Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly criticized Hizballah for operating as the most heavily armed militia “outside the authority of the state” and outside the country, including in Syria.

In a report to the Security Council Guterres also called on Lebanon’s government and armed forces “to take all measures necessary to prohibit Hizballah and other armed groups from acquiring weapons and building paramilitary capacity” outside the authority of the state.

He said Hizballah’s military activity violates a 2004 Security Council resolution ordering all Lebanese militias to disarm and the Taif Accords that ended the country’s 1975-90 civil war.

Its engagement in the Syrian conflict also violates Lebanon’s official policy of “disassociation,” or neutrality in regional affairs.

There is no mention in the Guterres report of Iran as the supplier of Hizballah arms or its threats to Israel.

Five Libyan army soldiers were killed on Sunday by landmine explosions in the eastern city of Darna, Xinhua news agency reported, citing military and medical sources.

“Five soldiers of battalion 212 infantry were killed when several landmines exploded west of Darna during a reconnaissance operation following the withdrawal of militant group members.

“The withdrawal of the militants came after air force raids,” an officer said, adding several militants were also killed by the army,” said an official of the army’s operations centre.

The Libyan army has launched a military operation to take over Darna from the militants.

Since 2015, Darna has been besieged by the army, which demands that the Shura Council (consultative council) of the Mujahideen, a coalition of Islamist militias, to leave Darna.

Libyan National Army forces made further progress in the battles to liberate the eastern coastal city of Derna, meanwhile Speaker of the House of Representatives, Advisor Aqilah Saleh, announced that the parliament in the eastern city of Tobruk will discuss next week a proposal to move its headquarters to Benghazi, like reported by aawsat.com.

Saleh welcomed the members’ request to move the parliament to Benghazi pointing out in a statement that according to the constitutional declaration, the parliament should be in Benghazi.

He praised what he described as “the historic role of Tobruk, which embraced the House of Representatives.” He also thanked the city of Benghazi and its people for their great sacrifices to eliminate terrorism and extremism.

Saleh stressed that the request to the House to Benghazi will be discussed during parliamentary session next Tuesday and a formal decision will be taken in accordance with the constitutional declaration. He invited all members of the council to attend the session.

Meanwhile, Commander of Libyan National Army (LNA) Marshal Khalifa Haftar met in Derna with battle commanders of Operation Dignity Battle. During the meeting, the officials discussed necessary plans to target the enemy wherever they may be.

Haftar’s office said in a brief statement that he had given instructions on fighting against “terrorists” in the coastal city.

In related news, violent clashes broke out between the national army forces and militias of Shura Council of Mujahideen in Derna, where 9 gunmen were killed and over 10 injured, according to a medical source at al-Wahda hospital.

While army forces were reported to have made “significant progress” in south of Derna, army spokesman Brigadier Ahmad al-Mismari confirmed the arrest of 21 terrorists in Derna, including six foreign nationalities.

Military officials said the army attacked targets of extremists using artillery, and confirmed the control of several areas on the outskirts of the city.

LNA besieged the town on the main road between Benghazi and Egypt and has long threatened to start ground operations there. Previous attacks were limited to air strikes and artillery shelling from time to time.

Military operation spokesman, Abdul Karim Sabra, said that the army forces are advancing on five fronts supported by air strikes and artillery shelling, while military sources confirmed that the troops advanced towards villages about four kilometers from the city.

Since mid-2015, the national army forces imposed a land and sea blockade on Derna, only allowing medical and humanitarian cases to enter or exit the city. It is the only coastal city outside the army’s control in the east of the country, as it is under the control of a coalition of extremist groups affiliated with Shura Council of Mujahideen, known for its loyalty to al-Qaeda.

Fifty of the 62 Palestinians reported killed during Monday’s deadly protests on the Gaza border were Hamas activists, a senior Hamas official claimed yesterday.

An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson for Arab media posted a video on Twitter of an interview with the Hamas official, Dr Salah Albardawil, in which he claims 50 of those who died were members of Hamas. His claim was in response to a question about claims that Hamas sent youths to die in the protests as political fodder, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

The claims comes after Islamic Jihad published a statement on Tuesday claiming that three of the 62 killed were members of that organisation’s military wing. But an Islamic Jihad official told Haaretz that Israel’s attempt to dismiss the victims as terrorists was pathetic.

Haaretz also reported that Gaza health officials have cast doubt on initial claims that an eight-month-old baby died from Israeli tear gas fired during mass protests on the Gaza border with Israel.

The newspaper reported that a doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday that the baby, Layla Ghandour, had a pre-existing medical condition and that he did not believe her death was caused by tear gas.

Also on Tuesday, Layla’s family claimed that the baby had ended up in the area of the protest as a result of a mix-up. This came after the Gaza Health Ministry initially counted her among several dozen Palestinians killed on Monday.

