Last week, Ezra Klein, a columnist at the New York Times, and David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, sat down for a wide-ranging podcast discussion about Israel, nearly a year after Hamas attacked the country on October 7. Among other things, they discussed the situation on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, which both men had recently visited: on October 8 last year, the militant group Hezbollah—which, like Hamas, is closely allied with Iran—began firing rockets across the border, leading to the mass evacuation of Israeli residents in the area and what Remnick called “a constant back-and-forth” of rocket fire. While this has been “somewhat controlled,” Remnick said, he acknowledged that his choice of terminology was “an absurdly bloodless word to describe what’s going on.” He also noted that, in the days after October 7, some Israeli leaders advocated an “all out” response to Hezbollah. “This was a big push,” Remnick said, “and, I think, an underplayed story to some degree.”
International pressure against such a course of action prevailed, but many Israeli politicians now view heeding it as “a mistake,” Remnick added. Klein noted that Israel had recently declared the return of evacuated northern communities to be an official war goal, amid broader political pressure to intensify military action against Hezbollah. He also said that, on the day that he and Remnick were speaking, there had been “a very strange bit of news”: thousands of Hezbollah fighters had apparently been injured after pagers in their possession exploded. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen on that front,” Remnick said, of Israel’s posture toward war in Lebanon. “This is something that changes hour to hour.”
Since Klein and Remnick spoke, the story of Israel’s posture toward Lebanon has changed dramatically and is now a very big one worldwide (even if, to my mind, it isn’t yet quite the huge deal it should be in a US media landscape that is increasingly saturated with inward-looking election coverage). The change started, arguably, with the pagers, which detonated last Tuesday in Hezbollah-dominated areas across Lebanon, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands; the next day, walkie-talkie devices blew up as well. (Israel has not officially said that it was behind the attacks, though Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has alluded to the fact.) The international press took notice—though various critics argued that major outlets downplayed the physical and psychological impact of the attack on Lebanese civilians. Ali Harb, a journalist at Al Jazeera English, wrote that the coverage “focused on the Hollywoodesque aspect of the attack rather than its terroristic nature.”
Some US news outlets and pundits did describe the attack in such terms (including, strikingly, the former CIA director Leon Panetta, in an interview with CBS). In Lebanon, broadcasters interviewed trauma surgeons who wept as they described surgically removing damaged limbs and eyes, and, in one case, spoke with a taxi driver who offered to donate his corneas to a victim, as Rania Abouzeid noted in The New Yorker yesterday. (“How can I continue to see while they have been blinded?” the man said. “The eye that I will donate will protect the nation.”) In the days that followed, the violence escalated further. On Friday, Israel hit an apartment building in Beirut, killing sixteen Hezbollah operatives, one of them very senior in the organization, but also, apparently, dozens of civilians. Over the weekend, Hezbollah fired another barrage of missiles into Israel, some of them deep inside the country.
Then, yesterday morning, Israel began another round of strikes. In Beirut, residents “anxiously scanned their phones, and car radios crackled with radio broadcasts describing wide-scale bombardment in the country’s south,” according to the Times; meanwhile, some residents, in Beirut and elsewhere, reported receiving phone calls and text messages that read, in Arabic: “If you are in a building housing weapons for Hezbollah, move away from the village until further notice.” In one case, Israel reportedly managed to broadcast the same message via a Lebanese local radio station; an Arab-language spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces posted similarly on X, underscoring the point with a cartoon video depicting an elderly woman abandoning a home stuffed full of weapons. Lebanon’s information minister said that his office had also received a recorded warning. “This comes in the framework of the psychological war implemented by the enemy,” he said.
By the end of the day, Israel had struck what it described as 1,600 Hezbollah-related targets across Lebanon—mainly in the south, but also in the east and north and, last night, in Beirut. According to Lebanon’s health ministry, the strikes killed at least 558 people and injured 1,800 others; per the Washington Post, the ministry did not distinguish between militants and civilians, but at least thirty-five children were reported as being among the dead; the ministry said today that “the overwhelming majority” of the victims “were safe and unarmed people in their homes.” The strikes continued today. Hezbollah, for its part, fired on what it described as military-industrial targets in Israel and at the largely evacuated city of Kiryat Shmona. At least one woman was minorly injured, but no deaths have been reported. At time of writing, an explosion had just been heard in Beirut and Hezbollah had just said that it fired rockets at a military base south of the Israeli city of Haifa. The story is still developing.
In Western media, coverage attested to “fears” of a regional war—as they have after so many apparent escalations since October 7—with the word “war” qualified by modifiers like “all out,” “broader,” or “full scale.” If these raised the question as to what more it might take for this state of affairs to be reached, observers on the ground left little doubt that a very serious conflict was already underway. Writing in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Amos Harel argued that yesterday’s events marked the opening of “a phase of all-out war,” even if Israel had yet to send ground troops into Lebanon and Hezbollah had yet to bomb the area around Tel Aviv. This morning, L’Orient–Le Jour, a Lebanese outlet, introduced an online live blog by describing this as “the 353rd day of the war between Hezbollah and the Israeli army.” On its print front page, the paper wrote that while the war had been going on for months, it was “limited, silent, and sometimes seemed so far away.” Yesterday, the paper said, it tipped over into “open war.” The headline read, in bold font, “The nightmare becomes reality.”
