00:06Our top story. Israeli warplanes have bombed the heart of Beirut this morning, bringing down
00:12apartment blocks there shortly after Israel issued a last-minute evacuation order. The
00:18strikes today are some of the most intense to hit the center of the Lebanese capital in decades.
00:23At least 12 people are reported to have been killed, including an employee of a Hezbollah-run
00:28television channel. Children are among the injured. Now, all this in a country that's
00:34seen more than one million people displaced in the past 10 days or so. Well, let's get
00:40the very latest from Claire Pakala. She's our reporter currently in the southern Lebanese
00:46city of Sidon. Claire, tell us then about where you are and what's been happening there today.
00:56Well, Sidon is known as the gateway to the south of Lebanon. And I can tell you, behind
01:01me, in the area behind me, at around half past nine this morning, there were four strikes,
01:06four Israeli strikes here. We don't know if they were drawn from the air or from the sea,
01:10but four took place here. Two people were killed. Two others were injured. Sidon has become a
01:17refuge place for many Lebanese people who have been fleeing from the south. The city is very,
01:22very crowded. We've been speaking to people who are sleeping in tents, people who are sleeping in
01:27their cars along the seafront. There are shelters for people here, but they are overcrowded. People
01:32very reliant on aid, aid given out by charities, food, bottled water. It's a pretty tense atmosphere
01:40inside. And at the moment, earlier on, I was further south in Tyre, the city of Tyre. Now,
01:45that's very much in the red zone. So the Israeli army reissuing late last night its evacuation order
01:52telling residents there to leave. And we have heard recently from the Arabic language spokesperson of
01:58the Israeli army saying that the Israelis will now be targeting crossing points across the Letani
02:06river to try to prevent Hezbollah from moving men and supplies and weapons. This as Hezbollah continues,
02:15we saw that lots last night, several rockets from Hezbollah being fired from the south of Lebanon
02:22into northern Israel. When we were in Tyre, we were told that there had been six Israeli airstrikes so
02:28far today in Tyre. And above our heads, we saw at least three what appeared to be Israeli aircraft in
02:34the skies as two. And Claire, take us then to that dramatic footage we played at the top of the
02:40programme and the bombing of the heart of Beirut this morning. I understand you were actually in
02:45the capital today when that happened.
02:50It happened in the early hours of this morning, not too far from where we were. So we went to
02:55the scene
02:55as fast as we could. And the building, as you can see in those images, completely flattened. What's
03:00interesting is that same building was targeted in the lower floors last week. But it was the strike in
03:07the early hours of this morning that brought it to the ground. But the Israeli army did give out a
03:12warning signal. And so people nearby were able to evacuate. And as we understand, there were no
03:17casualties. While we were at that site of that flattened building, we heard another blast. And so
03:23we got into the car and drove for about a kilometre to a different neighbourhood, the Zoek al-Blaz
03:29neighbourhood. And there we saw the impact of a precision strike on the seventh floor of a building
03:35there in a highly densely populated area. So even though that strike was a precision strike, it really was
03:41clearly really targeting one particular apartment building and one particular floor and one
03:46apartment. The nearby buildings, particularly one of them opposite, had been impacted as well. And
03:54certainly, I've got to stress, this is in central Beirut. This is not in the southern suburbs,
03:59the Dahiya. This is not in the Hezbollah stronghold. And I was speaking to locals there. So we saw people
04:04in those central Beirut neighbourhoods with their suitcases leaving, just trying to get out as quickly as
04:09they could. Others, though, one gentleman that I spoke to was there with his wife and three young
04:14children who said, we don't have anywhere else to go. It's either we stay in our homes or we end
04:18up on
04:18the streets. So for now, we're choosing to stay in our homes.
04:21All right, Claire Packelan reporting for us this hour in Sidon earlier on this morning. She was in the
04:27Lebanese capital in Beirut. Thank you. Well, with Lebanon, as we were hearing there, now being
04:33increasingly drawn into the heart of this war between Iran, Israel and the United States, I'm
04:39pleased to welcome to the programme now the Lebanese analyst, Eamon Mahanna. He's the director of the
04:45Samir Qasir Foundation. Eamon, good to talk to you today. Can I just get your reaction, first of all,
04:51to these scenes in central Beirut this morning? Israeli bombs falling, you know, sort of within
04:58walking distance of downtown Beirut, walking distance almost of the Lebanese government.
05:05It's a real tragedy. It's a tragedy that Lebanon has been witnessing and living through time and
05:12again. It is also unfortunate that the latest strike killed a journalist working for Al-Manar TV
05:20station because it shows that civilians are also paying the price of a confrontation that Lebanon
05:26has not chosen, that was imposed on Lebanon. And our country has become the theatre for a war between
05:33Israel and Iran using Lebanese tools when it comes to Hezbollah, but a war that none in Lebanon has
05:40chosen. None of the Lebanese people want this war, neither Hezbollah's constituents, nor the Lebanese
05:45government, nor any other single citizen. And the fact that we have no agency to stop it,
05:50unless we go through such a deep division in our country, makes our hearts burn.
05:58And look, let's talk about how the Lebanese government's been responding to what's
06:02happening. We have now over one million people displaced in Lebanon. It's worth reiterating,
06:06Lebanon's a country of just some five million people, a little more than that.
06:10Israel has begun a ground invasion as well. So is the government able to respond to what is clearly
06:18enormous needs by its population?
06:22We need to separate between two levels, the political level and the humanitarian level.
