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Harry Belafonte, singer and civil rights activist who popularized ‘Hava Nagila’ in the US, dies at 96
(New York Jewish Week) — Barrier-smashing singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who once boasted of being “the most popular Jew in America” because of his rendition of a Hebrew classic, died Tuesday at his longtime Upper West Side home. He was 96.
The New York City native was the one of the first Black artists to achieve widespread commercial success in the United States, and while he was raised Catholic, his life frequently dovetailed with Jewish causes, values and people. Among Belafonte’s many Jewish connections — which included brokering a meeting between Nelson Mandela and Jewish leaders in 1989 — was his marriage to his Jewish second wife, dancer Julie Robinson. The couple, who were married from 1958 to 2004, raised two children, Gina and David.
In 2011, Belafonte revealed in his autobiography, “My Song: A Memoir” that his paternal grandfather was Jewish. Belafonte’s parents were both Jamaican immigrants: his mother, Melvine, was the child of a white mother from Scotland and a Black father, and his father, Harold George Bellanfanti, who later changed the family name, was the son of a Black mother and white Dutch-Jewish father. In his book, Belafonte describes his paternal grandfather, whom he never met, as “a white Dutch Jew who drifted over to the islands after chasing gold and diamonds, with no luck at all.”
Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr., in Harlem on March 1, 1927. His father was largely absent during his childhood; his mother, who struggled with finding work, forged a relationship with a Jewish tailor who taught her how to mend garments. “That tailor gave me my first sense of kinship with Jews, which would deepen over time,” Belfonte wrote in his memoir. He spent a portion of his childhood with his grandmother in Jamaica, but he returned to New York to attend George Washington High School in Washington Heights — where Alan Greenspan and Henry Kissinger were also educated — before dropping out.
Following a stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Belafonte was bitten by the acting bug when, working as a janitor’s assistant, he was given a pair of tickets to the American Negro Theater as a gift. “It was there that the universe opened for me,” he told NPR in 2011. “I decided with any device I could possibly find, I wanted to stay in this place. What I had discovered in the theater was power: power to influence, power to know of others and know of other things.”
In the late 1940s, Belafonte enrolled in acting classes, where he met his lifelong friend Sidney Poitier. The impoverished pair would often share a single theater ticket, trading places at intermission. He also befriended Jewish actor Tony Curtis, writing in his memoir: “He lived in the Bronx with his family; why live downtown, he’d say, when he could live uptown for free? And who cared if they still greeted him up there as Bernie Schwartz?”
He and Curtis frequently went to parties together, he wrote, sometimes with the actress Elaine Stritch, “who swore more colorfully than any sailor I’d known,” and “the blunt Jewish comic” Bea Arthur, “who’d start matching wits with Elaine until the two of them had everyone in uncontrollable laughter.”
To pay for acting classes, Belafonte began dabbling in singing at nightclubs, and it was there that a true superstar was born. One of Belafonte’s early successes were his performances of the Hebrew dance hit “Hava Nagila” at the classic downtown folk club the Village Vanguard. His rendition, Belafonte joked to The New York Times in 2017, made him “the most popular Jew in America.”
In that same interview, Belafonte recalled the tough uptown streets of his childhood, and how he was drawn to the fast money his uncle’s number-running business earned. “Everybody in that world were role models in how to survive, how to be tough, how to get through the city, how to con, the daily encounters,” he said. “But my mother saw to it that unless I wanted to live life absent of testicles, she wasn’t going to have me follow her brother Lenny. Somewhere in there is a Sholem Aleichem — a rich story to be told of the lore of that time.”
With his 1953 breakthrough album, “Calypso” — which included his most iconic work, “The Banana Boat Song” — Belafonte “almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music,” according to The New York Times’ obituary. “Calypso” climbed to the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release and stayed there for 31 weeks; it is reported to be the first album by a solo artist to sell more than a million copies. By 1959 he was the most highly-paid Black performer in history, according to the Times.
Known around the world as the “King of Calypso,” Belafonte recorded and performed a wide range of global and folk classics throughout his wide-ranging musical career — Jewish standards among them. In 1959, he performed “Hine Ma Tov” in England, with what appears to be an Israeli military choir; his 1963 album, “Streets I Have Walked,” includes a rendition of “Erev Shel Shoshanim” (“Evening of Roses”), a popular Jewish wedding song.
