Israel has added another objective to its ongoing conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah: ensuring the safe return of residents from communities along its border with Lebanon to their homes.

The country’s security cabinet voted on the measure during a late night meeting that lasted into the early hours of Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said, adding that “Israel will continue to act to implement this objective.”

Though the return of residents of northern Israel has long been understood to be a political necessity, this is the first time it has been made an official war goal.

Officials and residents from Israel’s northern region have become increasingly vocal about the need to return to their homes, piling pressure on the government to act against the threat of Hezbollah’s rockets from southern Lebanon.

The addition of the new war aim may push Israel to shift its military focus to its northern front as it warns that its patience for reaching a diplomatic solution with Hezbollah is running thin.

Earlier on Monday, Netanyahu told US envoy Amos Hochstein in Tel Aviv that it won’t be possible to return the northern residents without a “fundamental change in the security situation in the north,” according to his office. He added that Israel will “do what is necessary” to safeguard the region’s security and return the residents to their homes.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was however more specific, saying in a post on X after meeting Hochstein that the only way to allow the residents of the north to return is “though military action.”

Hochstein cautioned Netanyahu against initiating a wider war in Lebanon, Axios reported, citing sources it didn’t identify.

Hezbollah has said that it will end its attacks on Israel when Israel ends its war in Gaza.

Gallant’s fate

The addition to Israel’s war aims comes amid reports in Israel that Netanyahu plans to replace Gallant with a former rival politician, Gideon Sa’ar. Unlike Gallant, who served for decades in the Israel Defense Forces, Sa’ar is a near lifelong politician. Reports of his potential appointment as defense minister have already caused a stir in Israel’s political and military establishment.

Netanyahu’s attempt to fire Gallant in March last year due to Gallant’s opposition to the government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary prompted large public protests. The prime minister eventually backed down. On Monday evening, crowds gathered outside Sa’ar’s house in Tel Aviv to protest his potential appointment and express concerns about its possible impact on the fate of the hostages in Gaza.

Opposition leader Benny Gantz on Tuesday slammed reports of Gallant’s potential dismissal.

“Replacing a minister of defense on the brink of a possible more intense campaign in the north, which could turn into a regional war is, in my opinion, is irresponsible security-wise,” he said in a statement. He said the addition of the new war aim was “better late than never.”

Georgian lawmakers on Tuesday approved the third and final reading of a law on “family values and the protection of minors” that would impose sweeping curbs on LGBTQ rights.

The bill would provide a legal basis for authorities to outlaw Pride events and public displays of the LGBTQ rainbow flag, and to impose censorship of films and books.

Leaders of the governing Georgian Dream party say it is needed to safeguard traditional moral standards in Georgia, whose deeply conservative Orthodox Church is highly influential.

Activists say the measure is aimed at boosting conservative support for the government ahead of a parliamentary election on October 26 in Georgia, a country that has ambitions to join the European Union but which Western governments fear is now tilting back towards Russia.

Tamara Jakeli, director of campaign group Tbilisi Pride, said the bill, which also restates an existing ban on same-sex marriage and bans gender reassignment surgery, would likely force her organisation to close its doors.

“This law is the most terrible thing to happen to the LGBTQ community in Georgia,” Jakeli, 28, told Reuters. “We will most likely have to shut down. There is no way for us to continue functioning.”

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, a critic of Georgian Dream whose powers are mostly ceremonial, has indicated that she will block the bill. But Georgian Dream and its allies have enough seats in parliament to override her veto.

LGBTQ rights are a fraught topic in Georgia, where polls show broad disapproval of same-sex relationships, and the constitution bans same-sex marriage. Participants in Tbilisi’s annual Pride marches have come under physical attack by anti-LGBTQ protesters in recent years.

Foreign agents

The issue has become more prominent ahead of October’s election, where Georgian Dream is seeking a fourth term in office and is campaigning heavily against LGBTQ rights.

The ruling party, whose top candidate for the election is billionaire ex-prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, has deepened ties with neighbouring Russia as relations with Western countries have soured.

Earlier this year, it passed a law on “foreign agents” that the European and U.S. critics said is authoritarian and Russian-inspired. Its passage sparked some of the largest protests Georgia has seen since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Opinion polls show the party, which in 2014 passed a law banning anti-LGBTQ discrimination before later pivoting to more conservative positions, remains Georgia’s most popular, though it has lost ground since 2020, when it won a narrow majority in parliament.

In one ruling party advert aired on Georgian television, Pride director Jakeli’s face is shown alongside the words: “No to moral degradation”.

Jakeli said that the bill could only be stopped if Georgian Dream were to lose power in October, though she noted that the country’s opposition parties are not overtly supportive of LGBTQ rights.

“The only way we can survive in this country and have any progress on LGBTQ rights is for us to go in great numbers to the elections and vote for change,” she said.

Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was among those injured in Beirut, according to semi-official Iranian media outlet Mehr News.

Lebanon’s Ministry of Health has urged citizens who possess pagers to discard them and warned hospitals to be on “high alert.”

The explosions affected several areas in Lebanon, particularly the southern suburbs of Beirut, according to Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces.

NNA reported that “hacked” pager devices exploded in the towns of Ali Al-Nahri and Riyaq in Lebanon’s central Beqaa valley, resulting in a significant number of injuries. The locations are Hezbollah strongholds.

The Israeli military, which has engaged in tit-for-tat strikes with Hezbollah since the start of the war in Gaza last October, said it would not be commenting on the incident.

Health workers across Lebanon were asked to report urgently to work given the “large number of injured people being transferred to hospitals” following the pager explosions, the Lebanese Ministry of Health said. Officials also called for people to donate blood in anticipation of increased need.

Videos circulating on social media and news agencies show explosions in various locations that appear to be powerful.

In one CCTV video, a man can be seen picking out fruit in a supermarket when an explosion tears his bag to shreds. Bystanders can be seen running away as they hear the explosion, while the man drops to the ground clutching his lower abdomen. After several seconds, he can be heard groaning in pain.

This is a developing story. More details soon…

Ukrainian prosecutors have launched an investigation into an alleged Russian execution of a Ukrainian soldier found dead with a sword inscribed with “for Kursk” in his body, in an apparent act of revenge for Kyiv’s recent incursion into the Russian border region.

In a photo circulating online, a man is seen lying on his back on a rubble-strewn road with a medieval-style sword protruding from his chest. Duct tape can be seen around the wrists of one of his blood-stained arms.

The words “for Kursk” are written in Cyrillic on the sword, in seeming reference to Ukraine’s cross-border attack on the Kursk region, the first foreign invasion of Russian territory since World War II.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, said on Tuesday that the image showed “another act of barbarism” by Russia. His office later confirmed it had opened a criminal investigation into the alleged execution.

“Footage of an alleged execution by sword of an unarmed Ukrainian serviceman with taped hands is spreading on the web,” he wrote on X. “Russia continues its deliberate policy of eliminating everything Ukrainian, demonstrating worldwide its brutal cruelty and cynically disregarding any values and norms of the civilized world.”

Kostin said preliminary assessments showed the incident occurred in Novohrodivka, a city in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said the alleged execution was “a violation of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War.” Under this convention, prisoners of war must not be subjected to torture and must be protected from violence.

Kyiv is investigating nearly 130,000 war crimes allegedly committed by Moscow since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Kostin said in June.

Thursday’s image comes as Russia is stepping up its efforts to expel Ukrainian forces from Kursk. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged the start of Russia’s counteroffensive and said the Kremlin intends to deploy up to 70,000 troops to the region, but said last week that Moscow’s forces “have not yet had any serious success.”

Meanwhile, Russia is inching forward toward Pokrovsk, northwest of Novohrodivka, where the alleged sword execution occurred.

In an update Thursday, Ukraine’s military said its troops had thwarted 40 Russian attacks near Pokrovsk over the past 24 hours, and that the attacks were most fierce near Hrodivka and Novohrodivka.

The Kremlin has not commented on the alleged execution.

Is it a prelude to a wider attack or the totality of the message to Hezbollah? This is the key question for the next 48 hours in the Middle East, as the Lebanese militant group comes to terms with the wholesale disruption and violation of their most sacred communications.

Tuesday’s wave of explosions in Lebanon will likely scar the Party, as they are often known, who pride themselves on secrecy, and the technological omerta their members adhere to. Yet it is their very bid to keep their secrets – using low-tech pagers and not more trackable smartphones – that appears to have led to several deaths and thousands of injuries.

It will have caused a seismic shock with Hezbollah members to now be asking not only if it is safe to contact their colleagues, but if those colleagues are unharmed?

Israel has characteristically not claimed responsibility, but if it was behind the attack as Lebanon and Hezbollah say, then the question is whether this vast and unprecedented assault was intended to presage a wider fight.

It would make strategic sense to dispense a moment of intense chaos like this just before a bigger onslaught on the group militarily.

The timing is telling. Just on Monday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant said during a meeting with the US envoy Amos Hochstein that the time for diplomacy with Hezbollah had passed and military might could take center stage. Literally hours later, their enemy’s entire communications infrastructure was hit with an attack that, according to a Lebanese security source, used pagers purchased by Hezbollah in “recent months,” necessitating a long lead time in the operation’s planning.

The violence again spoke of a technological gulf between Israel and its opponents. We have seen this repeatedly in high-profile killings in Tehran over the past years: the precision of an apparent Mossad strike against an al-Qaeda leader in 2020. The wizardry behind the killing of nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, which reportedly used facial recognition to fire a machine gun. And the recent assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which reportedly used a remote-controlled bomb hidden in a guest bedroom.

