Who gets a veto over Israeli action against Hamas and Iran?

Jonathan S. Tobin

United Arab List (Ra’am) party chairman Mansour Abbas stands alongside fellow party members on stage following the release of exit poll results in the northern Israeli city of Sakhnin, on Israel’s general election night, Oct. 27, 2026. Photo by Michael Giladi/Flash90.

As the world awaited the official counting of the votes in Israel’s election for a new Knesset, one thing seemed clear: Neither the coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor that of the “anyone-but-Bibi” alliance of parties arrayed against him appeared to have a path to a majority that would enable them to easily form a government.

Yet the results raise the question of whether a government could be formed by the anti-Netanyahu coalition combining its strength with that of the anti-Zionist Arab parties, which significantly increased their strength in this round of elections.

Will they keep their promise?

To do so would violate the pledges made by three of the main anti-Netanyahu parties led by former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, former prime minister Naftali Bennett and former defense minister Avigdor Liberman, who all promised never to be part of such a coalition during the campaign.

Many on the Israeli left and elsewhere say those parties were bullied into making such a pledge by Netanyahu and their fear of being viewed as aligned with parties that oppose the existence of the Jewish state. Critics of Netanyahu and the Israeli right claim that attempts to exclude the Arab parties from government or even to speak of anyone winning a majority of the Zionist or Jewish vote, as the prime minister did in his election-night address to his supporters, is inherently racist.

That may sound reasonable to Americans, whose political parties have always been vaguely ideological, but not sectarian or representing ethnic or religious groups. And it is entirely true that the votes of Israeli Arabs count just as much as those of their Jewish fellow citizens, and that their representatives have the right to enter the Knesset. Contrary to the smears and blood libels hurled at Israel, it is not an “apartheid state” but a democracy.

And it is also true that a precedent was established by the ragtag, shaky coalition formed in June 2021 led by Bennett, when one of the Arab parties participated: Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas.

So what factor, other than anti-Arab prejudice, would bar either of the two Zionist coalitions from forming some sort of pact with Abbas and Ra’am, and the larger Joint Arab List, to end the uncertainty and form a government?

The answer is obvious. And it has nothing to do with Jews being prejudiced against Arabs and/or Muslims.

Simply put, at a time of ongoing war against Iran and its terrorist proxies—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen—the notion of giving parties ideologically opposed to the existence of the State of Israel an effective veto on security questions and the stability of Israel’s government is unimaginable. Or at least it would be, if those seriously considering such a deal prioritized the defeat of these forces, rather than merely being obsessed with ousting Netanyahu.

A half-truth

As Netanyahu noted with grim satisfaction in an address to his supporters on Tuesday night, the pre-election polls coming from media outlets hostile to him greatly underestimated the strength of his Likud Party and its allies. As the votes were counted, Likud did emerge as by far the largest of the parties. But his alliance of right-wing and religious parties was still short of winning an outright majority, which marked a change from the last election, when it did achieve that goal.

That allowed his foes to claim that Israelis had rejected the prime minister since a majority had voted for parties not aligned with him. That was a half-truth because it involved combining the votes of the anti-Netanyahu Zionist parties and those Arab and Islamic parties.

The idea that supporters of the United Arab List and the Ra’am Party on the one hand, and on the other, those backing Eisenkot, Bennett or Lieberman, are somehow aligned with each other is fictional. However, it does open up the possibility that although the anti-Netanyahu coalition seems to have gotten far fewer seats than the prime minister’s bloc, it could manage to form a government by allying itself with the Arab parties. 

United Arab List (Ra’am) party chairman Mansour Abbas stands alongside fellow party members on stage following the release of exit poll results in the northern Israeli city of Sakhnin, on Israel’s general election night, Oct. 27, 2026. Photo by Michael Giladi/Flash90.

What they stand for

It’s important to remember what these two Arab parties stand for.

Abbas’s United Arab List, better known by its Hebrew acronym Ra’am, came into being as the political wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel, an extension of the international Islamist and terrorist Muslim Brotherhood. It has broken off from that movement but still holds to its basic ideology while also claiming to favor a two-state solution with Israel. That’s a contradictory position that allows it to maintain its links to its old allies (whose factions have been banned for inciting and advocating violence) while attempting to represent Israeli Arabs—in particular, the Bedouin, who support it in large numbers.

