Oil prices held on to most of the previous session’s sharp gains in early trade on Tuesday (June 2, 2026) on uncertainty over the status of ceasefire talks between the United States and Iran and the potential reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Brent crude ⁠futures inched up 6 cents, or 0.06%, to $95.04 a barrel at 0001 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate fell 17 cents, or 0.18%, to $91.99 a barrel.

Both benchmarks rose more than ‌5% in the previous session but pared gains after U.S. President Donald Trump said he had not been told that Iran was suspending talks with Washington ‌and that Israel had agreed to pull back any troops that were preparing ‌to attack ⁠southern Lebanon.

– Reuters

People hold Hezbollah flags while commemorating Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, on May 25, 2026.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Pictures of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are displayed inside the Iranian embassy in Beirut, as people attend a gathering to pay tribute to him and to show support for Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, in Beirut, Lebanon, April 22, 2026.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A Lebanese soldier sits on top of a military vehicle outside the municipality building of the southern Lebanese border village of Blida in the aftermath of an Israeli army raid on the village, on October 30, 2025.
| Photo Credit: AFP

A man walks near a flag of Hezbollah and portraits of the group’s slain leader Hassan Nasrallah, on the rubble of a building destroyed during Israel’s air and ground offensive in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam on January 28, 2025.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The Israeli military said on Friday (January 31, 2025) it struck several Hezbollah targets overnight in the Bekaa Valley and along the Syrian-Lebanese border.

The Army said the targets include a facility used for underground weapons development and another associated with the smuggling of arms into Lebanon.

On January 30 2025, Israel said it intercepted a surveillance drone launched by Hezbollah calling it “a breach of the ceasefire agreement” between Israel and Lebanon.

Hezbollah and Israel reached a ceasefire in late November, ending a deadly conflict that began with the Gaza war in 2023. The U.S. confirmed on Sunday that the agreement, which includes a 60-day period for Israeli troop withdrawal, will remain in effect until Feb. 18, extending the original Jan. 26 deadline.

Israel has carried out multiple strikes on Lebanese territory since the ceasefire extension killing and injuring more than 100 people.

The most recent attack is a drone strike that injured at least five people in southern Lebanese town of Majdal Selm.

Georges Elia decorates a Christmas tree inside St. George Melkite Catholic Church, that was destroyed by Israeli airstrike, in the town of Dardghaya in southern Lebanon, on December 22, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

A Christmas tree stands among the fallen stones of what remains of St. George Melkite Catholic Church in southern Lebanon. Once a vibrant community centre, the 18th-century church is in ruins after an Israeli airstrike in October.

Georges Elia, a 40-year-old municipal worker and churchgoer, took it upon himself to bring some normalcy as the holiday season approached, weeks after a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants.

“This year, Christmas is arriving with sadness for us, but we didn’t want it to be a sad one for the town’s residents and its church,” Mr. Elia said. “We tried to put up a tree, even if it is a modest and simple one.”

It’s a small tree, shorter than him. He bent to place the shining garland and the final star. Crystal chandeliers hang, still intact, above the shattered pews. Paper images of Santa Claus lay on the debris.

The Christmas tree lacks lights, since the war destroyed power lines. It also lacks the traditional Nativity scene, since it might fall apart on the uneven ground.

“But, of course, Christ is born in our hearts, lit with our love for him,” Mr. Elia said.

The church was struck as Israel bombarded southern Lebanon and sent in ground forces, turning what had been a low-intensity conflict of near-daily exchanges of fire into all-out war. Hezbollah said it attacked in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, while Israel said it wanted a safe border area so citizens could return home.

Mr. Elia, his family and the rest of the community fled their homes after receiving evacuation orders on September 23, joining hundreds of thousands of people displaced in Lebanon.

The church serves around 30 families. The airstrike marked the third time it had been damaged by Israeli forces over the years.

“In the Israeli invasion in 1978, we lost the western wall to the church. The residential rooms were hit by Israeli airstrikes in 1992,” said the priest, Father Maurice el Khoury.

When Mr. Elia returned weeks later, he found the damage worse than he had imagined. “The photos didn’t show how bad it really is,” he said.

The priest, who has served the church for 11 years, recalled the moment he saw its destruction.

“My blood pressure went up. I lost my balance and had to lean on the wall,” he said. “For me to see it this way, I couldn’t comprehend it.”

The financial toll of the damage is staggering, too. Father el Khoury estimates restoration costs at nearly $3 million.

The church’s destruction is part of the war’s devastation in Lebanon. The World Bank has said almost 1,00,000 homes across the country have been partially or completely destroyed during the 14-month war, with damage amounting to an estimated $3.2 billion.

With the main church building in rubble, Father el Khoury now conducts Sunday Mass in a small underground room that once housed visiting bishops and priests, reading by the light of a mobile phone. The room, though damaged, was repaired to serve as a temporary place of worship.

During one Mass, the priest reminded families of the true essence of the holiday season.

“This room is more like the cave where Jesus was born,” he said. “We are the people embodying the birth of Christ in our reality.”

The priest said the community’s faith has not wavered: “For this upcoming Christmas, we will have Mass here.”

