Unidentified drone downed over Lebanon airbase, US forces block authorities from crash site
The Cradle | February 18, 2026
An unidentified drone was downed in the early hours of 17 February after entering the airspace above Hamat Air Base in northern Lebanon, a Lebanese security source revealed exclusively to The Cradle.
The incident unfolded when security at the base, which also hosts US forces, intercepted the aircraft, causing it to crash into nearby woodland.
According to the source, patrols from Hamat municipal police and units of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) headed to the area to examine the wreckage.
US personnel at the scene intervened to stop the inspection of the downed aircraft. According to The Cradle’s source, US troops drew their weapons and prevented Lebanese officials, including the local mayor, from approaching the crash site, asserting that the drone might have been booby-trapped with explosives.
Lebanese authorities did not take possession of the aircraft, the source said, and US officials later revealed that the drone was no longer at the location initially identified as the crash site.
A US general stationed at the base reportedly sought to contact the Hamat mayor to apologize, but the mayor refused the gesture, objecting to the behavior of the forces hosted at the base in northern Lebanon.
The drone infiltration of Lebanese airspace comes as the Israeli army continues to violate the terms of the US-sponsored “ceasefire” without repercussion.
In early February, troops from the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) near Kfar Kila, southern Lebanon, observed two drones, one carrying an unidentified object assessed as an “immediate threat.” It entered close range, dropped a stun grenade, exploded about 50 meters from the UNIFIL troops, and then headed toward Israeli territory, with no injuries caused.
The UN mission assessed that the drone belonged to the Israeli army and had crossed the Blue Line “in violation of Security Council resolution 1701,” describing the use of armed drones in this manner as “unacceptable.”
Since November 2024, when Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah ceased attacks against Israel under the terms of the US-brokered truce, the Israeli army has committed over 12,000 violations of Lebanon’s territorial sovereignty, including more than 8,000 airspace breaches and 700 airstrikes.
Israeli attacks have killed 343 Lebanese and caused nearly 1,000 injuries, with civilian casualties including dozens of women and children.
Israeli forces maintain an active military presence at several border outposts on Lebanese territory, hindering the return of more than 64,000 displaced residents after a campaign of destruction that rendered much of the southern border zones uninhabitable.
“Our presence at five points in southern Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire agreement, but we imposed it, and the United States accepted it,” Israel Defense Minister Israel Katz declared on 18 February.
His remarks come as Lebanon’s government acknowledged that the army will need at least four months to implement the next phase of a plan aimed at disarming Hezbollah.
Israeli drones drop grenades near UNIFIL in Lebanon amid Hezbollah disarmament push
Press TV – September 3, 2025
The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) says Israeli drones have dropped four grenades close to peacekeepers working to clear roadblocks, which were hindering access to a UN position, in “one of the most serious attacks” on its personnel since the 2024 ceasefire deal between Lebanon and Israel.
“This is one of the most serious attacks on UNIFIL personnel and assets since the cessation of hostilities agreement of last November,” the UNIFIL said in a statement on Wednesday.
It added, “One grenade impacted within 20 meters and three within approximately 100 meters of UN personnel and vehicles.”
UNIFIL has stated that the Israeli army was notified beforehand regarding its road clearance operations in the area, southeast of the village of Marwahin.
“Any actions endangering UN peacekeepers and assets, and interference with their mandated tasks are unacceptable and a serious violation of Resolution 1701 and international law,” the UNIFIL said.
The resolution, which brokered a ceasefire in the 33-day-long war Israel launched against Lebanon in 2006, calls on the occupying Tel Aviv regime to respect Lebanese sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Last week, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to terminate the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon at the end of next year after nearly five decades, bowing to demands from the United States and its close ally Israel.
The UNIFIL was created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after Israel’s 1978 invasion. Its mission was expanded following the summer 2006 war on Lebanon.
The Israeli attack also comes amid growing pressure on the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah. The United States and Israel have increasingly attacked the peacekeeping force for not countering Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
However, observers note that UNIFIL’s mandate does not include countering Hezbollah, and the resistance movement is widely viewed across Lebanon as a critical deterrent against Israeli aggression.
Despite near-daily Israeli airstrikes and repeated violations of Lebanese airspace and sovereignty, Hezbollah remains the only credible military force capable of confronting the occupation and preventing further Israeli incursions.
Lebanese officials have condemned Israel’s continued occupation of five positions in southern Lebanon, calling it a clear breach of the ceasefire terms.
Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, under growing US-Israeli pressure to push for Hezbollah’s disarmament, welcomed the extension of UNIFIL’s mandate but emphasized the need for Israel to withdraw from occupied Lebanese territory.
Critics, however, question how Lebanese forces can assert control in the south while Israeli troops remain in place and escalate attacks.
As calls to disarm Hezbollah grow louder from Washington and Israel, many in Lebanon argue that such efforts ignore the core issue of Israel’s continued violations of Lebanese sovereignty.
