Israeli warplanes struck five locations in the southern and eastern part of Lebanon overnight killing three people and injuring 23, the latest reminder that the truce brokered by Washington between Israel and Hezbollah last November is more of a formality. The Israeli military claims the attacks were in response to an explosive drone fired by Hezbollah at Israeli forces from their Commando Brigade, which was located in Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory, and was intercepted without injury to any troops, and that Israel "declared" the drone launch a "blatant violation" before retaliating against Hezbollah in the security buffer zone in Tyre, Nabatieh and the Bekaa Valley.

Two young men were killed on a motorcycle near a ridge that the IDF had just cleared of what it said was a Hezbollah underground facility, and a third person was killed and 15 others injured, including children, women and rescuers, in a strike on a village near Tyre, says Lebanon's health ministry with the same facts.

Both sides agree to the sequence of events. The question is who fired first, when the ceasefire was supposed to take effect in November 2024, and that debate has been ongoing, with little respite since then. Lebanon has repeated the numbers to the UN Security Council, as there were over 800 violations in the first month after the truce, then 2,036 violations over the last three months of 2025, and then more than 6,000 violations of the truce in Lebanese airspace, land and sea in just three months.

Resolution 1701, which was passed in 2006 to end just such a border conflict, is being repeatedly referenced by Beirut's foreign ministry, which is also demanding the council take the necessary measures to secure Israel's complete withdrawal from the five points it occupies inside Lebanon. The complaints have generated statements of concern from UN, and all else.

The more unnoticed revelation is that this isn't a ceasefire narrative at all, it's a story about a wartime that hasn't necessarily ended. What is happening now goes back to March 2, 2026, when Hezbollah returned to the battle against Israel to "avenge" the killing of Iran's supreme leader in a US/Israeli attack on February 28, 2026, and to the fact that Lebanon has been taking Israeli bombings with a grain of salt since that date. On June 19, a second truce was proclaimed and strikes in the immediate vicinity of the buffer zone Israel calls the "yellow line" continued almost without interruption.

The Ministry of Public Health has estimated the death toll at more than 4,300 and the wounded at over 12,000 in the renewed campaign, which began March 2, and continues to rise in the ministry's own daily bulletins, which have been issued for six months.

The economic accounting is where the story ends being an abstraction. Very early damage estimates by the World Bank have estimated the cost to rebuild and recover post-fighting at $11 billion until December 2024, with the total economic impact of the war at $14 billion, which includes $6.8 billion in physical losses and $7.2 billion in lost productivity and closed operating costs. The single largest loss was in the housing sector, which suffered $4.6 billion, about 99,000 of which were partially or completely destroyed, while the tourism sector, one of Lebanon's few stable foreign-currency earners, suffered a $3.6 billion loss. In 2024 alone, Lebanon's real GDP shrank by 7.1 percent, compared to a pre-war forecast of growth of less than one percent, and the country's total loss of GDP since 2019, when war struck, "had reached close to 40 percent", according to the Bank's own report.

From the outset, Lebanese officials, including the economy minister, have disputed the Bank's figures, estimating the losses at $20-25 billion by mid-2026, when the fighting had lasted for months, and the worst losses among the displaced Lebanese families have not yet been fully documented when the guns finally go quiet, the small businesses that will never reopen. Since then the World Bank has granted a small $250 million tranche for rubbles removal and emergency infrastructure repairs, a fraction of what will be needed for reconstruction, and only after the fighting does not stop.

Any easy solution is complicated by Israel's own calculations. Domestically, the government is up for election in the next couple of months and no Israeli leader wants to appear to be easing pressure on Hezbollah while the group still has weapons in its possession. The government's own five-phase disarmament plan to bring all arms under state control is not yet enforced in Lebanon. That plan provides Israel with an argument for further strikes: So long as Hezbollah has the ability, Israel has the right to strike first, it says. Lebanon's counter is that Israeli airstrikes are undermining the state's own right to the monopoly of the use of force that it claims it enjoys, as each airstrike reinforces Hezbollah's position that only it alone is capable of shielding Lebanese communities from Israeli attack.

The instability isn't confined to the Lebanese border. Within those 24 hours, settler attacks raged throughout the West Bank: farm property was burned near Ramallah, a group of mourners was pepper-sprayed and beaten by settlers and Israeli authorities fired tear gas into a Bedouin community near Bethlehem.No one was arrested, and Israeli authorities haven't issued a comment as of yet, but the 24 hours yielded a series of settler attacks: farm property was burned near Ramallah, a convoy of mourners was beaten and pepper sprayed by settlers and tear gas was fired into a Bedouin community near Bethlehem. None of this has anything to do with the strikes in Lebanon but it all addresses the same basic pattern: a series of concurrent warring that are ostensibly controlled by ceasefires, resolutions and disarmament plans that are largely used to deflect responsibility, not to restrain anyone.