World
Israel’s war on Lebanon triggers unprecedented displacement crisis
Beirut, Lebanon – On Friday evening, a sudden explosion heavily damaged Dina’s* home in the Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon’s capital Beirut. It was caused by the shock wave of an Israeli air attack, during which dozens of bombs were dropped at once on a nearby apartment complex in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of the capital that is about two kilometres (1.2 miles) away from the refugee camp.
The huge attack killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and an unknown number of civilians after it levelled several residential buildings, leaving thousands more destitute. The blasts shattered the glass of small shops and cars in the camp, blew doors off their hinges and devastated nearby buildings and homes, explained 35-year-old Dina.
The explosions triggered mayhem as thousands of people and vehicles in the camp rushed towards its narrow exits. Dina grabbed her 12-year-old brother and ran down the stairs from their home, where she saw their elderly mother lying on the ground covered in debris.
Initially fearing that their mother was dead, Dina’s brother broke down. However, it turned out she was still conscious.
“My mother was confused and delirious, but I helped her up and told her that we had to run. I knew more bombs were coming,” Dina told Al Jazeera from a cafe in Hamra, a bustling neighbourhood in central Beirut that has absorbed thousands of displaced people from across Lebanon.
Unprecedented crisis
Israel escalated its conflict with Hezbollah in the second half of September, devastating southern Lebanon and triggering mass displacement.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), one million people have been uprooted from their homes due to Israel’s attacks, 90 percent of them in the last week.
But Lebanon’s caretaker government – operating without a president and reeling from a severe economic crisis – has struggled to respond to people’s needs. Thousands are sleeping on the floors of classrooms after the government converted more than 500 schools into displacement shelters.
Thousands of others are sleeping in mosques, under bridges and in the streets. But the crisis could get even worse now that Israel has begun a ground offensive.
“A ground invasion will compound the problem,” said Karim Emile Bitar, a professor of international relations at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. “We already have more than one million people who left their homes. That is around the same number we had in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon and reached Beirut.”
Moments after Israel announced its ground offensive, it ordered civilians to evacuate 29 towns in south Lebanon.
Nora Serhan, who is originally from southern Lebanon, said that her uncle remains in one of the border villages. He refused to leave when Hezbollah and Israel began an initially low-scale conflict on October 8, 2023.
Hezbollah had begun firing projectiles at Israel with the stated aim of reducing pressure on its ally Hamas in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 41,600 people and uprooted nearly the entire 2.3 million population.
The devastating war on Gaza followed a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, in which 1,139 people were killed and around 250 taken captive.
After Israel and Hezbollah began exchanging fire, Serhan’s uncle chose to stay put. She suspects that he did not want to abandon his house and surroundings, even though the conflict cut off his water and electricity. But since Israel announced its ground offensive, Serhan’s family lost contact with him.
“When [Israel escalated the war last week], I think that maybe it became safer for my uncle to stay in the village than to risk fleeing on the roads,” she told Al Jazeera.
Losing home
Hundreds of thousands of people have abandoned their homes and villages to seek safety in Beirut, as well as in towns further north.
Abdel Latif Hamada, 57, fled his home in southern Lebanon last week after Israel began bombing the region. He said that a bomb killed one of his neighbours, while another was trapped inside his home after rubble and debris piled up outside the entrance.
Hamada risked his own life to clear the rubble and save his neighbour. He said that they were able to flee five minutes before Israel bombed their own homes.
“I didn’t rescue him. God rescued him,” said Hamada, a bald man with a nest of wrinkles around his eyes.
Despite fleeing just in time, Hamada wasn’t safe yet. He hitched an exhausting and terrifying 14-hour ride to Beirut – the journey typically takes four. Thousands of cars were squeezed together trying to reach safety, while roads were obstructed by rubble and stones that were blown off nearby homes and buildings.
“Israeli planes were all over the sky and we saw them drop bombs in front of us. I often had to get out of the vehicle to help clear the debris and stones obstructing our car,” Hamada told Al Jazeera.
As he took another drag from his cigarette, Hamada said that he wasn’t scared when Israel escalated its attacks. Over the course of his life, Israel has displaced him three times from his village, including during its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its devastating assault on the country in 2006.
In the latter war, an Israeli bomb fell on his home and killed his wife Khadeja.
“I’m not scared for my own life anymore. I’m just scared of what awaits the generation ahead of me,” Hamada said.
Permanent displacement?
Civilians and analysts fear that the ongoing displacement crisis could end up being protracted – even permanent.