Abbas got high marks from liberal Israelis and others who cheered his willingness to join with Netanyahu’s opponents in 2021. In return, for propping up the government led by Bennett (who was elected on a pledge to never sit with anti-Zionist parties or those of the Israeli left), he received much-needed funding for Arab communities.

The other Arab Party is the Joint List, a coalition of secular nationalist Arab parties that includes Hadash, the former Communist Party of Israel, and is led by academic Yousef Jabareen. It improved its showing in the last election in 2022 by reuniting with one of its former constituent members, the radical leftist Balad Party, which ran on its own four years ago and fell below the threshold of votes needed for entry to the Knesset.

This restored Joint List did far better than Ra’am this time. Its radicalism and full-throated opposition to Israel’s existence and Zionism is undiluted by any appeals to moderation. It appealed more to Arab voters, who on the whole do not seem to have rewarded Abbas for his past service in a Zionist-led government.

Abbas appeared to double down on posing as moderate in this election. Ra’am gave the second slot on its list to Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish former Israeli law-enforcement officer and member of Knesset for the center-left Yesh Atid Party, who was essentially acting as a beard for his new Islamist friends. But this tactic didn’t garner many Jewish voters. By contrast, Arabs were inspired to turn out in large numbers by the prospect of electing radicals who would be their answer to Israeli right-wingers like Otzma Yehudit’s leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current national security minister. But for all the complaints heard in Israel and around the world about Ben-Gvir and his outrageous statements and behavior, the members of the Joint List, and to some extent, those affiliated with Ra’am, are far more radical and dangerous to Israel and its democracy than those on the Jewish right.

The Haredi analogy

Some on the Israeli left say the Arab parties ought to be no more out-of-bounds for participation in a government than the Haredi parties: the Mizrachi Shas and the Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism, which are not, at least in principle, Zionist.

But this argument is somewhat disingenuous.

It’s true that, strictly speaking, Shas and UTJ aren’t Zionist because the rabbis who act as their spiritual authorities don’t consider the current State of Israel to be the answer to the messianic hopes of Jews for the last 2,000 years. One can certainly criticize them for enabling a culture of avoidance of military service or even of participation in the economy for Haredi men. But they have not only worked with and participated in the government of Israel for decades; they also do not sympathize with or support Israel’s enemies. They illustrate the difference between non-Zionism and anti-Zionism. One is based on acquiescence to the need to cooperate with the Jewish state. The other is part of an effort to destroy it.

The two Arab parties have offered to provide their votes to Eisenkot and the Zionist left from outside the government to enable them to oust Netanyahu. But whether inside or outside the Cabinet, it would make Eisenkot and his colleagues utterly dependent on factions that could pull the plug on them at any moment.

That means they could rely on Jabardeen and Abbas to back their plan to topple Netanyahu and perhaps enact constitutionally dubious legislation to ensure that he would be barred from office in the future. Once that was accomplished, Eisenkot—or whoever it was that wound up forming such a minority government—would know that their tenure would end the moment they displeased these Islamist and Arab nationalist factions.

Giving insurance to Iran and its allies

That could effectively give Iran insurance that Israel would not strike (with or without the United States) its nuclear and ballistic-missile facilities, as well as other targets that aid its fomenting of international terrorism. That would likely also extend to any action to ensure that Hezbollah isn’t able to re-establish its ability to threaten northern Israel, which was largely eliminated by the current government’s victories won during the course of the war that ensued after the catastrophe of Oct. 7, 2023.

And it might also be exactly what Hamas needs to ensure that it can get away with its refusal to abide by the terms of the October 2025 ceasefire agreement with the United States, and both disarm and surrender governance of the approximate 30% of the Gaza Strip it still controls.

That is why the precedent of Mansour Abbas’s participation in the government led by Bennett and his colleague Yair Lapid from June 2021 to December 2022 isn’t a reason to try such a scheme again.

Israelis may have patted themselves on the back during those 18 months for demonstrating to the world anew that it was a democracy in which Arabs as well as Jews could govern. While that fact didn’t convince any of its critics to stop libeling it as an “apartheid state,” it also took place in a time when Israel wasn’t at war.