Israel intentionally shelled UN troops in Lebanon: Report
Press TV | April 5, 2015
A new report has revealed that Israel forces intentionally shelled a United Nations watchtower in southern Lebanon, which left a Spanish peacekeeper dead back in January.
The El Pais newspaper article published on Sunday cited extracts from a confidential Spanish military report on the incident, saying the Israeli forces corrected the trajectory of the artillery fire to hit the UN post. Thirty-six-year-old corporal Javier Soria Toledo was killed in the attack.
According to the report, Corporal Ivan Lopez Sanchez, a Spanish soldier stationed near the post, told investigators it was clear that the UN position was being targeted, noting, “Every time, they corrected the trajectory from Majidiye to the 4-28″ post, where the United Nations Interim Force Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers were stationed.
A second Spanish solider confirmed Sanchez’s report, saying the first salvo of shells landed some 500 meters north of the UN post and then Israel “corrected the trajectory towards the position.”
A third solider added that the fragmentation bombs used in the attack targeted the post’s main watchtower.
The newspaper also quoted a UN report as saying that around 20 artillery shells, 90 mortar grenades and five projectiles were fired at the UN post during the attack.
Spain and Israel have agreed to carry out a joint investigation into the incident.
The UNIFIL has some 10,000-troops, from 36 nations, which include some 600 Spanish soldiers.
Ban suggests Israeli attack on UNIFIL post was deliberate
Press TV – February 28, 2015
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has suggested that the Israeli regime deliberately targeted a base of UN peacekeeping forces along Lebanon’s southern border last month, in which a peacekeeper was killed.
“The incident happened at a UNIFIL base which is known perfectly by Israeli forces,” Ban said, using the acronym for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.
According to Lebanon’s An-Nahar daily on Saturday, Ban also censured the killing of the Spanish peacekeeper who died in the Israeli shelling of the UNIFIL post in January.
During the Israeli raid on the Lebanese border, the observation tower of a Spanish UNIFIL position in Abbasieh, one kilometer east of Ghajar, was directly struck by an artillery shell, killing Cpl. Francisco Javier Soria Toledo.
A report submitted to the UN Security Council on Friday by the UN’s Special Coordinator for Lebanon Sigrid Kaag held the Israeli regime “fully liable for the death of the peacekeeper.”
Israel launched the attack after Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah targeted an Israeli military convoy in the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms on January 28, killing two soldiers and wounding several others while destroying at least nine Israeli military vehicles.
The attack by Hezbollah was launched in response to an Israeli airstrike in the town of Qunaitra in Syria’s Golan Heights 10 days earlier, which killed several top members of the Lebanese resistance movement and an Iranian commander.
The Israeli attack on the UNIFIL post in January was not the first of its kind.
Four UN observers were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their post in Khiam, southern Lebanon, during the 2006 Israeli war on the Arab country. Then-UN chief Kofi Annan said at the time that the attack appeared to be “deliberate.”
A French UN observer was also killed in 2005 near the Shebaa Farms by Israeli tank shelling.
The most notorious Israeli attack, however, came in April 1996, when artillery shells fired by the regime’s forces struck the Fijian battalion headquarters in Qana, killing 107 civilians who had taken refuge at the compound.
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Still No End in Sight of the Murder and Mayhem Wrought by the 9/11 Culprits
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | July 17, 2016
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Fourth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
Back in 2006 all but a prescient few, such as Christopher Bollyn, perceived it as premature to try to identify and bring to justice the actual perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes. There was still some residue of confidence that responsible officials in government, law enforcement, media and the universities could and would respond in good faith to multiple revelations that great frauds had occurred in interpreting 9/11 for the public.
Accordingly, the main methodology of public intellectuals like Dr. Kevin Barrett or, for instance, Professors David Ray Griffin, Steven E. Jones, Peter Dale Scott, Graeme MacQueen, John McMurtry, Michael Keefer, Richard B. Lee, A.K. Dewdney, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, and Michel Chossudovsky, was to marshal evidence demonstrating that the official narrative of 9/11 could not be true.
The marshaling of evidence was spurred on by observations coming from government insiders like Eckehardt Wertherbach, a former head of Germany’s intelligence service. In a meeting in Germany with Christopher Bollyn and Dr. Andreas von Bülow, Wertherbach pointed out that, “an attack of this magnitude and precision would have required years of planning. Such a sophisticated operation would require the fixed frame of a state intelligence organization, something not found in a loose group like the one led by the student Mohammed Atta in Hamburg.”
Andreas von Bülow was a German parliamentarian and Defense Ministry official. He confirmed this assessment in his book on the CIA and 9/11. In the text von Bülow remarked that the execution of the 9/11 plan “would have been unthinkable without backing from secret apparatuses of state and industry.” The author spoke of the “invented story of 19 Muslims working with Osama bin Laden in order the hide the truth” of the real perpetrators’ identity. … continue
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