Belafonte’s greatest passion, however, was neither acting nor singing — it was civil rights activism. There, too, he worked closely with many Jewish activists, as part of the historic Black-Jewish civil rights alliance of the 1950s and 1960s. But, as he recalled in his memoir, it was racism delivered by a Jewish TV executive that first inspired him to take on racial segregation in the United States.
The executive, a Jew from Montreal named Charles Revson, asked Belafonte to stop hosting white dancers on his performance show, citing the preferences of Southern viewers. Belafonte said he rejected the instruction and let Revson cancel the show. He realized, he wrote, that TV could only reflect societal attitudes, not change them. “To change the culture you had to change the country,” he concluded.
Through his civil rights activism, Bellafonte befriended Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956; the pair remained close until King’s assassination in 1968. “My apartment was a retreat for him,” Belafonte told NPR of King and his 21-room apartment in 2008. “He had his own entrance, his own kitchen. The home became, for him, a place where he could think and reside, take his shoes off, have his collar open and be him.”
Belafonte helped provide the seed money to launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and he was one of the lead fundraisers for that organization and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was “deeply involved” in the 1963 March on Washington and helped fund the Freedom Rides.
Belafonte’s commitment to social justice endured throughout his long life and career. In the 1980s, he helped organize the Live Aid concert, and he served as UNICEF’s goodwill ambassador after Jewish entertainer Danny Kaye pioneered the role. He was also a co-chairman of the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, along with Gloria Steinem, though ill health kept him from attending.
Though primarily famous for his singing, Belafonte continued to make movies throughout his career; in 1970 he produced and co-starred in “The Angel Levine” alongside the original “Fiddler on the Roof” star Zero Mostel. Based on a story by Bernard Malamud, Belafonte starred as the titular Jewish angel. (The “project had a sociopolitical edge,” the Times noted, as the entertainer’s Harry Belafonte Enterprises hired 15 Black and Hispanic apprentices to work on the film’s crew.)
The cause of Belafonte’s death was congestive heart failure. He is survived by his two children with Robinson; the two children he had with his first wife Marguerite Byrd, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte; and eight grandchildren. After divorcing Robinson in 2004, he married photographer Pamela Frank in 2008; Frank also survives him, along with stepchildren Sarah Frank and Lindsey Frank and three step-grandchildren.
“There’s just so much left that’s in my basket of possibilities,” Belafonte told The New York Times ahead of his 90th birthday in 2017. “I’m not as young as I feel, or as young as I would consider myself to be. The 90 figure is a blur. But I do know that if there’s anything left for me to do, I had best hurry up and do it, because time is not an ally.”
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The post Harry Belafonte, singer and civil rights activist who popularized ‘Hava Nagila’ in the US, dies at 96 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘The Girl in the Red Jacket’: A Testimony From Inside Iran
Cars burn in a street during a protest over the collapse of the currency’s value, in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
I am Maddie, a millennial woman from Iran and an eyewitness to a bitter reality impossible to unsee.
I woke up on the morning of January 7, 2026, and checked my phone, scrolling through clips of my favorite shows. I walked into the living room with my phone still in my hand, when I realized that protests had broken out in the capital, Tehran.
At first, I ignored it. I had seen this before. In the 2019 “Bloody November” protests (Aban-i-Khoonin), the streets did not just protest; they bled. What started as fury over oil prices became a desperate fight for survival and freedom. The only thing more deafening than the gunfire was the chilling realization that this regime would rather rule a graveyard than lose its throne.
In 2022, the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in police custody sparked a new wave of demonstrations, and headscarves were burned. Streets filled again. Bullets tore through the chants; the shadow of the gallows grew longer every passing day. For every burned scarf, a life was taken.
Every time the streets stir, that old terror returns. The memory of what happens to empty hands never really fades. Our only weapon is our voices, but voices don’t stop bullets. You can’t save your loved one with chants; the memory of the consequences of rising against a totalitarian regime is etched in the pavements of this land in the form of stains.
This time, I knew the protests would be suppressed as they always are, and people would be forced back into silence. I put on my hoodie and left to buy eggs and dog food. I hadn’t been to the market for over a week. At the counter, I handed my card to the shopkeeper. The card machine beeped and showed an insufficient funds error. I knew I had money; I was certain of it. I asked the shopkeeper why the payment was being declined. He looked at me and said I didn’t have enough.