During the period before the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab orgy of mass murder, torture, rape and kidnapping that took place on Oct. 7, the entire Israeli military, intelligence and political establishments, including both Netanyahu and those who opposed him in the current election, were convinced that Hamas wasn’t really a threat. Few understood the gravity of their country’s security predicament as Iran put in place the forces that would launch a multi-front war on the Jewish state.

In the aftermath of that disaster and the costly war Israel was forced to fight against foes who amply demonstrated their genocidal intent, it’s all well and good to second-guess Netanyahu and blame him for it happening on his watch. But it is equally apparent that refraining from inviting into the cabinet parties that are against ensuring the elimination of the ability of Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran to again call into question Israel’s existence is not an irrational or bigoted perspective. It’s simply common sense.

And that is not even taking into account the argument that in the remaining two years of President Donald Trump’s second term, Israel has a unique window of opportunity to ensure its security. That window is likely to close once he leaves office and is replaced by either a Democrat or a Republican like Vice President JD Vance, who would, at best, be less interested in Israel’s strategic dilemmas and might be hostile to Jerusalem.

Even if we assume that Eisenkot would wish to follow in Netanyahu’s footsteps and form a partnership with Trump on these issues—an assumption that may be unfounded—the idea that an Israel governed by a coalition dependent on the goodwill of the Joint List, let alone Ra’am, could pursue such necessary policies is pure fantasy.

A theory of cooperation

In the past, some Zionist thinkers have written and spoken of the need for a Jewish state where Arabs would also be empowered as partners. In particular, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the founding fathers of Zionism and Israel and the ideological North Star of the Israeli right, wrote of the need for shared governance and Arab participation, even mentioning the idea of Arabs serving as vice premier of the state when a Jew was prime minister.

This is cited by those who oppose Netanyahu as a justification for a government with Ra’am or the Joint List.

Still, his idea presupposed the achievement of the “Iron Wall” Jabotinsky had written of in his 1923 essay on the subject of securing Arab acquiescence to a Jewish state. Only when the Arab and Muslim world was ready to realize that the Jewish state that would become Israel (after his death in 1940) could not be defeated and was a permanent fact accepted by the Arabs could such a scheme work. The tragedy of Oct. 7—and the subsequent surge of antisemitism across the globe driven by anti-Zionist agitation and blood libels—demonstrates that the world is a long way away from a theoretical era of peace when Jabotinsky’s liberal vision could conceivably be accomplished.

From this perspective, the belief that Israel needs a government that secured its votes only from the Zionist parties that share a national consensus against repeating the mistakes of Oslo and the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza seems not merely reasonable but an imperative. To smear it as being racist is deeply wrong.

An Israeli government beholden to parties that oppose Israel and sympathize with its enemies is entirely possible and would be legal if attempted. Many of Israel’s past governing coalitions were formed because politicians broke promises to the Israeli people.

Yet the next government of Israel will have the responsibility to ensure that the victories achieved after Oct. 7 via the heroism of its soldiers, the support of its citizenry and the courage of its leader are not thrown away. A Zionist government for Israel is essential in wartime.

Regardless of whether voters favor Netanyahu’s continuance in office—or think that his ouster and giving Eisenkot a chance to lead Israel is the change their country needs—opposition to a minority government that relies on Arab nationalists, communists and Islamists is a rational course of action, not bigotry. Israelis and Americans who support the Jewish state should not be shamed or intimidated into failing to point this out.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

Oct. 7 isn’t over …

Fiamma Nirenstein

People visit the Nova music festival memorial site, where hundreds of people were murdered by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 massacre, near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel, Oct. 5, 2026. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

When the Hamas terrorists broke through the fence to enter Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the strategic message they were meant to carry out was clear. Then-Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar had set out the plan in his own handwriting, in small, careful Arabic script.

The message was: Go and destroy the Jews. In doing so, you will not win the war, but you will win history. You will destroy Israel; the Islamic umma, dar al-salam, will devour dar al-harb. And this first conquest will precede the destruction of Jewish history and, with it, the entire Judeo-Christian civilization that it generated.

There are two chapters to the history of Oct. 7: the unprecedented events of that day, and the subsequent expansion of antisemitism into the intellectual and moral centers of power in Europe and America.

