Israel attacks 4 countries and territories in just 4 hours
Media silence was deafening last night, as Israel attacked Syria, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon
In the space of a single night, in span of roughly four hours, Israeli forces hit four different fronts at once, as their genocidal Prime Minister promised to complete all their wars, despite the ceasefires he signed.
Artillery and armor moved again in southern Syria, a drone strike and air raid tore into a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, drones and airstrikes killed Palestinians in Gaza, and raids and shootings unfolded across the occupied West Bank, in a bloody reminder to Israel’s neighbours exactly how dangerous being their neighbour is. Each one of these attacks was carried out under the shadow of an existing ceasefire or long standing legal framework that is supposed to limit exactly this kind of action, and each one fits into a longer pattern where humanitarian law is treated as a suggestion to the only apartheid state in the Middle East.
While Donald Trump continues to talk of “peace” in the region, the region are yet to see it. Israel’s political class have learned that as long as they keep their genocidal rhetoric in Hebrew, no one will call them out for parroting words of peace in English, nothing says that more than Elon Musk’s X platform blocking Hebrew translations entirely. The platform has been used by Itamar Ben-Gvir and others to promote a continued campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against all their neighbours, so Elon Musk provided the cover for that language.
The rest of the media sphere are not innocent in this campaign of extreme ignorance. On most homepages on the internet’s top newspapers, you can see story after story about the UN Security Council adopting Resolution 2803, approving a vague United States plan for a transitional “peace council” and an international force that is supposed to stabilise Gaza and open a road to some kind of Palestinian statehood. Just a day later, Israel continues to attack Gaza, but telling that story would fracture the faux peace that almost every outlet seems to want to tell you exists, so they simply don’t tell that story. And when they do, they find a manner to blame Hamas, or offer Israel another ‘out.’
In Lebanon, a formal ceasefire signed on 27 November 2024 was meant to end the last round of war, and for Israelis, that was true. Lebanon has not fired a bullet since October of 2024, while Hezbollah haven’t fired a bullet since the ceasefire was agreed to. But for citizens of Lebanon, that peace was never real, not for one day. The agreement has already been violated more than six thousand times, hundreds have been killed, including at least 13 in a single strike yesterday.
Six thousand ceasefire violations isn’t enough however, not for Israel’s ruling regime. All signs currently point to these attacks ramping up, with rhetoric from the country’s ministers are insistent that a new war must come.
On the Syrian front the 1974 disengagement agreement created a demilitarised buffer under UNDOF to stop exactly the sort of cross border shelling and armor incursions we are now watching on a weekly basis. Humanitarian law does not disappear because a conflict is rebranded as “law and order”, “counter terrorism” or “mowing the lawn”. It binds the occupier just as much as it binds the occupied, but occupiers never make good listeners.
Syria wants peace, Syrians deserve peace
On the Syrian side of the Golan, the pattern has been erosion of the disengagement line one small step at a time, Israeli troops move forward, while talks of peace with Israel stall. Their US-backed neighbour denying the opportunity for peace talks, unless Syria allows them to hold the territory that they have taken against international law.
A SANA bulletin reported that Israeli artillery shelled the Tal Ahmar area in eastern Quneitra province last night, alongside strikes around the villages of Abidin and Kuya in the Yarmouk basin near western Daraa. Local sources described the shelling as part of a series of Israeli actions in southern Syria that have become routine. This is happening on terrain that was formally placed inside a demilitarised zone after the 1974 Israeli Syrian disengagement agreement, overseen by UNDOF, a deal that Israel seems to have completely ditched.
Without the pressure of the governments and international media, they know they have the freedom to do just that.
That agreement was never a full peace treaty and everyone knew it, yet for decades it at least kept heavy weaponry away from most of the border communities. Since the Israeli move back into parts of the buffer zone in 2024 and 2025, criticised at the UN as a violation of that same agreement, artillery and armoured incursions have crept further into Syrian countryside, with no end in sight. When shells land near villages like Abidin and Kuya, the people under that fire are living with a double erasure, because the world still pretends the old disengagement framework is intact while the tanks and self propelled guns behave as if the Golan frontier has silently been annexed all over again.
Meanwhile, everyone knows one thing for certain, if Syria were to fire back, the condemnation from Western governments and media sources would suddenly find its way back to the headlines.
There is no ceasefire in Gaza
In Gaza, the appearance of the term “violation of the ceasefire” happens so often that the phrase almost loses its meaning. On the same day that diplomats were still selling Resolution 2803 as a turning point for Gaza, Palestinian faced a fresh wave of killings. The Israeli army itself announce these killings through their IDF announcements on an almost daily basis, to almost complete media silence, including on the days when UN members celebrated both the ‘ceasefire’ and the passing of the recent Resolution 2803.
When you read them alongside the Security Council text, which authorises an international stabilisation force and praises a plan that is supposed to stop the bombing of civilians, the gap between theory and practice becomes entirely laughable. The stabilisation force doesn’t belong in Gaza, it belongs at the borders, because that’s where the murderers continue to come from.
Gaza’s population has just lived through a campaign of genocide that killed tens of thousands of people and flattened more than half of the entire strip.
That population is still trapped, still displaced, still under a blockade that every major human rights organisation has described as collective punishment, and as shown by a BBC investigation, stilll facing the continued destruction of territory by their occupiers.
These are not small violations of the ceasefire. People are being killed at a slower rate, but the murder has not stopped. Destruction is happening at a slower rate, but the destruction has not stopped. A ceasefire would stop the killings, end the destruction and supply enough aid, which remains restricted.
The reality is one that most media outlets wouldn’t dare speak, if there’s a ceasefire, Hamas are abiding by it, while Israel is happily ignorant of it.