The same superior intelligence and capability was on display across Lebanon, where civilians appear to have been caught in widespread blasts that were not precise enough. The horror of hundreds of apparently simultaneous tiny but intimate explosions will be felt by ordinary Lebanese, a reminder of the damage inflicted nationwide by the 2006 war with their southern neighbor. The risk of widespread war with Israel again has become a pressing reality since the October 7 attacks.

It places Hezbollah, however, in another unenviable moment of frailty – plunged into chaos, with great pressure upon them to project strength again. The same dilemma was visited upon them after the assassination of senior commander Fu’ad Shukr in August. Hezbollah felt compelled to strike back, and maintain a sense of deterrence. Yet it became slowly clear they lacked enthusiasm for a larger conflict. Leader Hassan Nasrallah delayed their response to a time of his choosing, and enabled the muted exchange of rocket fire and airstrikes that followed on August 25 to not get out of hand.

At the same time, the given wisdom that Israel does not want a war either is eroding. Israeli airstrikes hit targets to their north almost daily, with a growing absence of concern about Hezbollah’s response. Tuesday’s wide-ranging attack on Lebanon will necessitate Hezbollah finding some means of projecting strength through retaliation, but again speaks to the gap between their capabilities and those of their southern neighbor.

A long ground war between the two would see Israeli forces, over-stretched and exhausted by a brutal year-long Gaza campaign, facing to their north an enemy fresher and better-trained than Hamas. Hezbollah will still be able to inflict significant damage upon Israel if a full-scale battle erupts. But Israel may have decided too cleanly that Hezbollah seeks to avoid war, and therefore can be goaded repeatedly.

It may be precisely the sort of miscalculation that leads to a widening of the conflict; the moment when Hezbollah determine Israel have dismissed them as a persistent threat will be the moment they feel compelled to act most violently.

The pager blasts could speak of a war where one side is confident in its huge advantage technologically, but also willing to absorb the risks that come with inflicting a wide-ranging embarrassment on its foe. We will learn in the coming days if the calculations behind the attack avoided escalation, or fomented it.

As Russia’s military last week launched globe-spanning drills widely seen as a show of strength directed at the United States, President Vladimir Putin made clear which country he sees as standing by Moscow’s side.

In an opening video address, Putin said 15 “friendly” nations would observe what Moscow claimed were some 90,000 troops and more than 500 ships and aircraft mobilized for the largest such exercises in 30 years.

But only China would take part alongside Russia, according to Putin.

“We are paying special attention to strengthening cooperation with our friendly countries. This is especially important today amid rising geopolitical tension around the world,” the Russian leader said.

Dubbed “Ocean-2024,” the seven days of drills that ended Monday are the latest in a recent slew of military exercises and joint patrols between Russia and China that come on the heels of vows from Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to tighten military cooperation, even as the Kremlin wages its war against Ukraine.

China sent several warships and 15 aircraft to waters off Russia’s Far East coast for Ocean-2024, according to the Russian military. In addition, Chinese and Russian forces this month touted deepened strategic coordination during joint naval drills in waters near Japan and held their fifth joint maritime patrol in the northern Pacific.

It follows a raft of joint exercises over the summer, including near Alaska – where US and Canadian forces intercepted Russian and Chinese bombers together for the first time – and in the South China Sea, a vital waterway claimed almost entirely by Beijing in which geopolitical tensions are rapidly rising.

That coordination has been watched with increasing concern in Washington, which has for months accused China of bolstering Russia’s defense sector with dual-use exports like machine tools and microelectronics, a charge Beijing denies as it claims neutrality in the conflict.

It also comes as the war in Ukraine grinds on and threats escalate, with Putin warning NATO leaders that lifting restrictions on Kyiv’s use of longer-range Western missiles to strike deep inside Russia would be considered an act of war.

The latest Russia-China military drills fit a pattern of more than a decade of enhanced military coordination between the two countries, experts say.

But at a time of heightened global tensions – including over Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s aggression in the South China Sea, and its claims to the self-ruled island of Taiwan – they also underscore how Moscow and Beijing increasingly view each other as key to projecting strength.

The joint drills also raise questions about whether the two nuclear-armed powers, which are not treaty allies, could act together in any potential future conflict.

‘Improving and consolidating’

The relationship between these two giant neighbors has never been simple.

Moscow and Beijing were once enemies that fought a 1969 border conflict between the Soviet Union and a young Communist China. But recent decades have seen a robust arms trade between the two, and – especially as Xi and Putin tightened ties more broadly – a scaling up of military coordination.

Between 2014 and 2023, the two militaries have held at least four and as many as 10 joint military exercises, war games or patrols each year, including multilateral drills with other countries, according to data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Those drills and patrols have also appeared to observers to become increasingly complex – for example involving both navy and air forces or more advanced equipment, as well taking place in farther-flung parts of the world.