It is the construction of a collective psychosis, a breach in the moral system built over centuries—in the principle of cause and effect, in the ability to read history and in our concepts of good and justice.

It is this worldwide revolution that we are dealing with when we speak of Oct. 7, in addition to tears, mutilated bodies and war. We should also remember how antisemitism has repeatedly been the harbinger of crises in the civilizations that produced it, including the destruction of Europe in World War II.

The tears and the blood

But we must begin with the tears and blood that hundreds of thousands of Israelis still shed, having lost loved ones in the massacre and in the war.

It is the form, the method and the purpose of the Oct. 7 massacre that we had not seen before, except 80 years ago in Hitler’s Germany and, until 1953, in the Soviet Union.

On Oct. 4, 1943, in Posen, Heinrich Himmler explained to 90 SS leaders that Jewish children also had to be exterminated because he could not, “for moral reasons,” avoid extending to them the death sentence that their parents “deserved”; otherwise, the future of his people and of the world would be threatened by their revenge.

Thus, for “moral reasons,” the Palestinians coldly decided to burn alive, dismember, rape and murder Jewish families in the kibbutzim of southern Israel.

The purpose of their conquering political Islam is a final solution, total destruction, pursued in the name of an ideology and a religion that is intrinsically political as well, without humanitarian objections.

For Hamas, Iran and many other actors now active throughout the world, humanitarianism itself becomes part of the execution. It is the intention that has driven antisemitism through the centuries: to cleanse the earth of Jews, and therefore today, first and foremost, of Israel, and turn it into the kingdom of the chosen ethic—the one pursued by the Hamas charter and demanded by Shi’ite Iran.

On Oct. 7, the Islamist imperative to erase and subjugate revealed itself in its naked form.

A war on seven fronts

Jewish resistance to this turning point in the history of persecution has this time taken the form of the war on seven fronts that Israel has fought since that day.

As the daily news shows, this war has not ended—not against Hamas, not in Judea and Samaria, not in the north against Hezbollah, and certainly not against the greatest puppeteer of hatred against Israel and the Jews, Iran.

Meanwhile, other dangerous fronts are opening, such as Turkey, while Qatar remains the greatest financier of organized hatred in the form of information and culture.

At the same time, large-scale intifadas—the largest in France, with Spain and Britain close behind—are setting Europe ablaze, while New York, through free elections, becomes Mamdani’s city.

And everywhere, Oct. 7 is celebrated as a festival of the genocide of the Jews.

The campaign to erase the Jews

Alongside the bestial massacre, an antisemitic flood of denial immediately developed, one in which Europe, too, is immersed up to its neck.

In this continuation of Oct. 7, the disappearance of the Jews means driving them out of the social world. It means making them disappear from universities and cinema, sporting competitions and literary prizes, politics and soccer championships—terrorizing and humiliating them until they are expelled everywhere.

Erase them.

Terrorize families and children at school. Put students in a position where they cannot attend university. Expel from talk shows every Jewish commentator and every friend of the Jews.

It is a Shoah. The Jew disappears.

This is happening through the success of a vast network of lies, from the word “genocide” to “ethnic cleansing” to “famine,” all the way to the most classic antisemitic formulas, now accepted as commonplace: the blood libel of the slaughter of innocents; the pursuit of money and power; the targeting of children and civilians; the murderous rampage of crazed soldiers thirsting for revenge.

And then there is the image of a monstrous supreme leader, Nazi-fascist and imperialist—a cinematic transfiguration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, turned into a puppet of public discourse with no relationship to reality.

The inversion of reality

Logic, knowledge, culture and reason—even the principle of cause and effect upon which, since ancient Greece, the examination of facts has been constructed—have been hollowed out through a rejection of our social structure and of liberal democracy.

In its place comes a universalist culture that denies history, apologizes for a distorted and denigrated Western past and kneels before a totalitarian world that persecutes dissidents, women and homosexuals, even to the point of death.

A particular historical conjunction has allowed a Western society gripped by profound moral and intellectual confusion to find a partner ready to forge an unprecedented alliance: militant and supremacist Islam, much of it immigrant, another part still in its countries of origin, which sees messianism as its political rationale.