West Bank faces unprecedented attacks
While Gaza is discussed in terms of ceasefires, the West Bank is still quietly treated as a space where the occupation never really stopped and therefore military “operations” are assumed to be part of the landscape. On the same night as the Gaza shootings and the Lebanon air raid, Anadolu reported that the Israeli army closed the entrance to the town of Beit Ummar in the southern West Bank and opened fire on Palestinians there after an earlier car ramming and stabbing attack had killed a settler and wounded three others The closure was justified as a security measure, yet residents faced live fire for the crime of being in a town that was suddenly turned into a sealed military zone.
In a separate report, the agency recorded that two Palestinians were shot dead by the army in the southern West Bank, with the Palestinian Health Ministry confirming their deaths and Israeli military spokespeople linking the shooting to the same attack near Bethlehem. Another Anadolu piece highlighted the “serious” injury of a child by Israeli fire in the West Bank, which local media connected to the same wave of raids and roadblocks. None of this is happening in a legal vacuum. As the occupying power, Israel is bound by the Fourth Geneva Convention to protect the civilian population, to avoid collective punishment and to distinguish between suspects in a specific attack and the broader community around them.
Instead, entire towns are subject to closure whenever an attack occurs, settlers frequently carry out reprisal assaults on Palestinian property under the loose protection of the army, and lethal force is used in ways that human rights groups have repeatedly described as extrajudicial killings. The narrative that the West Bank is a separate theatre from Gaza also breaks down on nights like this, when Palestinians under occupation are shot in the south of the Strip and in the hills around Hebron in the same span of hours, all under the banner of “security”.
Over 6000 Israeli ceasefire violations in Lebanon
If Gaza is treated as a testing ground for new international arrangements and the West Bank is treated as an open ended laboratory of military rule, southern Lebanon has become the place where Israel demonstrates that they, and they alone have an exemption to all ceasefire agreements.
On the night in question, a drone strike and then an air raid hit the Ain al Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near the city of Sidon. Fourteen people were killed and several others wounded. The National News Agency said a drone targeted a car near the Khalid bin Walid mosque inside the camp and that subsequent strikes hit the mosque’s centre with three missiles. Anadolu described the attack as a “new massacre” and noted that the ministry called it part of a series of Israeli violations of the ceasefire.
Al Jazeera’s coverage reminded readers that Israel is already accused of more than six thousand violations of the 27 November 2024 ceasefire, and that those violations have killed more than three hundred people and injured over six hundred. That ceasefire was supposed to end a war that had already followed on from earlier escalation in 2023 and 2024. Israel continues to occupy several strategic hills inside Lebanese territory that it seized during the last round of fighting. When an air force that still holds Lebanese land uses a drone and then multiple missiles on the largest Palestinian camp in the country, killing teenagers playing football according to some local testimony, it is hard to pretend that this is a marginal or accidental breach.
Lebanon’s history is full of examples where Palestinian camps become the place where regional messages are written in blood. From Sabra and Shatila to the long sieges of the camps in the civil war, the idea that these spaces are somehow less worthy of protection has been baked into regional politics. International law does not see it that way. A refugee camp is a civilian space. A ceasefire is supposed to protect people in that space, not offer a backdrop to slowly escalating bombardment.
The wider media remains ignorant of Israeli crimes
Arabic outlets, local agencies and live feeds treated the night’s events as a clear four front episode. SANA and regional mirrors recorded artillery and shelling in southern Syria. Palestinian and Lebanese agencies documented the killings in Gaza, the raids and shootings in the West Bank, and the drone strike and triple missile hit on Ain al Hilweh. There is an emerging picture of a regional power that feels confident enough to operate almost simultaneously in four jurisdictions, two of them under formal ceasefire regimes and two under occupation and long standing UN frameworks, without expecting much more than a few cautious statements from its allies.
Much of the English language media sphere flattened this into separate incidents. A brief line about “two Palestinians shot near Gaza border”, a short item on “Israeli strike on suspected militants in Lebanon”, a paragraph about “clashes in the West Bank after attack on settlers”, a sentence or two about “reported artillery fire in southern Syria”. When coverage is broken up like this, the coordinated or at least concurrent nature of the escalation disappears. Audiences are not invited to see four locations being hit within one narrow night time window. They are presented with isolated episodes that can easily be dismissed as random flare ups or mere background noise to the “real” diplomatic story.
The result is a kind of narrative laundering. Ceasefires and UN resolutions are given prominent headlines. Violations are pushed down the page, wrapped in language that foregrounds Israeli threat perceptions and treats Palestinian and Lebanese casualty figures as contested claims. The basic chronology that matters to people under fire who count minutes between sirens and shell impacts, the feeling that all fronts are open at once, is edited out of the main story. When history remembers earlier moments like the 1982 invasion of Lebanon or the Second Intifada, it tends to see them as coherent campaigns because the violence was recognised as such at the time. Nights like this one risk sinking into the record as forgettable “security incidents”.
What happened over those four hours is not an aberration. It is a snapshot of the current regional order, where an occupying power that already faces accusations of genocide in Gaza operates under multiple legal regimes and still acts as if force is its primary language. In southern Syria, on a frontier that should be buffered by a half century old disengagement agreement. In Gaza, where a new Security Council resolution speaks of stabilisation while soldiers keep shooting people near a line only they can see. In the West Bank, where occupation has become so normalised that the closure of entire towns and the killing of suspects and bystanders reads as routine. In Lebanon, where a ceasefire with thousands of recorded violations still gets described as “holding” while missiles fall on a refugee camp.
If there is any lesson to draw from this sequence, it is that law and agreements only restrain power when the international system decides that violations carry a price. Until then, four fronts can light up in the same night under the cover of diplomatic language that pretends the guns are silent, and the people who live under those guns are left to join the dots themselves.
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