US Press
Washington Post: southern Lebanon lives Trump's ceasefire as a prison
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The American president describes the Lebanon ceasefire as a success. The people inside the ground it froze describe a prison.
That gap is the subject of a Washington Post report from southern Lebanon, published on Wednesday. Israeli forces still hold the buffer zone they entered, on the stated purpose of dismantling Hezbollah's military infrastructure, and residents live under restrictions the paper says invite comparison with the occupied West Bank.
The comparison is the point, and it is not a rhetorical flourish. What the Post describes is the architecture Palestinians know by heart: land held indefinitely by an army that answers to nobody living on it, movement permitted by decision rather than by right, and a political vocabulary — security zone, temporary presence, phased redeployment — that outlives every timetable attached to it.
The ceasefire the report measures was reached in April with American mediation. Its terms tie Israeli withdrawal to verified Hezbollah disarmament, and the Lebanese army has begun taking over the first areas Israeli troops vacated.
For readers in Ramallah and Gaza the value of the piece lies in the direction of the borrowing. For decades the West Bank was described as an exception, a situation without parallel. American reporting now reaches for it as the reference point that explains a second country to its readers.
Israel's defence minister said this week that his army intends to hold security zones in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza for the long term.