That was when I realized what had happened. Prices had tripled in less than two weeks. The US dollar had surged past 150,000 toman. At that moment, something broke inside me. I was not just shocked. I was angry, frustrated, and humiliated. Standing there, unable to pay for basic necessities, I understood that the crisis was no longer something happening on screens in Tehran. It had reached my hands, my wallet, and my life.
I spent the day reading, watching videos, and playing with my dogs. By the afternoon, I had to go to work. I went, finished my shift, and came back home. When I returned, I asked my uncle whether there had been any protests where we live. He said there were none.
“This is a small city,” he said. “Everyone knows everyone, you can’t just disappear in a crowd, so even if there are protests, you are not going anywhere.”
I nodded and went out to see my friends. We talked about ordinary things while the news played in the background, the way people do when fear has become a routine. Injustice lingered in the air like a toxin, impossible to escape. Near the main street, I noticed two men and a few young boys and girls standing together in silence. A police van parked in front of them, close enough to silence them without a word. Chanting wasn’t allowed. No banners, no organization — this alone was dangerous.
I went home with a pounding heart. I took off my shoes, then put on a black mask and wrapped a black shawl around my head and neck. In my rush, I forgot to change my red jacket. I found myself already moving before I had fully decided.
Uncle called out, “Where are you going?”
“I am just going to see, not going to do anything!”
“It is dangerous, they will find out, this is a small town,” he warned me about the consequences.
“Ten minutes? I will keep my distance,” I pleaded.
“Only ten minutes! Don’t do anything stupid.”
This is how we negotiate with fear, through time limits and promises that no one believes.
I put my shoes on in a hurry and stepped outside, overwhelmed by adrenaline, moving fast, almost without thinking.
Every step felt like calculating a potential death sentence. Every corner felt like a risk that couldn’t be undone. Here, opposition is not met with dialogue; it is met with batons, bullets, prison, and execution without trial. We grow up knowing the names of the dead even when their stories are erased. We know that a protest is never just a protest; it is a gamble with your future, your freedom, and your life.
As I turned the corner, I saw a few protesters standing apart from one another, careful not to form a crowd. I stopped at a distance. My legs were shaking. My hands would not stay still. I leaned against a wall, trying to steady my breathing. It was my first time standing this close to a protest. I noticed that everyone was wearing black jackets and black masks, as if color itself could be used against us.
I glanced down at my own red jacket and thought of the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List, a symbol of how innocence and visibility offer no safety when violence is systematic. I stood there for less than a minute, fully aware that in this country, a minute is more than enough to change everything.
Before I could think any further, one of the girls stepped out from the group and walked towards me. I didn’t recognize her at first.
“Maddie, come,” she said.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. My feet moved even as my mind resisted. When I reached the group, I recognized a few of my friends not by their faces, but by their eyes. That was visible.
One of them whispered. “Why are you wearing red? Are you crazy?”
“I didn’t think about it,” I said. I’ll wear black tomorrow.”
We stood there without speaking. One by one, others joined us. Ten people in total. No chants. No movement. Only bodies assembling quietly under constant watch in a small town crowded with the Revolutionary Guard and Basij.
I came home.
Uncle asked. “How did it go?”
“It was fine, I won’t wear a red jacket tomorrow,”
“Tomorrow?” He was quiet. He didn’t say another word.
All night, I kept turning from side to side, consumed by the consequences of having joined a protest. In my family, repression is not an abstract idea. Many of our relatives were killed in the 1970s. We never supported what was called a revolution; what actually took place was a coup d’état. The memories came back uninvited.
During the “Bloody November 2019-2020,” one of my family members was arrested and tortured in a detention center. He spent months as a political prisoner before being released on bail. Those months were filled with a familiar terror: not knowing where your loved ones had been taken, waiting weeks and months without answers, imagining every possible outcome just to survive the silence.
To quiet my thoughts, I downloaded an audiobook from YouTube, The Song of Achilles, my favorite book of all time. In the middle of fear, it offered a strange kind of warmth.
The next evening, at 8 PM, I put on a black jacket and a black mask and returned to the protest with two of my friends, Zahra and Melena. This time it was larger. The ground itself seemed to tremble under the weight of so many feet. Men, women, and children stood together, all dressed in black. The children I was used to seeing run freely through the streets now looked serious, alert.
“Why didn’t you bring your dogs?” one of them asked. They recognized me.
“They might bite you,” I said, and they laughed.