A Gaza human rights group, Al Mezan, has said that it is looking into the circumstances of the infant’s death.

Meanwhile, Hamas reportedly refused to accept medical aid trucks sent by the IDF on Tuesday. According to Haaretz, Hamas refused to accept supplies from an IDF truck and ordered its men not to unload them.

Egypt’s military have killed 19 extremists during Operation Sinai 2018, the army said in a statement.

Ten extremists were eliminated by the military in a number of areas of the Sinai Peninsula. Nine more extremists were killed by the interior Ministry’s forces, which are participating in the military operation, it said.

The operation of the Egyptian armed forces was launched on February 9 to crush jihadists who have waged an insurgency that has killed hundreds of soldiers, police and residents over many years. The military says it has eliminated more than 200 terrorists, and detained hundreds involved in extremist activities.

At least 24 of the 61 Palestinians killed Monday in the Gaza border riots were terrorists affiliated mostly with the Hamas terrorist organization, with some being members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said Tuesday, following a joint investigation conducted by the IDF and the Shin Bet.

Violent clashes erupted Monday between Palestinian protesters and the IDF on the Gaza border on the backdrop of the opening of the new US Embassy in Jerusalem. This is the highest Palestinian death toll since Operation Protective Edge in 2014.

IDF fighter jets and tanks then attacked Hamas targets in a training camp in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, following earlier attempts to plant an explosive device on the fence and gunfire at soldiers.

Forces of Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar attacked opposition targets in the eastern city of Derna on Tuesday using aircraft and artillery, taking a wheat silo and villages on the outskirts, military officials said according to reuters.com.

It was the first major operation since Haftar announced last week that he would seize the last stronghold of opposition to his Libyan National Army (LNA) in the east of the country.

The LNA has surrounded the city, on the coastal highway between Benghazi and Egypt, and has long threatened to begin ground operations there. Its campaign had previously been limited to occasional air strikes and bombardments.

The United Nations is leading efforts to stabilize Libya and prepare it for elections before the end of the year.

Egypt, which backs the LNA, has several times carried out air strikes in Derna on what it said were training camps sending militants into Egypt.

The troops advanced to villages some 4 kms (two and a half miles) from the city, LNA sources said.

Sabra did not have casualty figures but websites close to the DMSC said five people were killed in air strikes.

Monday afternoon, when the IDF confronted violent disturbances on the fence, an intelligence alert was received that a Hamas squad was planning to place an explosive charge on the fence to allow to for a mass infiltration into Israel, like reported by jpost.com.

Troops belonging to the IDF’s Magellan unit stationed themselves opposite the expected attack point in the northern Gaza Strip. When the squad of eight terrorists emerged from amidst the violent demonstration which was taking place, two armored IDF vehicles drove over the fence and were attacked by the cell with explosives and light weapons.

According to the army the cell fired at troops from two different locations, one from a hill some 200 meters from the security fence and another point some 30 meters from the border.

Troops then engaged the cell, opening fire at them from Israeli territory while a tank and IAF aircraft struck the terrorists’ position. All eight terrorists were killed in the exchange of gunfire.

“Yesterday, during a violent riot, which included the burning of tires, throwing of pipe bombs and throwing of stones, we saw shots fired at our forces and realized that Hamas operatives were the ones who carried out the shooting. Due to this, the crowed dispersed and I gave an order to fire. The fighters were operating professionally, with great courage and precision, and prevented a significant shooting attack on our forces,” a commander in the unit said.

According to the army a pistol, grenade launchers, charges and preparations for opening the fence were found in the place where the firefight was.

The army believes that the quiet on Tuesday is likely due to Hamas assessing the situation and calculating their next step.

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” is one of the worst clichés in the English language. Unfortunately the phrase’s logic is applied all too often to the ongoing violence at the Israel-Gaza Strip border, like reported by freebeacon.com.

Just look at Peter Beinart’s recent column on the riots there. “Why are thousands of Palestinians risking their lives by running toward the Israeli snipers who guard the fence that encloses Gaza?” asks Beinart. “Because Gaza is becoming uninhabitable.” And why is the Strip becoming uninhabitable? Because Israel is “denying Gaza’s people the water, electricity, education, and food they need to live decent lives.”

According to Beinart, the ongoing attempts to damage and breach the border security fence to attack Israel, the rocks and firebombs hurled and shots fired at Israeli soldiers, the firebomb-bearing kitesthat torment Israeli farmers trying to grow crops, the widespread presence of swastikas at the demonstrations, the anti-Semitic threats against Jews, the horrible ecological effects caused by burning tires to blind Israeli border guards—all actions carried out by Gazans—are reactions of victims motivated by resistance against their oppressors. The fact that most of the rioters who Israelis have killed were terrorist operatives, or individuals affiliated with terrorist organizations, is irrelevant, because it gets in the way of this narrative.

