 percent of the enclave with plans to push that figure to 70 percent in coming operations.

A newly revealed recruitment initiative by Israeli law enforcement has sent shockwaves through the region, with Israeli authorities actively courting ultranationalist activists and Jewish settlers to serve in police units stationed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz has reported.

The call for new hires came directly from Daniel Lerach, deputy commander of the police detachment tasked with overseeing the sensitive religious site. In a public online appeal, Lerach explicitly sought what he termed “religious officers” to be deployed at Al-Aqsa. In messages circulated across social media platforms and private WhatsApp groups—many of which are tied to Israeli settler communities in the occupied West Bank—Lerach extended an open invitation: “Anyone who wants to take part in implementing sovereignty is welcome to contact me.”

Haaretz’s reporting further confirms that rabbis affiliated with the Temple Mount movements, extremist organizations that stage frequent incursions into the Al-Aqsa compound and openly advocate for the destruction of the mosque to make way for a third Jewish temple, have urged their followers to answer the recruitment call. Arnon Segal, a high-profile leader of the Temple Mount movement, hailed the initiative as a pivotal milestone, framing it as growing official Israeli recognition of Jewish claims to the contested site. Segal acknowledged that some potential recruits had raised concerns about joining a police force that currently enforces the long-standing status quo ban on Jewish prayer at the compound, but noted that a large number of movement activists have still opted to enlist.

This recruitment drive is the latest in a string of escalating actions that Palestinian officials characterize as a deliberate campaign to reduce Palestinian presence at Al-Aqsa while entrenching unilateral Israeli control over the site. The Jerusalem Governorate of the Palestinian Authority has condemned the move as a “dangerous development” that forms part of a broader project to erase the mosque’s centuries-old Islamic identity.

In an official statement released Thursday, the governorate explained that the initiative aims to embed activists from extremist Temple Mount groups and adherents of the religious Zionist movement directly into the institutional structure Israel uses to enforce its control over the holy compound. The statement emphasized that the plan marks a new, more open phase of collaboration between official Israeli state bodies and radical Temple Mount organizations.

“This issue extends beyond the recruitment campaign itself,” the statement read. “Israel is seeking to transfer effective authority over Al-Aqsa from the Islamic Waqf, which holds legal and historical custodianship of the site, to Israeli police and other state bodies.”

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound holds profound religious significance across multiple faiths: it is the third-holiest site in Islam, while for Jewish communities it is known as the Temple Mount, revered as the location of two ancient Jewish temples that once stood on the land. For decades, the site has operated under a fragile internationally recognized status quo arrangement, which preserves its identity as an Islamic place of worship and formalizes the custodianship role of the Jordan-backed Islamic Waqf. Under this agreement, only Muslim worshippers are permitted to pray at the site, while non-Muslim visitors may enter under terms set by the Waqf, which retains full authority over all administrative, maintenance, and religious matters related to the compound.

Since Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, however, the Israeli government has steadily eroded this status quo, imposing growing restrictions on Palestinian and Muslim access to the site while steadily expanding Jewish presence and administrative control. Violations of the long-standing arrangement have accelerated dramatically since October 2023, with senior Israeli officials and sitting lawmakers openly calling for the imposition of full Israeli sovereignty over the entire Al-Aqsa compound.

Tensions over the future of Jerusalem’s most sensitive religious sites have escalated this week after the United Kingdom issued its first formal public reaffirmation of Jordan’s longstanding custodianship role, following explosive reports of a covert US-Israeli plot to overhaul the decades-old status quo at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

Last week, independent outlet Middle East Eye (MEE) broke the story detailing alleged plans backed by former Trump administration advisor Jared Kushner—now unaffiliated with the current US administration—and current US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee to strip the Jordanian monarchy of its historic custodianship rights, a position enshrined in decades of international agreements. Multiple anonymous officials from the US, Jordan, Palestine, as well as Western and Gulf Arab diplomatic sources confirmed the details of the proposal to MEE.

Under the reported plan, the Jordanian-backed Islamic Waqf, which currently manages administrative and religious affairs at Al-Aqsa, would be stripped of its authority. A new Israeli-controlled body would rebrand the mosque compound as a “multi-faith centre”, granting Jews equal access to the sacred Muslim site and formally permitting organized large-group Jewish prayer— a change that breaches longstanding arrangements that have prevented religious friction at the site for decades. The plan would also give Israel significant control over the appointment of imams, senior mosque leadership, and final approval over the content of weekly Friday sermons.

The revelations sparked rapid backlash from UK lawmakers, with independent MP Shockat Adam penning a formal letter dated May 29 to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper pressing the government for a clear response. In his letter, Adam noted that many of his constituents had reached out to express deep outrage and alarm over the reported plans, emphasizing that for Palestinians and Muslim communities globally, Al-Aqsa Mosque is far more than a place of worship: it is a core symbol of national and religious identity, collective dignity, and a bulwark against ongoing territorial dispossession in the region.

Adam put four key questions to the Foreign Secretary: whether ministers had raised the reported plans directly with US and Israeli counterparts; whether the UK would continue to formally back Jordan’s custodianship role; what risk assessment had been conducted into the threat of further ethnic cleansing and regional instability stemming from changes to the holy sites’ status; and whether the government would issue a public statement opposing any efforts to weaken Jordan’s internationally recognized custodianship.

After MEE submitted Adam’s letter to the UK Foreign Office for comment, a department spokesperson issued the government’s first official stance on the controversy since MEE’s initial report broke. “We value Jordan’s important role as custodian of the Holy Sites in Jerusalem. The historic status quo arrangements at Jerusalem’s Holy Sites must be respected,” the spokesperson confirmed.

The reaffirmation aligns with longstanding official UK policy, which has long recognized Jordan’s custodianship over both Muslim and Christian holy sites across Jerusalem. It also comes amid a marked shift in the UK’s approach to the Israeli government, with British officials increasingly toughening criticism of ongoing expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Just this week, MEE reported Wednesday that senior government sources confirm UK ministers are actively considering imposing a formal ban on imports of goods produced in those illegal settlements.