I noticed Snow — a white stray dog — near the sidewalk, looking for me. He finds me wherever I go. I ran home, brought him food, and returned. Dogs are considered filthy and forbidden under Islamic Sharia rules. I have faced constant opposition and mockery simply for feeding and caring for them. That story alone could fill pages.
Snow ate his food and stayed close. When we began walking towards the avenue, he followed along the sidewalk, frightened by the crowd. As we moved, more people joined us.
Then the chants began.
“Death to Khamenei!”
“Death to the dictator!”
“This land will not be free until the clerics are dead.”
The silence was gone, replaced by the brave people who enveloped the town whole.
Those who could not walk with us showed up with their cars, driving slowly in front of and behind the crowd. Their continuous honking, clapping through open windows, and making their presence known gave me the courage to keep walking and chanting even as my heart pounded and I felt certain I could be shot at any moment.
At that moment, Zahra grabbed my arm and shouted at the top of her lungs, “You know what I feel, Maddie?”
“What?” I shouted back.
“I feel free, I feel free to scream, for once in my life I am feeling that my voice is liberated, I have the right to shout.”
I looked at her — the only thing I found was the glistening eyes behind that mask, which was supposed to be a barrier between us and death itself. I nodded, and we held each other’s hands firmly.
That night, I returned home to find the Internet completely cut off. The blackout had begun. I didn’t care; I threw my phone onto the bed, and slept. In the morning, I realized it wasn’t just the Internet. Phone calls didn’t go through. Messages wouldn’t send. I couldn’t reach friends in other cities. Desperate for information, I watched television, scanning for any mention of what was happening elsewhere.
Reports emerged that a hospital in Ilam had been attacked and besieged by police. In Marvdasht, in Fars province, residents had taken up weapons against security forces. The situation was escalating. Authorities brought in forces from other provinces to regain control.
On the third night, again at 8 PM, we went out again; this time the crowd was even larger. Soon after, security forces opened fire on protesters in a nearby town. The crackdown intensified. Families were harassed. Homes were raided. Tear gas, metal pellets, and live ammunition were used. People were shot in the head and in the back, killed or permanently paralyzed.
A 16-year-old boy I knew was murdered. His name was Mehdi. The IRGC and Basij abducted him and his friend from the protest, beat them with rifle butts, sexually assaulted them, and then shot them. One died on the spot, the other remains in a coma.
This is not an exception; this is the life we have been living for decades. The following day, Iranian Intelligence began calling families of the protesters one by one, threatening them, ordering them to turn themselves in, and to stop protesting. Homes were raided. My friends and family were targeted.
Families were told their lives would be destroyed. In some cases, relatives of those killed were forced to sign documents falsely stating their loved ones had been killed by the “Mossad agents and terrorists.”
My uncle received a call. “Tell your family to stay home, or there will be consequences.”
We did not stop, but I began to lose strength when I could no longer reach my friends in other cities.
Eleven days after the massacre began, I briefly regained Internet access. The first thing I did was message friends in larger cities. One of them, from eastern Tehran, I won’t mention his name, told me that the regime had shot everyone who came out; the streets were flooded with blood. Security forces executed wounded protesters by shooting them in the head while they were receiving medical care. Families were forced to pay a ransom to retrieve the bodies of their children.
There is credible evidence that Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani militia, many of whom fought in Syria for Bashar al-Assad, were deployed to suppress protesters.
Another friend from Tehran sent me videos he recorded himself. In it, bodies were tagged and placed into bags. These were not anonymous images pulled from social media; they were scenes witnessed firsthand by people I know. The dead were not statistics; they were protesters who had stepped into the streets just like me, and never returned. Every name was a story. A dream.
What Iranians are suffering is not unrest. It is a calculated campaign of terror. The Islamic regime has turned public spaces into a killing ground, medical centers into execution sites, and mourning families into targets of extortion and intimidation. Violence is applied methodically, meant not only to crush protests, but to teach an entire nation what dissent costs.
This is not a momentary crisis. It is the continuation of a system that has perfected repression over decades, one that survives by bloodshed, silence, and the deliberate erasure of human dignity.
Many Islamic countries remain silent. Their narrative is a lie painted over a massacre. While our streets ran red, the leaders of the Muslim countries looked the other way. Seeing them shake hands with the very men who ordered our slaughter is a sickening sight.
My request is direct and urgent.