Palestinism has provided the ideal common cause for this convergence. It has become the magical vessel into which culture, good intentions and human rights can be poured. It has become the battlefield between oppressors and oppressed, between freedom and imperialism, between universalism and racism.

In reverse.

When decent people drive from a stage a mother who wants to testify about the murder of her entire family by Hamas on Oct. 7 because they want to watch “Naza,” telling her, “Go away, you should be ashamed,” they no longer possess any knowledge of reality, nor do they wish to know it.

To them, the woman is a “colonialist,” and the punishment for her guilt “did not happen in a vacuum,” as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared in commenting on Oct. 7, assuming a responsibility equal to that of those who slit throats.

He thus inaugurated the era of the hunt for the Jew, licensed by international legality.

The answer cannot be lamentation

The conclusion, however, cannot be lamentation, nor the tears that we are forced to swallow.

The Jewish people have never had either the time or the desire to shed too many of them, as can be seen from the history of the incredible reconstruction of their homeland, repopulated in the aftermath of the Shoah.

They have work to do.

Who could have been more grief-stricken than the men and women who set to work even as they were already being attacked once again?

It is incredible that in less than 80 years, the only country in the Middle East without oil—so democratic that it suffers internal divisions at every turn, so courageous that it has prevailed on every front after trying to share its tiny land and receiving in return a bite at the jugular—is today full of children and projects.

Its per capita GDP is higher than the GDPs of France, Italy and Britain. Its inventions help the entire world in science, agriculture, technological innovation, medicine and defense.

Its intelligence services save the Western world from terrorism; its rescue teams know how to dig through the ruins of enormous earthquakes. Its joy of life is woven together with a desire for peace that, although repeatedly rejected, is part of the fundamental culture taught in its schools.

Israel knows how to win

And so today, still in the fire of the post-Oct. 7 world, responsibility for every antisemitic accusation must always and only remain with the antisemites.

Faced with every piece of nonsense, every criminal fantasy about Israel and the Jews, those who respect themselves have no choice but to look the enemy and the fool in the eye, without allowing themselves to be influenced by feelings of guilt.

If I explain how the Israeli army fights while trying to safeguard civilian lives even as the enemy systematically uses them as human shields; if I show once again that the ratio of combatant to civilian casualties is 1 to 1.2, the lowest of any urban warfare situation in the world, it must not be to answer Palestinian propaganda.

Nor should it be to convince those who refuse to be convinced.

It does not work.

Antisemitism has endured through the centuries, but the Jews have endured, too.

The difference today lies in the certainty that Israel knows how to win wars.

The entire West can win with Israel, if it still wants to and still can.

That is no small thing. On this third anniversary of Oct. 7, the confrontation is still underway, and it is fierce.

Fiamma Nirenstein is an Italian-Israeli journalist, author and senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA). An adviser on antisemitism to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she served in the Italian Parliament (2008-2013) as vice president of the Foreign Affairs Committee. A founding member of the Friends of Israel Initiative, she has written 15 books, including October 7, Antisemitism and the War on the West, and is a leading voice on Israel, the Middle East, Europe and the fight against antisemitism.

Terrorist kills Netanel Shakron, father of six, in Samaria on Yom Kippur eve

JNS Staff

“Today, six young Israeli children lost their father to heinous terrorism,” the Israeli government stated. May his memory be a blessing.”

A Palestinian terrorist shot and killed Netanel Shakron, a father of six, near Neveh Tzuf in the Binyamin region of Samaria on Sunday, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.

“Today, six young Israeli children lost their father to heinous terrorism,” the ministry stated, of the attack in the area which is also known as Halamish. “May his memory be a blessing.”

Shakron was reportedly in his 40s.

In the past, news outlets, international organizations and Palestinian leaders have highlighted what they say is Israeli aggression on and leading up to Muslim holidays and holy months. The Oct. 7 terror attack took place on a Jewish holiday.

The gunman reportedly shot at Israeli civilians from a vehicle near a natural spring in the area. The victim’s son saw him get shot, according to reports. Shakron was later pronounced dead at Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikvah.

Minutes after the shooting, an Israeli soldier near the scene arrived and shot at the attacker, injuring the latter, who fled, the Israeli military said.