In a first this July, both the Chinese and Russian aircraft intercepted near Alaska took off from the same Russian air base, according to CSIS researchers, who also noted this was the partners’ first joint air patrol in the northern Pacific.

“They’re not as interoperable as NATO allies, but they are improving and consolidating this strategic partnership or alignment,” said Alexander Korolev, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Being able to work together as a single entity is a core ethos of NATO, the decades-old alliance of 32 member nations that is bound together by a mutual defense pact and is viewed by both China and Russia as a key military rival.

The demonstration of Russia and China’s consolidation has a clear audience: the US and its allies.

Putin and Xi have been driven together by a shared view that the West aims to suppress their core interests. For Putin, those concerns include preventing NATO expansion, while Xi eyes control of Taiwan and South China Sea domination.

Putin spelled out that context in his video address launching Ocean-2024, accusing the US and its allies of “using the alleged Russian threat and the China containment policy as a pretext for building up their military presence along Russia’s western borders, as well as in the Arctic and in Asia-Pacific.”

The Russian leader also warned that the US planned to station intermediate and shorter-range missiles in “forward deployment areas,” including the Asia-Pacific region. This appeared to echo comments Putin made over the summer criticizing Washington’s and Berlin’s plan to deploy US long-range missiles in Germany from 2026, and of the US temporarily sending a powerful missile launcher for exercises in the Philippines earlier this year – a move also condemned by Beijing.

Both Russia and China want to show the US and its allies that their “two militaries are becoming increasingly integrated and any challenge to either risks a combined response,” said Carl Schuster, a retired US Navy captain and former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

“They are saying in effect that we can do to you, that is, operate in your backyard like you have been doing in ours.”

The drills also provide opportunities for each to learn from the other – as Russia, with its extensive battlefield experience, and China, which has become increasingly advanced in electronic military technologies, each have something to learn from the other, observers say.

Korolev said it’s “increasingly difficult” in the wake of the Ukraine war and extensive Western sanctions to know the extent to which the latest drills are also sustaining Sino-Russian technical cooperation on arms, which previously was a feature of their years of steadily enhanced military collaboration.

Double threat?

In Washington, the optics of the tightening ties are raising concerns over the risk of a simultaneous US military conflict with China and Russia, or even one that could also include other partners, like Iran, with which the two countries held naval drills earlier this year. There are also concerns about Moscow’s potential support for Beijing in any war in Asia-Pacific.

There, Beijing and Washington navigate a host of potential flashpoints including China’s designs on Taiwan and its mounting aggression in the South China Sea against US treaty ally the Philippines. Both Russia and China have also been warily watching the US’ strengthening of its longstanding ties with regional allies.

But observers say that despite the growing coordination within joint drills, it’s unlikely there is a clear end goal past sending a strong signal – at least for now.

“I don’t know that you are going to see Russian planes supporting a Chinese attack on Taiwan, for example, or in a conflict with the Philippines are Russian vessels are going to support Chinese ones? I doubt it,” said Elizabeth Wishnick, a senior research scientist in the China and Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Division at independent research group CNA.

While Russia and China may have “overlapping interests” they are not on the same page on strategic goals in the region, she said.

“I don’t think you can assume that just because they’re having more military exercises that they’re in lockstep,” she said.

In joint statements, China and Russia insist their relationship is one of non-alignment that doesn’t target any third party.

Each also has different geopolitical objectives in the region. Russia, for example, maintains close ties with China’s rival India – and is likely eager to prevent any Chinese ascendancy in Asia that deepens the power imbalance between Beijing and Moscow.

In turn, China would also be wary of compromising its own strategic aims by acting too directly in concert with Russia – but also of any action that could destabilize warming ties with its northern neighbor following decades of fractious relations that have previously spilled over into conflict.

“Simply put, China sides with no one but itself,” said James Char, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University’s Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore. “Beneath the surface, China and Russia continue to harbor deep mutual mistrust.”  
 
But observers say there’s still a potential range of ways the partnership could come to bear if conflict were to break out in Asia involving China.

Russia would at least reciprocate with the kind of diplomatic and economic support that Beijing has extended to Moscow during the war in Ukraine, analysts say, and would also likely help provide weapons and discounted energy.

When it comes to joining China in any potential conflict with the US, however, Russia may have “more to lose and little to gain,” according to Schuster, the retired Navy captain.

But were China to act against Taiwan, the Russian military could potentially offer limited support like sending ships and air force patrols to waters around Japan, or possibly deploy one or two submarines into the Western Pacific, he said.

That would “give the US and its allies another factor of concern as they weigh how to respond,” he said. “But China will have to offer a lot to convince Russia to join that conflict.”