World leaders, the UN, and international human rights organizations! The Islamic Republic does not recognize international law. It violates it openly and repeatedly. Human rights abuses are central to its survival. Repression is not a policy failure. It is the policy.
The regime promised it would not execute protesters. From early January up till now, it carried out multiple executions. These were acts of intimidation, intended to terrorize a population into submission. Many political prisoners are at risk of execution.
The world must stop treating this regime as a legitimate governing authority and begin treating it as what it is: a system sustained by violence, fear, and the systematic destruction of human life. Silence, neutrality, and delay are not neutral positions. They are choices with consequences measured in blood.
This is not a warning.
It is a record.
It is an appeal to action, before more victims are added to the documented toll of the Islamic regime’s state violence.
Long live Iran.
پاینده باد ایران
Maddie Ali is a teacher and philosophy student based in Iran. In addition to her academic work, she has been involved in civic activity in her hometown, including participating in and helping organize local protests alongside friends and family. Her name has been changed to protect her identity.
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The Balkan Firewall: Why Iran’s Post-War Pivot to Europe Threatens the EU
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 1, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
In mid-February 2026, Germany and several other European Union member states quietly extended their internal Schengen border controls for another six months. The official reasoning was general irregular migration, but the unspoken intelligence consensus points to a far more specific, acute threat: the “Western Balkans Route” has become the primary artery for Iranian-backed operatives and radicalized actors seeking to infiltrate the continent.
While the world’s attention remains fixated on the Middle East and Iran’s threat to the region, a quieter, equally dangerous shadow war is unfolding on Europe’s periphery. With its traditional Levant proxies heavily battered, Tehran is actively reactivating and expanding its oldest European foothold — the Balkans — to export terror, destabilize the EU, and target Jewish communities from within.
The direct ballistic exchanges between Israel and Iran last summer shattered a decades-old taboo. In its wake, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) realized that relying exclusively on a Middle Eastern “Ring of Fire” leaves the Iranian homeland unacceptably vulnerable to Israeli and American retaliation.
To restore its asymmetric deterrence, Tehran has pivoted outward, focusing on the soft underbelly of Southeastern Europe. Iran’s ties to the region are deep, dating back to the IRGC’s deployment to Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Today, however, that dormant infrastructure is being weaponized to exploit a modern phenomenon: the “Red-Green” alliance.
Operating out of opaque cultural centers and state-sponsored NGOs in Sarajevo and beyond, Iranian intelligence is successfully cross-pollinating with radical Far-Left European networks. Under the guise of “anti-war” coordination, Tehran is providing logistical support, secure communications tactics, and financial backing to extreme anti-Zionist factions. The goal is simple: manufacture a self-sustaining engine of domestic unrest and virulent antisemitism that keeps Western European security services perpetually distracted.
Jerusalem is acutely aware of this shifting threat matrix and is not waiting for Brussels to wake up. Over the past year, Israel has launched an aggressive, under-the-radar diplomatic and military offensive to build a geopolitical firewall in the Balkans.
This strategy is evident in the unprecedented intensification of Israel’s ties with Serbia and Albania. Following Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s historic visits to the region, defense and cyber cooperation has skyrocketed. In the first half of 2025 alone, Serbian arms exports to Israel surged to tens of millions of euros, culminating in massive bilateral defense agreements.
Simultaneously, Israel is deepening its strategic embrace of Albania. Tirana, a predominantly Muslim nation with a proud history of saving Jews during the Holocaust, has emerged as one of the fiercest anti-Iran bastions in Europe. Having severed diplomatic ties with Tehran following massive Iranian cyberattacks in 2022, and currently hosting the anti-regime Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), Albania has welcomed Israeli cyber-defense expertise with open arms.
By strengthening Belgrade and Tirana, Israel is actively working to geographically isolate Iranian influence in Bosnia, creating a buffer zone that protects both Israeli interests and, ironically, the broader European continent.
Despite Israel’s proactive measures, the European Union remains perilously exposed. The “Red-Green” networks incubating in the Balkans do not intend to stay there. They are designed to exploit the geographic proximity and porous borders of the Western Balkans to smuggle operatives, weapons — particularly illicit firearms diverted from legacy stockpiles — and radicalized individuals directly into the Schengen zone.