“Hamas is indeed a brutal and destructive force, to both Israelis and Palestinians,” acknowledges Beinart. “But Hamas did not force Israel to adopt the policies that have devastated Gaza. Those policies represent a choice—a choice that has not only failed to dislodge Hamas, but has also created the very conditions in which extremism thrives.”

This argument is so inaccurate—yet so commonly found in Western media—that it requires a response. One simply needs to look at recent “protests” to see who is really devastating the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, who suffer under the cruel and incompetent rule of Hamas, an Islamist terrorist group that seeks Israel’s destruction.

Last week, dozens of Palestinian demonstrators broke into, ravaged, and looted the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Israel and the Strip. Kerem Shalom is the main entry point for merchandise and humanitarian aid entering Gaza. “It’s difficult to think of a place more critical to the Strip’s own economy,” writes Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff. Yet Palestinian rioters caused millions in damage to infrastructure there, mainly by setting fire to the gas pipelines that supply fuel to Gaza. The Israeli military says Hamas backed the destruction. Some reports offer a slightly different take, suggesting a mob spontaneously attacked the crossing and, after the rioting began, Hamas allowed the demonstrators to do as they wished. Either way, Hamas endorsed efforts to sabotage Gaza’s only means of receiving goods and aid as the Strip’s economy crumbles.

So Hamas and its sympathizers blame Israel for Gaza’s fuel shortage, and then set ablaze their means of getting fuel. Yet Beinart accuses Jerusalem of denying Gazans their basic needs.

To be clear, Israel facilitates the transfer of significant quantities of aid into Gaza. Hundreds of truckloads of merchandise enter through the Kerem Shalom crossing each day. Just last week, tens of thousands of pounds of food, gas, fuel tanks, cargo, building materials, and humanitarian aid entered Gaza from Israel, according to the Israel Defense Force’s spokesman. The Jewish state also provides water and electricity to Gaza. It may not provide education, but that is the sole responsibility of Gaza’s governing body, which cares more about teaching anti-Semitism than how to think critically.

Israeli leaders recognize that it is in their interest to improve living conditions in Gaza, if for no other reason than to prevent another war with Hamas. The question is how to do that. Hamas won’t help; using Gazans as human shields and working to terrorize the Jewish state are counterproductive in this regard. Still, as Issacharoff notes, Hamas wants the economic and humanitarian situation in Gaza to stabilize and to avoid a war with Israel. Perhaps the Kerem Shalom riots were meant to signal that, without the former, conflict is on the horizon. They also show how enraged Gazans are at Israel andthe Palestinian Authority, which maintains control of the crossing.

Often lost in the coverage of Gaza is that President Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority is far more responsible for the deteriorating situation there than Israel. Most press reports barely, if at all, mention the PA’s role, and Beinart only references it in passing. But Abbas—whose leadership Gazans don’t acknowledge—seems intent on making living conditions in Gaza so terrible to the point of triggering an Israel-Hamas war. The Palestinian government has imposed economic sanctions on Hamas and is considering even further sanctions on Gaza. “Already teetering on the edge of humanitarian collapse, additional sanctions could push the Strip over the edge, leading inevitably to more instability,” writesanalyst Ghaith al-Omari. Abbas has also cut salaries for staff in Gaza and, last year, requested that Israel cut the electricity supply to Gaza. The majority of Gaza’s electricity is imported from Israel but paid for by the PA, which grew tired of financing the Strip’s power.

Israel, in contrast, only prevents items from entering Gaza that could be used as a military threat, and Jerusalem only imposed a blockade when Hamas smuggled weapons into the Strip to fire at the Jewish state, including thousands of rockets.

Unfortunately Western media outlets paint a picture of Gaza similar to that of Beinart. The New York Times, for example, recently published a sympathetic profile of Saber al-Gerim, a 22-year-old Gaza protester, who, the paper was sure to note, “has a modish haircut and carries a few extra pounds from too many months without work.” The article describes a young man who—despite screaming “Allahu Akbar,” throwing stones, and trying to tear down the border fence—is just “a protagonist in nobody’s drama but his own,” someone who dreams of “going home to a patch of land he has never seen and cannot really visualize,” a Palestinian who is “stoic” and “enterprising” but “ill-starred.”

Similar profiles of “hopeless” Gazans lashing out are common in prominent publications. Curiously, it’s quite difficult to find a comparable profile of an Israeli caught up in the chaos—maybe an innocent farmer unable to harvest his crops near the border because they’re set ablaze by people like Gerim, or a soldier protecting her country from rioters seeking to break down the security fence. Are their concerns not important?

