In Beirut in the past 24 hours, there hasn’t been any Israeli strike since that large scale attack on Wednesday. It appears that the US administration is pressuring Israel to accept at least a reduction of violence, if not a ceasefire, because its priority is to save that deal with Iran.
But Iran has interests to ensure that deal holds, it is continuing to insist that the Lebanon front is included.
- As the US and Iran prepare for talks in Pakistan, Israel continues to bombard Lebanon after killing at least 300 people and injuring 1,150 in nationwide strikes on Wednesday.
The Israeli military says more than 40 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in southern Lebanon over the past week, and 50 infrastructure sites destroyed.
The Israeli military has been threatening to target ambulances in Lebanon, accusing Hezbollah of making “extensive military use” of them.
Iran: the IRGC came out with a new map recently where ships must go.
They are demanding tariffs and charges that ships should pay to Iran to go through.
Hezbollah continues to target northern Israel with drones and missiles
The Lebanese armed group says its fighters targeted the Kiryat Shmona settlement in northern Israel with a squadron of attack drones on Friday.
Ireland’s foreign minister says she is “appalled” by the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and has called for the US-Iran ceasefire to be extended to the country.
Israel seeks ‘escalation through normalisation’ in Lebanon: Analyst
The ceasefire negotiations between the US and Iran are “extremely problematic” for Israel, says Abed Abou Shhadeh, a political analyst and activist based in Jaffa, Israel.
In particular, Israel is not “interested in any diplomacy or negotiations with Lebanon,” he said.
However, in now agreeing to talks with Lebanon in the US, Israel was looking to pursue what he described as a policy of “escalation through normalisation”.
In effect, Israel would continue to keep the war going in southern Lebanon, which it has invaded, and at the same time engage in talks with the government in Beirut, Abou Shhadeh warned. That approach also suits the Lebanese government, he added, because it helps clip the influence of Hezbollah.
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Fifty fighter jets. One hundred and sixty precision-guided munitions. One hundred targets. Ten minutes. Three geographic zones spanning 170 kilometres from Beirut’s southern suburbs to the Beqaa Valley to southern Lebanon. Simultaneous impact. Zero warning to the targets. Defence Minister Katz said it was the largest concentrated blow Hezbollah has suffered since the pager operation in September 2024.
The pagers were hardware infiltration. This was something else entirely.
In September 2024, Israel compromised Hezbollah’s supply chain, embedded explosives in pagers, and detonated them simultaneously. It required months of physical engineering, covert procurement, and logistical insertion. It killed approximately 40 commanders. Operation Eternal Darkness killed over 200 operatives in a single ten-minute window without touching a single device in advance. The penetration was not physical. It was informational.
The IDF confirmed that the operation was planned several weeks in advance and was going to proceed regardless of whether the Iran ceasefire was reached. The timing was driven by what the military described as optimal operational conditions. Translated from military language into plain language: the intelligence picture was complete. Every target’s location was known. Every target’s location was current. And every target’s location was known to be current at the same moment.
That simultaneity is the revolution. It is not possible to strike 100 dispersed command nodes across 170 kilometres in ten minutes unless you have real-time positional data on all of them continuously. Not yesterday’s data. Not this morning’s data. Live data, updating faster than any human can relocate, verified across multiple intelligence streams, and fed into a strike package that executes before the first target can warn the second.
Israel has built what military doctrine now calls a “data factory”. The system originated in Gaza where Unit 8200’s AI platforms, known internally as Gospel for infrastructure targeting and Lavender for personnel identification, compressed target generation from 50 per year to 100 per day.
Haaretz confirmed on March 31 that this data factory is now active in the Lebanon and Iran theatres, creating a single operational picture from satellite imagery, drone feeds, signals intelligence, cellular metadata, and human sources fused through machine learning algorithms that identify patterns faster than any analyst corps on earth.
The name Eternal Darkness is not poetic. It is literal. When you strike every command node, every intelligence headquarters, every missile coordination centre, and every elite unit’s operational hub simultaneously, the lights go out across the entire organisation at once. There is no fallback node to activate. There is no secondary command to assume control. There is no communication channel to issue the order to disperse because the communication channel is what revealed the location in the first place.
Hezbollah’s options after Eternal Darkness are binary. Go digital and be found. Go analogue and be slow. An organisation that abandons digital communications to survive surveillance becomes an organisation that cannot coordinate distributed operations, which is the definition of a degraded force. The IDF does not need to destroy every fighter. It needs to destroy every connection between fighters. And on April 8, in ten minutes, it demonstrated that it can do exactly that across an entire country.
The pagers changed the supply chain. Eternal Darkness changed the definition of command and control. In 2026, your signal is your coordinates.
(Shanaka Anslem Perera)
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