In recent days, reporters covering the situation on the ground have faced increasingly visible signs of escalation and danger. On Thursday—as Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, gave a televised address in response to the pager attack, which he described as a “declaration of war” that would be met with “just punishment”—Ben Wedeman was reporting for CNN from Beirut when an Israeli jet streaked by, dropping flares. (“Obviously the timing of that overflight was no mistake or coincidence—clearly the Israelis wanted to distract the many viewers of Nasrallah,” Wedeman said. “Of course, when an Israeli fighter jet flies over Beirut like that, that only increases the fears that an escalation is coming.”) Yesterday, Tasneem Chaaban, a journalist at L’Orient–Le Jour, reported on camera that she was “stuck” in the southern Lebanese village of Ansar amid an Israeli bombardment. Earlier this month, the Associated Press profiled Plestia Alaqad, a young Palestinian journalist whose coverage of the war in Gaza earned her a large following on Instagram before she evacuated and ended up in the relative “tranquility” of Beirut. Yesterday, Alaqad posted a video of a gridlocked Lebanese road. “People are panicking,” she wrote. “We’re all afraid of what will happen in the upcoming days or even hours.” She added that she’d posted the death toll but deleted it because of how quickly it was going up.
While the immediate situation inside much of Lebanon may have escalated, covering the region, of course, has long been dangerous. Reminders of this fact are everywhere. The AP reported that Alaqad moved to Beirut to pursue a master’s in media studies on a scholarship named after Shireen Abu Akleh—the Palestinian American correspondent for Al Jazeera who was killed by Israeli forces while covering a raid in the occupied West Bank in 2022. (On Sunday, with the world’s eyes turned toward Israel’s northern border, the country’s military raided the West Bank bureau of Al Jazeera, slapping it with a shutdown order and confiscating equipment.) Earlier this year, Terry Anderson, a former AP reporter, died; as his obituaries noted, he was kidnapped by Hezbollah in Lebanon while covering a prior period of conflict in the country in the eighties, and held captive for seven years. Hezbollah has remained hostile to independent journalists, as Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has noted.
Since October 7, over a hundred journalists in Gaza have been killed in Israeli strikes, according to figures maintained by the Committee to Protect Journalists and other groups. Several Israeli journalists were killed by Hamas on October 7 itself. And, in the days and weeks afterward, three media workers were killed in southern Lebanon, while covering the volley of missiles across the Israeli border. Two—Farah Omar and Rabih Maamari—were killed in an Israeli strike in November while on assignment for Al Mayadeen, a network affiliated with Hezbollah. The other—Issam Abdallah, a photojournalist with Reuters—was killed while filming cross-border shelling on October 13. A Reuters investigation found that Israeli tank fire killed Abdallah and injured several other journalists in his vicinity; all of them were clearly identified as press at the time. RSF has concluded that the journalists were targeted. A UN report found that the attack violated international law.
Ten days ago, before the latest escalation inside Lebanon, a coalition of rights groups including RSF wrote to a UN commission urging it to investigate Abdallah’s killing. “In the context of growing violence in the region, this well-documented crime…must not go unpunished,” an RSF official said. This week, the UN’s General Assembly is convening in New York. Lebanon seems sure to be a point of focus. Ahead of time, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria interviewed António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, and asked him about the Israeli pager attack in Lebanon. Guterres replied that he feared an escalation into “full-blown war”—and the “devastating” possibility that Lebanon could become “another Gaza.”
Other notable stories:
- For New York magazine, Ryu Spaeth profiles Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose new book, The Message, is partly concerned with addressing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. In journalism, Coates “had found his voice, his platform, his purpose in life,” Spaeth writes. “And yet, as he sees it, it was journalistic institutions that had not only failed to tell the truth about Israel and Palestine but had worked to conceal it. As a result, a fog had settled over the region, over its history and present, obscuring what anyone at closer range could apprehend easily with their own two eyes.” Student protesters against the war in Gaza, Coates told Spaeth, “are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”
- Controversy continues to engulf Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, after CNN reported last week that he referred to himself as a “black NAZI” and made other offensive comments on the message board of a porn website. Yesterday, Robinson told reporters that he is “going after” CNN as he pushes back on the allegations—and yet the local TV station WRAL reports that he has rejected supporters’ offers of IT help in investigating the posts, which Robinson has claimed were fabricated. Meanwhile, as Robinson’s staff quit en masse, the notorious troll Jack Burkman claimed that he was Robinson’s new campaign manager—but the claim exploded after The Bulwark’s Sam Stein investigated it.
- For the New York Times, Mike Baker reports from Montana, where Republicans are trying to wrest control of the Senate by unseating Jon Tester, a Democrat. Not so long ago, the Democratic Party was comparatively strong in the state, Baker reports, but that has changed in recent years. Among other factors, “the depletion of local newspapers has left many residents turning to talk radio and cable TV outlets for news, with their polarized focus on national politics. Some candidates in the state say that in a state where campaigns once succeeded based on door-knocking and local name recognition, party identification has become an increasingly powerful factor.”
- In media-jobs news, Arc XP, a publishing-technology arm of the Washington Post, laid off fifty-four staffers; Sara Fischer reports, for Axios, that Arc is still losing money despite growing its customer base. Elsewhere, Devlin Barrett, who covers the Justice Department and the FBI for the Post, is moving to the Times. And the Fund for American Studies, an organization dedicated to ideas of liberty and personal responsibility, announced seven new recipients of the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship, who will do in-depth reporting on issues “surrounding the principles of a free society.”
- And for the Times, Matt Flegenheimer dug into the relationship between Kamala Harris and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Fox News star turned Trump surrogate (she is engaged to his son Don Jr.) who knew Harris when they were both lawyers in San Francisco around the turn of the century. As the pair now “find themselves, a quarter-century later, as political adversaries on the grandest scale,” Flegenheimer writes, “their intersecting early-career arcs reveal something more enduring about these onetime counterparts, their divergent paths and the political parties in which they ultimately rose.”
ICYMI: The questions for climate journalism
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.