Israeli troops later caught the terrorist after he sought treatment at a nearby hospital, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Israeli special forces assisted in the search, and Israeli Air Force craft were deployed to support the operation.

“No terrorist is immune, nor are those who aided them. We will settle the score with all of them. In Gaza, in Lebanon and in Judea and Samaria,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated on Sunday.

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Israeli soldiers and police officers near the scene of an attack, in which a terrorist shot and killed Netanel Shakron, a father of six, at a spring near Neve Tzuf in the Binyamin region of Samaria, Sept. 20, 2026. Credit: Hilel Ben Or/Flash90.

Israel-Lebanon Deal Under Strain as Hezbollah Disarmament Falls Short

Ailin Vilches Arguello

Smoke billows from southern Lebanon following an Israeli strike, as seen from Nabatieh, southern Lebanon, June 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

Two months after Israel and Lebanon signed a US-brokered memorandum of understanding, frustration is mounting in Jerusalem as the Lebanese army falls short of its pledge to dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in the country’s south — threatening to stall the fragile agreement before the two sides can move to the next stage of negotiations.

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), an Israel-based research institute, released a new report on Friday warning that the pilot program in southern Lebanon has failed to deliver on the security commitments outlined in the MoU between Beirut and Jerusalem, as the Lebanese army has yet to demonstrate that it can disarm the Iran-backed terrorist group and establish a state monopoly over weapons in the country.

ITIC’s data shows that Hezbollah is not only refusing to give up its weapons but also remains firmly entrenched in the country’s south, with affiliated and allied organizations maintaining a strong presence on the ground, providing a civilian front for the Islamist group’s military-terrorist activities and helping it preserve its foothold in the area.

Under a US-brokered framework, Israel and Lebanon signed a MoU in June outlining the Israeli military’s withdrawal from the country’s south and the transfer of security responsibility to Lebanese authorities.

Although the agreement did not set fixed deadlines, it established pilot zones to test the parties’ compliance and assess whether the Lebanese army could dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure and prevent the terrorist group from reestablishing its presence in the area.

According to the ITIC’s assessment, the Lebanese army is both failing to uphold the agreement’s terms and effectively allowing conditions that violate them, as Hezbollah-linked organizations continue operating openly in the pilot zones and the government struggles to confront the group’s extensive civilian infrastructure.

The army’s efforts are further complicated by legal restrictions that limit its ability to search private properties, which are widely known to be used by the terrorist group as civilian cover for its military-terrorist infrastructure.

Among the two most prominent organizations operating in the area are the Islamic Health Organization, which falls under Hezbollah’s Executive Council, and the Wa Ta’awanu Association, which runs aid programs and supports the reconstruction of civilian infrastructure.

Established in 1984, the Islamic Health Organization provides medical services to Shi’ite communities as well as Hezbollah’s operatives, through a vast network of hospitals, medical centers, and clinics across Lebanon, particularly in the south. ITIC points to its extensive presence as a key part of the civilian infrastructure that supports and shields Hezbollah’s terrorist activities.

For its part, the Wa Ta’awanu Association provides food and housing assistance to local residents but has long been suspected of also serving as civilian cover for Hezbollah’s activities in the area.

According to a report by the Israeli news outlet Walla, Israel has warned the United States that the pilot program in southern Lebanon has failed, sharply criticizing the Lebanese army’s efforts and accusing it of failing to effectively dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the country’s south.

Israeli officials have reportedly accused Lebanese Army Chief of Staff Rudolf Heichal of continuing to cooperate with Hezbollah, avoiding confrontation with the terrorist group’s commanders and failing to carry out effective operations to locate the group’s infrastructure and weapons.

Hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel reignited on March 2, when the terrorist group opened fire in support of Iran two days after the start of the joint US-Israeli military campaign against the Iranian regime. 

Since then, Israeli forces have established a “buffer zone” extending into southern Lebanese territory, which officials say is meant to shield northern residents from Hezbollah attacks amid thousands of rockets and drones fired throughout the war.

Even though a US-backed ceasefire has sharply reduced violence, negotiations and prospects for lasting peace remain fragile, with Israeli forces still launching strikes while positioned in southern Lebanon to maintain its buffer zone and dismantle Hezbollah military infrastructure.