Abbie Fielding-Smith

Israel has now blown up the main coastal bridge into the city of Tyre, further cutting off south Lebanon from the rest of the country ahead of their ground offensive.

We will quite literally all pay the price

Publication day for Blood Will Flow! A five-year investigation into the second biggest terror attack of all time, after 9/11, the effort to cover it up, and the hidden truth of the global energy business. bonnierbooks.co.uk/books/ithaka/b…

Evacuation orders means things like people being unable to go for dialysis or other such routine life-maintaining treatments, or the collapse of fragile livelihoods they spent years to build and maintain. It's lethality in a humanitarian way you don't notice on a screen.

Does it have a civilian death ticker?

"Let's redo the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, but this time with explicitly sectarian overtones" is an unbelievably stupid idea, even by the standards of American Middle East policy Also: that it's being discussed is a reminder of how Lebanon (and particularly President Aoun) has wasted time over the past 18 months reuters.com/business/aeros…

The Damascus governorate banned yesterday all restaurants in the city from selling alcoholic drinks. It also banned all liquor stores, with the exception of those located in Christian majority areas (Bab Touma, Bab Sharki, Qassaa). Practically, this means that Syria's new leaders, similarly to leaders of most Muslim-majority countries, think they need to tell their Muslim citizens how they should behave, what they should drink or not, eat or not, and, eventually, how they should be dressed. But more seriously, the decision effectively segregates between Muslims and Christians. It implies that Christians should stay in their areas and Muslims in theirs. Even during the late Ottoman period, this type of segregation was starting to disappear.

Incredible there are no serious efforts to prevent this invasion.

This needs to trigger a significant preventative response.

Lebanon is in a real catch-22. Hizbollah is too weak to deter Israel, protect its community, force a negotiated settlement, or rethink its own tactics... Yet strong enough to deter the Lebanese army from taking over, while egging on Israel and inviting ever more escalation.

I escaped from Iran. But I keep reliving the horror economist.com/interactive/18… from The Economist

“But, as you see, it's a beautiful day, the Strait of Hormuz is open and people are having a wonderful time!”

Although the new war on Lebanon may look like a continuation of its forebear in 2024, it is in fact different in many ways.🧵

My best tip for anyone trying to get back into reading is to remember that you can read books to avoid other responsibilities in your life, and it can become a vice if you play your cards right.

I don’t think unconditional surrender is imminent.

“I never thought I’d say this, but if someone from within the regime becomes a real reformer, why not? In the end, we just want peace” ft.com/content/4e048e…

This investigation from @OCCRP, published a few weeks ago, uncovered how a person running two UK-registered crypto exchanges was actually a fake front linked to laundering for Iran's regime. One of the links in the investigation relied on facial matching a cat. Brilliant.

A glimpse of dystopia. There’s an urgent need for pressure to stop the madness of bombing oil sites and desalination plants on any and all sides of this conflict. When people say international law doesn’t matter any more, this is the kind of action they are enabling.

U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed scores of children on Saturday, officials tell Reuters. W/@phildstewart

Disruption from the war isn't just to the oil-and-gas industry: "The Middle East is one of the world's largest fertiliser producers, while the Strait of Hormuz is a crucial shipping route for exports. About 35 per cent of global urea exports pass through the waterway... the route also handles 45 per cent of global sulphur exports." "If the disruption continues, consumers could see higher prices for bread within six to 10 weeks, eggs within a few months and pork and broiler chicken within six months." ft.com/content/7efe20…