According to New York magazine, they’re not. “This month, Israeli snipers shot hundreds of Palestinian protesters—including one journalist wearing a vest marked ‘PRESS’—who posed no life-threatening danger to them, or to the people they’re meant to protect,” writes Eric Levitz. Apparently Levitz and New York don’t realize that attempting to breach the Israeli border to destroy infrastructure and harm citizens is a threat to Israel. The article also makes no distinction between rubber and actual bullets.

The media blame Gaza’s jaw-dropping unemployment rate on the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt, rather than Hamas’ rule and a society fueled by hatred. They also get basic facts wrong. Take another recent Times story, in which the paper reported that the Gaza fence is “electrified.” How would demonstrators be able to climb an electrified fence without special equipment? This isn’t Jurassic Park. The barrier has electronic sensors to detect infiltrators, as the Times clarified in a correction several days after the article was published.

Western media distort facts on the ground and create a clear picture of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimhood. In this situation, Hamas and sympathetic Gazans are justified to use violence. Throwing Molotov cocktails or trying to breach the security fence to “take back” Israel are understandable actions, according to this logic. After all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

A prominent Iranian-Israeli journalist says Israeli intelligence sources have reported unusual activities by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps forces in Lebanon, like reported by voanews.com.

Speaking to VOA Persian’s special program about President Donald Trump’s decision on the Iran nuclear deal, Menashe Amir said his intelligence sources detected the IRGC activities in Lebanon on Tuesday. Amir, who is based near Jerusalem, said the nature of those activities was not specified but he believed they could involve IRGC forces bringing Iranian missiles closer to Israel’s borders in preparation for an attack.

In the past few days, Israeli officials increasingly have warned of a potential Iranian strike in retaliation for recent Israeli military action in Syria aimed at curbing Iranian efforts to establish military bases there.

Amir said Israeli media were reporting increased activity by Israeli military aircraft in northern Israel on Tuesday. He said Israel may take military action against Iranian missile sites in the region to preempt any Iranian strikes. Iran has vowed to avenge recent attacks on its forces and their allies in Syria, without detailing the timing or nature of its response. Israel has acknowledged intervening militarily in the years-long Syrian civil war, but rarely has claimed credit for specific attacks.

Iran has long supported and supplied Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, which has an influential role in the Lebanese government and whose forces rival those of the Lebanese military. But the extent of Iran’s deployment of its own IRGC forces in Lebanon is not clear. STRATFOR, a U.S. publisher of intelligence analysis, reported in 2010 that there were about 4,000 IRGC troops in Lebanon at the time, deployed among five different bases. Amir said Iran and Hezbollah also have used Lebanese territory to train militiamen from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The revelation of unusual Iranian military activity in Lebanon coincided with Trump’s announcement of his decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement on Tuesday. Under the deal, his predecessor Barack Obama and leaders of five other world powers suspended sanctions against Tehran in return for Iran accepting restrictions on its nuclear program to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

In another interview on the VOA Persian special program, Paris-based Iranian opposition figure Reza Pirzadeh called the U.S. withdrawal a “big defeat” for Iran’s ruling Islamist clerics.

“Our job is not to let the Islamic Republic’s defeat turn into a defeat for the Iranian people, but rather into an opportunity for them to realize the freedom they deserve and save all of us from the evil of the regime,” he said.

Pirzadeh is a member of the Iran National Council for Free Elections, a dissident group founded by U.S.-based Iranian crown prince Reza Pahlavi.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in a televised statement following Trump’s announcement, said Iran will consult with European powers, Russia and China in the next few weeks to determine if it is in Iranian interests to remain in the 2015 nuclear deal. He also vowed that the U.S. will not succeed in hurting the Iranian economy by re-imposing nuclear-related sanctions.

But the U.S. pullout from the deal has put European powers in a tough spot in their economic ties with Iran, according to prominent Iranian journalist Alireza Nourizadeh.

Speaking to the VOA Persian show from London, Nourizadeh highlighted the case of Austria’s seventh-biggest bank Oberbank, which had signed a deal with Iranian officials last September to finance Austrian projects in Iran.

Austrian media reported in late March and early April that Oberbank put the deal on hold ahead of a possible decision by Trump to quit the nuclear deal and re-impose sanctions. The deal would have made Oberbank one of the first European banks to do business with Iran since the 2015 deal took effect.

Leaders of the three EU signatories to the deal, Britain, France and Germany, promised to keep abiding by the Iran nuclear deal despite the U.S. withdrawal.

In separate remarks on the VOA Persian program from Los Angeles, senior advisor to the Iranian American Jewish Federation Sam Kermanian said the European powers and the previous Obama administration had expected that the deal would dissuade Iran from pursuing regional domination.

“They hoped Iran would use the deal’s economic benefits to help the Iranian people and save them from pressure and misery. Unfortunately, this did not happen,” Kermanian said.