The recent extensions of EU border controls are a frantic, reactive band-aid to this structural vulnerability. When European university campuses erupt in coordinated anti-Israel violence, or when Jewish institutions in Paris or Berlin face targeted harassment, the logistical and ideological fuel for these actions can increasingly be traced back to the Balkan corridor.
The EU can no longer afford to treat the Western Balkans merely as a stalled enlargement project; it must be recognized as an active theater of Iranian subversion.
Brussels must move beyond temporary border checks and adopt a proactive, intelligence-led framework. This requires conditioning future financial aid to Balkan states on the strict expulsion of IRGC front organizations. Furthermore, European capitals must abandon their diplomatic hesitations and actively support the security firewall that Israel, Serbia, and Albania are attempting to build.
If Europe fails to dismantle Tehran’s Balkan gateway, the next great security crisis won’t arrive via a smuggler’s boat across the Mediterranean. It will drive straight across a European land border, armed with Schengen access and an ideology purpose-built to destroy the West from within.
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What You Haven’t Heard About: The Looming Hezbollah Threat Across Israel’s Northern Border
Lebanese army members and residents inspect the damages in the southern village of Kfar Kila, Lebanon, Feb. 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Karamallah Daher
On November 27, 2024, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire after more than one year of war, which started when the Lebanese-based terrorist organization launched a front in support of Hamas on October 8, 2023.
From the beginning of the fragile ceasefire through January 2026, Hezbollah committed 1,925 violations.
Today, the threat of Hezbollah continues to loom, amplified by the increasing regional tensions as Israel and the entire Middle East wait to see if and when the US will launch any military operation against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In addition to preparing for a possible Iranian retaliation in the event of a US strike, Israel is also contemplating the possibility that Iranian proxy Hezbollah will support its sponsor by joining in an attack on the Jewish State.
Despite being severely weakened after IDF operations took out senior leadership and destroyed between 70–80% of its firing capabilities, Hezbollah remains a significant threat not only to Israel’s northern border, but to the entire country, as it still possesses several hundred medium and long-range missiles.
Because of this volatile reality, the IDF has conducted a series of operations targeting both senior and lower levels of leadership in Hezbollah to degrade its ability to regroup and rearm. From February 16 through February 22, 2026, the IDF conducted operations in 25 areas of Lebanon, including air strikes, artillery missions, drone strikes, and ground operations.
The threat posed by Hezbollah is not isolated. It is part of a broader regional network backed by Iran, designed to encircle Israel with multiple fronts and sustained pressure. Since the outbreak of anti-regime protests in Iran, the IDF has remained on heightened alert, suspecting renewed rocket and missile attacks against the country.
New reports have warned that if Israel and the Iranian regime are to return to war, Hezbollah will likely join the fight. This would be a change in the terror organization’s strategy, after having sat out of the war between Israel and Iran in June 2025.
With Hezbollah’s degraded military capabilities, the military organization has effectively handed much of its restructuring and rebuilding efforts to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). IRGC officers have been meeting with Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon. Following one of these meetings between the IRGC and Hezbollah at a missile unit site in the Beqaa Valley, the IDF targeted the site, killing eight Hezbollah terrorists.
When this strike was reported in the international media, none of the above context was provided. Instead, the BBC, The Guardian, and Sky News all omitted from their headlines that those killed included eight terrorists. The lede was buried as the outlets suggested that the IDF operation was not based on precise intelligence to remove a looming threat, but rather an indiscriminate targeting of Lebanese civilians. The media have previously similarly framed any targeted strike as an Israeli violation of the ceasefire, rather than a measure to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its military infrastructure.
All of this unfolds against the larger reality that Hezbollah continues its refusal to adhere to the ceasefire agreement it signed. In a speech on February 16, Secretary-General Naim Qassem made clear the organization’s refusal to disarm.
While the Lebanese Armed Forces have claimed the disarmament has begun and that it has taken “operational control” of the area south of the Litani River — from which Hezbollah is required to withdraw — Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah infrastructure in those areas suggests the process is far from complete.
Hezbollah today is a fractured version of the terrorist organization it once was. Its leadership is weakened, and its rocket arsenal is nowhere near the extent it was before October 2023. Yet the presence of the terrorist organization on Israel’s northern border remains. Its apparent willingness to join the Iranian regime if a new round of fighting is to break out only goes to display that it has not strayed from its goal of destroying the Jewish state.
The media might try to look away from this reality, but Israel cannot — nor can it afford the consequences of ignoring the security threat.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.