According to Michael Young, an expert on Lebanon with the Carnegie Middle East Centre, Israel’s objective over the last two weeks has been to create a major humanitarian crisis for the Lebanese state and particularly for Hezbollah, which represents many Shia Muslims in the country.
“What’s worrisome is what will Israel do when it does invade? Will they begin dynamiting homes as they did in Gaza? In other words, do they make the temporary humanitarian crisis a permanent one by ensuring that nobody can return [to their homes]?” Young asked.
“This is a big question mark,” he said. “Once the villages are emptied, what will the Israelis do to them?”
Hamada and Dina both vow to return to their homes again, when they can.
Dina said her father and sister have already gone back to Burj al-Barajneh – now a ghost town – due to the terrible conditions in the displacement shelters, where there are few basic provisions and no running water.
She added that there is a growing feeling among everyone in the country that Israel will turn large swathes of Lebanon into a disaster zone, just as they did in Gaza.
“They are going to do the same thing here that they did in Gaza,” Dina said.
“This is a war on civilians.”
*Dina’s name has been changed to protect her anonymity.
The Spanish government is seeking to contain a scandal linked to EU pandemic funds, categorically denying that it used European money to pay pensions, as member states prepare for tough budget talks amid deep divisions over how funding should be allocated.
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An official in Madrid with direct knowledge of how EU funds are structured told Euronews that a technical matter is being instrumentalised in a way that is “simply false”, accusing the opposition of playing politics over what it describes as an accounting issue.
A Spanish budget watchdog reported earlier this month that the government of Pedro Sánchez used budget credits linked to the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), an economic plan partly funded through common debt designed to revitalise the bloc’s economy after Covid, to partly finance Spanish pensions in November 2024.
Madrid insists it did not breach the rules.
The European Commission asked Madrid for clarification after initial newspaper reports, according to a person familiar with the matter. It did not issue a follow-up request once Madrid provided an explanation, and Spanish authorities consider the issue closed.
However, the political scandal lingers, even as Madrid insists that “not a single euro” of EU money has been misused, amid backlash in so-called frugal countries. Spain and Italy were the biggest beneficiaries of the €750 billion recovery fund approved in summer 2020 after difficult talks.
In Madrid, the opposition People’s Party has demanded that Sánchez appear before Congress to explain the matter. The issue is also making waves in the European Parliament, with strong reactions from conservative lawmakers.
“If these allegations are confirmed, we are facing a serious abuse of European taxpayers’ money,” wrote Tomáš Zdechovský (Czechia/EPP), an influential centre-right member of the European Parliament’s budgetary committee, on X. “Europe cannot tolerate any misuse of recovery funds.”
“Is €10 billion in EU funds, intended for recovery after the pandemic, quietly being used to help pay Spanish pensions? It would confirm our worst fears about these funds,” said Dirk Gotink (The Netherlands/EPP).
Madrid sources insist the issue is being overblown for political purposes.
A government official pointed to the country’s economic performance and pushed back against the frugal-versus-south narrative, which often presents the wealthier north subsidising the weaker south. “Spain is the fastest growing economy in Europe, Germany is not paying our pensions,” said a second Madrid official.
The incident does, however, underscore the additional complications the country is facing due to its inability to approve a budget in a fragmented parliament. After failing to deliver a fresh budget for 2025, Madrid was forced to roll over a plan approved in 2023.
A fight over the EU’s financial future
The timing of the controversy is particularly sensitive.
Brussels is preparing to launch negotiations on the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), the EU’s seven-year budget for 2028–2034, and a central question will be what to do with the roughly €750 billion in joint debt accumulated through the recovery plan.
That programme was the largest and most politically consequential collective borrowing exercise in EU history. Whether it is ultimately seen as a success or a cautionary tale will inevitably shape how member states approach future proposals for shared financing.
Spain, the second-largest recipient of the initiative’s funding with a total of around €60 billion already received, has been among the most vocal advocates for an ambitious European budget and a permanent mechanism to pool financing needs.
Spanish Finance Minister Carlos Cuerpo has argued that pooling national debt at the EU level could generate annual savings of up to €25 billion.
Cuerpo, who is now Sánchez’s number two in government, echoed remarks made by France, Mario Draghi and a number of European intellectuals calling for a more efficient borrowing mechanism that would allow the EU to tap into the European Commission’s triple-A rating and lower financing costs for all 27 member states.
While the European Commission’s current budget proposal does not include new borrowing, contentious debate lies ahead over how to finance the repayment of existing recovery debt. Frugal northern countries like the Netherlands and Germany favour strict repayment schedules, even if that means cuts to other spending programmes.
On Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz reiterated his country’s opposition, even if the German central bank has been more nuanced about the benefits and risks of pooling debt.
Southern member states, including France and Greece, are pushing to roll over the debt accumulated during the pandemic, with President Emmanuel Macron describing calls for early repayments as “idiotic”. Paris is an advocate of a European safe-asset mechanism.
A European official supportive of the plan said the Spanish controversy is being weaponised not so much against Madrid, but against proposals put forward by southern countries ahead of the budget talks.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is used to kill rollover proposal,” the diplomat said.
The issue of the next European budget will feature in an EU summit scheduled in June.
The United States and China will discuss guardrails on artificial intelligence, including establishing a protocol for keeping powerful A.I. models out of the hands of nonstate actors, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday.
Mr. Bessent, who was speaking from Beijing in an interview with CNBC, did not give more details, including when these discussions would take place. But Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and President Trump had been expected to discuss A.I. during their summit in the Chinese capital.
If these talks happen, it would be the first time the two countries formally take up the issue during Mr. Trump’s second term. The capabilities and usage of A.I. have grown rapidly, and so have concerns that this technology could be weaponized by hackers and terrorists, or spiral out of human control.
“The two A.I. superpowers are going to start talking,” Mr. Bessent said. “We’re going to set up a protocol in terms of, how do we go forward with best practices for A.I. to make sure nonstate actors don’t get ahold of these models.”
Still, Mr. Bessent made clear that the fierce competition between the United States and China for supremacy in A.I. — which has been a major hurdle to cooperation on safety — remained front of mind for U.S. policymakers. Officials and experts in both countries have argued that they cannot slow technological development and risk losing out to their rivals.
Mr. Bessent said that the United States was willing to cooperate with China on A.I. safety because “the Chinese are substantially behind us” in terms of the technology’s development.
“I do not think we would be having the same discussions if they were this far ahead of us. So we’re going to put in U.S. best practices, U.S. values, on this, and then roll those out to the world,” Mr. Bessent said.
Experts have suggested that China’s A.I. models may be a few months behind the leading U.S. models.
Another hurdle to the United States and China working together on A.I. safety is that they have generally focused on different potential threats.
American experts have generally highlighted existential risks, such as the possibility of artificial general intelligence, or super-intelligence that exceeds that of humans. Chinese researchers and officials have more often highlighted risks related to social stability and information control, such as the possibility of chatbots producing content that challenges China’s leadership and policies.
Still, researchers in both countries have highlighted some shared risks, such as the possibility of A.I. being used to develop new biological weapons.
Ship SEIZED near UAE coast, UK military says
Iranian forces seized a vessel 38 nautical miles off the UAE coast early Thursday, a brazen provocation occurring just as President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in Beijing discussing key issues like the Strait of Hormuz.
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A ship was seized off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) near the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday morning, the British military reported.
The ship was boarded and “taken by unauthorized personnel” while it was roughly 38 nautical miles northeast of the United Arab Emirates’ oil export terminal Fujairah, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) reported Thursday.
UKMTO spotted the ship heading toward Iranian territorial waters after the seizure, it reported Thursday.
British authorities did not release information on who the ship belonged to or who seized it. Despite the lack of official corroboration, the BBC reported that the Honduras-flagged Hui Chuan was seized in the Strait on Thursday.
CARGO SHIP ATTACKED BY SMALL CRAFT NEAR STRAIT OF HORMUZ, UK MARITIME AGENCY SAYS
Ships are anchored in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas in southern Iran on May 4. A report on May 15 said a ship was seized off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and is being brought toward Iranian waters. (Amirhossein Khorgooei/ISNA/AFP)
Citing the risk-management company Vanguard, the BBC reported that the ship’s operators told Vanguard that the Hui Chuan was operating as a “floating armory” for ships in the Strait to defend themselves from pirates.
A container ship sits at anchor in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran, as a motorboat passes in the foreground on May 2, 2026. (Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA via AP)
At least two other ships have already been seized in the Strait of Hormuz since February.
IRAN SAYS ITS SMALL SUBS DEPLOYED TO STRAIT OF HORMUZ AS EXPERT EXPLAINS THREAT: ‘VULNERABLE TO DETECTION’
A cargo ship sails in the Persian Gulf toward the Strait of Hormuz on April 22, 2026. (AP Photo)
In April, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized the Panamanian-flagged MSC Francesca and the Epaminondes ships in the Strait.
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Fox News Digital contacted UKMTO and Vanguard for further information but did not immediately receive a response.
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