06:26When it comes to the purely humanitarian level, again, the government is managing a crisis it did not
06:31choose with very limited resources. And this matters when we assess its response. But when it comes to
06:40the crisis unit, the crisis cell that was set in the Grand Soraya, the prime minister's office,
06:47alongside several other ministers, we've seen a lot of professional response coming from the Lebanese
06:53government. And it's a response that is related to trying to distribute aid in the most transparent way,
06:59where different departments coordinate, rather than having duplication in these responses,
07:06involving the international actors, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, UNESCO, in a coordinated way.
07:12We have every evening a statement by a different minister explaining how their ministries are
07:20responding to the crisis. And we're not only talking about the ministries that are typically
07:24in charge of these types of responses. We've seen excellent measures by the
07:29ministries of tourism, agriculture, and many others. But this is purely on the responsive side.
07:34The real problem is political. The government has expressed since its formation, the desire to
07:42have monopoly over weapons in the country. It has expressed in a much more explicit way in August of
07:482025, its desire also to restrict weapons only in the hands of the government by the end of 2025.
07:55Then a plan with the Lebanese armed forces was put in place. However, the implementation of that plan
08:02is taking much longer than what Lebanon needed. And more recently, the government outlawed Hezbollah's
08:09military actions and asked the military and the judiciary to put an end to any armed measure by
08:18Hezbollah. And we've seen a failure to enforce this decision. So on the one hand, we have a government that
08:23is
08:23trying its best to manage the crisis, the humanitarian and the refugee or displaced crisis, but a much
08:31negative weakness, actually a real weakness in implementing the more essential political measures that would put
08:38this crisis to an end or that would reduce the time of the ongoing war.
08:43But isn't it really rather unrealistic to expect the Lebanese government right now, the Lebanese army,
08:48to try and disarm Hezbollah when the country is being bombed?
08:55It's definitely unrealistic in the current situation. This is why the pressure from Lebanon's allies,
09:02from Lebanon's friends, the French proposal, for example, are important to give the Lebanese
09:08government the ability to actually implement its decisions. But deep inside, my real question mark is
09:15about the political will. I know it exists in the executive. However, we are today paying the price
09:24of long years of buying time, of kicking the can as a strategy. We've reached the limit of that
09:31past attitude. Today is the time for tough choices that would create, on the one hand, elements for the
09:39state to increase its credibility. And this goes through a very good response to the crisis when
09:46it comes to supporting people, preventing hate against refugees, preventing further divisions across
09:52sectarian lines, and at the same time, symbolic measures by the military and the judiciary against
09:58Hezbollah. We're not saying here this armament of Hezbollah will happen overnight. But today,
10:03there you have military commanders and political commanders within Hezbollah that are threatening that very
10:09government of being dealt with as a Vichy government once the war ended. They are literally calling for
10:15executions. If the judiciary doesn't take clear measures against those who utter these threats,
10:22including on social media, and we're not talking here about bots, we're talking about real people
10:27calling for explicit murder. If absolutely no action is made to hold these people accountable,
10:34we cannot at any moment ask anyone in the world to believe we are ready to take more definitive
10:41measures and more actionable measures against the military wing of Hezbollah. So the sign of political
10:47will is essential, and it's still missing.
10:49And look, the president, Joseph Aoun, not just explicitly critical of Hezbollah,
10:55talking about how the group was working to collapse the Lebanese state. He also
11:02suggested that it might be time for Lebanon to have direct talks with Israel. That's something
11:08France has floated as well. What do you make of that idea?
11:14I think we've tried every other way of dealing with Israel in the past, and none have worked. We've tried
11:22armed action. It's worked until 2000, and Israel withdrew from Lebanon. But after 2000,
11:29everything that was done on the military front in order to confront Israel has only brought destruction
11:36to Lebanon, has only brought displacement, and has further exacerbated every single crisis, economic,
11:43social, sectarian, that Lebanon is going through. So today, negotiations are not optional at this stage.
11:48They are necessary to prevent a deeper escalation, because we haven't tried anything else. It is time to
11:53try a new approach in dealing with Israel. However, negotiations require some success factors. First,
12:00a relatively positive response from the Israeli side, which we haven't seen so far in a very
12:05explicit way. And we're also deep in the Lebanese quagmire of negotiations, horse trading insight,
12:13to see who will be represented within the negotiation committee. So we're debating already the composition of
12:19the negotiation team without necessarily having a roadmap for that negotiation. And Lebanon is full
12:25of dilemmas. If you do not represent all segments of the population and of the political spectrum
12:31in the negotiation team, you can have Hezbollah and even their allies who would say, this doesn't represent
12:36us and it doesn't bind us, which means that the negotiations will fail. But at the same time,
12:41if you include them and give them the same type of power that Speaker of the Parliament, Nabi Burri,
12:47a Hezbollah ally has had in previous indirect negotiations, we've seen the results of these
12:51negotiations that lead to very broad terms that can be interpreted in very different ways by the
12:57different parties, and that eventually only create some small periods of stability, but that are followed
13:03by even worse military actions, similar to the ones we are seeing today. So today, what is actually
13:10missing is political will to change course, to realize that everything that was done in the
13:16past in terms of managing the war, managing the relationship with Israel, managing the relationship
13:21with the internal segments of the Lebanese population have failed. It is time for a new approach. And we
13:27don't have the luxury of perfect conditions. Lebanon doesn't have that luxury anymore. We have to work
13:32with imperfect tools and make our best to make them credible. And this requires first asserting the
13:39credibility of the government. The government cannot make good actions on the one hand,
13:44and lose its credibility on the other hand, and then ask the world and the population to believe
13:50its good intentions. We need credible actions. And these are so far only limited to humanitarian response.
13:57All right, Eamon Mohanna, really good to get your analysis of the situation in Lebanon,
14:02the internal politics. Thank you very much indeed.
14:05Thank you very much indeed.
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