The Public Source

An Israeli suit recovered from the July 2006 War. It comes from the collection of the family of martyr Ali Mansour, from the town of Taybeh. Ali Mansour was killed during an infiltration operation into an Israeli settlement on September 20, 2024. Harouf, Lebanon. April 26, 2025. (Fátima el-Samman/The Public Source) Published on 19 June 2026 In Arabic, “withaqeyya” is a shrub in the olive tree family that blooms with white flowers and is used by farmers to create natural fences.

Zainab and Ali Mahdi, siblings from Naqoura, come from a long line of farmers. As children, they learned to care for the land, tending centuries-old olive trees, fruit orchards, vegetable plots, and bees on their farm. They sold fruit and vegetables along the seaside road, beneath a pine tree planted by their father. At home, they dried herbs, distilled rosewater and other aromatics — chamomile, rosemary, geranium — and prepared mouneh like tomato jam and pomegranate molasses.

On the first day of the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, I came across a cartoon circulating through the Instagram stories of my diasporic Iranian family and friends. It narrated the outbreak of war through a simple exchange: one character asks, “What happened?” Another replies: “The bad guys attacked the bad guys with the help of the bad guys.” In the homeland, many understood the war as a unilateral act of aggression initiated by the U.S. and Israel.

My aunt, who spent much of her life between Canada and the United States, had already lost a house once before, in Kafa’at, in 2024. After Israel issued a forced displacement order, she and her family left. The house was later demolished and everything inside destroyed. At the time, she tried not to dwell on her own loss. People were dying, others had lost even more, and catastrophes were everywhere.

On June 3, the U.S. State Department released a joint statement by the U.S., Lebanon, and Israel outlining a framework for ending hostilities between Israel and Lebanon. The statement emerged after a series of direct talks between Lebanese and Israeli representatives, and is the third such agreement since the outbreak of war between the two countries in October 2023.

Editor's Note: The article “The Enemy Made My Home His Headline, and I Watched Him Roam Every Corner” was first published in Arabic by Manateq on April 20, 2026. It was another evening of displacement. We had been forced out of our home and into a room that was witness to our counting down the days, waiting for the return. I was sitting with my family watching the news on television as we usually did, and this was when we saw it: our very own neighborhood appeared on screen.

A few hours after news broke of the martyrdom of reporters Ali Shoeib and Fatima Ftouni, along with cameraman Hussein Ftouni, we stood on the city’s shore. The crew of Al Manar was broadcasting live from Sour. When he finished, the reporter signed off the broadcast with, “Here is Ali Shoeib, southern Lebanon.” As soon as the camera cut — and as  cameraman Khodr Markiz was crying over his friend and colleague Hajj Ali Shoeib — a faint light flashed in the distant horizon, toward al-Bayyada.

My first memories of the village are tied to the occupation: the crossings and permits; the idea of “collaborators,” their cruel faces and foul reputations; the sound of artillery pounding villages beyond the occupied areas, sonic booms, and Umm Kamel; the military combing through the valleys; the fear that we could be dragged to detention camps, where even a 10-year-old boy could be treated as a threat: forced to collaborate, risk arrest, or be expelled; the improvised explosive devices, the...

My sister and I made a habit of journaling our memories. One dawn during Ramadan, the sound of the resistance’s rockets blended with the rain outside. My sister described the moment as “poetic," and it made me smile. Dawn was peaceful, its scent distinct, and everything was still. And then, the sound came. We wondered: “Did they finish their prayers, then launch the rockets?

At 1:30 a.m. on March 24, a high-pitched scream cut through the village of Halta, near Lebanon’s southeastern border, followed by the sound of gunfire. The village’s roughly 200 families were jolted awake. “We thought it was a brawl between locals,” Issa Abdel Aal, Halta’s mukhtar, the village’s elected leader, told The Public Source. He stepped outside, thinking he might intervene, but within moments bullets began raining down as fighter jets rumbled overhead.