A woman collects belongings in an apartment amid destruction in a residential area where an Israeli airstrike killed 9 people the day before, according to Lebanese officials, on November 7, 2024 in Baalbek, Lebanon.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

Lina al-Khalil has fled her south Beirut home to escape escalating Israeli attacks on Hezbollah, but she still returns daily to the bombarded area to keep the family business running.

“It’s more important than my house,” said the pharmacist, in her 50s, of the business she inherited from her father in Haret Hreik, a southern suburb of the Lebanese capital where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants hold sway.

Whenever the Israeli military issues a warning to evacuate before a strike — a near-daily occurrence for nearly two months — she closes down the shop and rushes out.

Despite the ever-present fear and the steep decline in business activity, Ms. Khalil does what she can to keep her business afloat, like many other shopkeepers in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The vast majority of the area’s estimated 600,000-800,000 residents have fled, seeking refuge elsewhere.

“With the drop in customers, the financial impact has been severe,” Khalil told AFP, adding that she has had to halve the salaries of her employees due to the pinch.

Ms. Khalil has moved most of the pharmacy’s stock to her second home in the mountains for safekeeping.

To serve the few customers she still has, she drives up to collect the medicine they need, and even delivers it to their homes when they can’t reach the pharmacy.

Some areas of south Beirut have been devastated by strikes since Israel intensified its campaign against the powerful Hezbollah movement on September 23, after nearly a year of limited cross-border clashes over the Gaza war.

Hide-and-seek

South Beirut grocer Mehdi Zeitar, in his 50s, has had to find a place to live after an Israeli strike destroyed his home.

For the time being, his vegetable stall has survived, but “all the surrounding buildings have been damaged”, he said.

“We’re playing hide-and-seek,” Mr. Zeitar added bitterly, referring to Israeli attacks.

“We leave by car until the strikes are over, then we go home.”

He comes in for two or three hours a day to run his shop, saying he has no other option to support his family.

But he told AFP that he spends much of his time waiting for customers, who never come.

“We are truly unemployed.”

In a recent report, the World Bank estimated that the Lebanese commercial sector incurred losses of $1.7 billion over 12 months of conflict, on top of billions more in losses to the economy and material damage.

Lebanon had already been reeling since 2019 from an intense economic crisis that pushed most of the population into poverty.

According to the World Bank report, around 11 percent of establishments in the conflict zones have been damaged, particularly in the southern areas of Tyre, Sidon and Nabatiyeh, where Israel’s military campaign has targeted Hezbollah strongholds.

It said that the “displacement of both employees and business owners from conflict-affected areas” has led to a near-complete halt in business activity as well as “disruptions to supply chains to and from conflict districts”.

Many consumers now buy only essentials, the report said.

Uncertain future

When the war began in late September, Ali Mahdi and his brother shuttered their clothing stores and warehouse in Beirut’s southern suburbs as well as in Tyre and Nabatiyeh, taking some of their merchandise with them.

They set up shop in several locations including Beirut’s Hamra district, at a distance from the majority of the strikes.

But they still face many challenges there.

“There’s the rise in rents, and the fears of residents in certain areas when it comes to renting to displaced residents from the southern suburbs and villages,” said Mahdi, who is in his 30s.

With their future shrouded in uncertainty, “we’re trying to clear our stocks,” he said.

“We don’t know whether to import new products or save our cash.”

Mahdi added that he had to make some of his 70 employees redundant and dock pay from the rest.

In the southern suburbs, an Israeli strike turned the cafe Abdel Rahman Zahr El-Din had opened five years ago into a pile of rubble.

He said he must salvage what he can, now that he has lost his only way to make ends meet.

“There’s nothing left but stones,” he said as he inspected the upper floor, emerging with a small table in his hand, unharmed but covered in grey dust.

Israeli airstrikes pounded areas across Lebanon, killing at least 25 people, officials said Wednesday (October 16, 2024), including more than a dozen in a southern town where Israeli bombardments in previous conflicts are seared into local memory.

Elsewhere in the south, a city’s Mayor was among the dead in a strike that Lebanese officials said targeted a meeting to coordinate relief efforts.

The Israeli military said they were targeting a Hezbollah commander in the strikes late Tuesday (October 15, 2024) on the southern town of Qana, where 15 people were killed. Associated Press photos and video of the scene showed several flattened buildings and others with their top floors collapsed. Rescue workers carried away the remains of dead people and used a bulldozer to remove rubble, as they searched for more victims.

Israel said the target was Jalal Mustafa Hariri, Hezbollah’s commander in charge of the Qana area.

In 1996, Israeli artillery shelling on a United Nations compound housing hundreds of displaced people in Qana killed at least 100 civilians and wounded scores more people, including four U.N. peacekeepers. During the 2006 war, an Israeli strike on a residential building killed nearly three dozen people, a third of them children. Israel said at the time that it struck a Hezbollah rocket launcher behind the building.

“Qana always gets its share,” Mayor Mohammed Krasht told the AP, referring to the town’s grim history.

Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, meanwhile accused Israel of “intentionally targeting” a municipal council meeting to discuss relief efforts in Nabatiyeh, where six people were killed.

“What solution can be hoped for in light of this reality?” he asked in a statement.

Strikes continued across Lebanon, including in the eastern Bekaa Valley and Nabatiyeh, in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli military said it targeted Hezbollah command centres and weapons facilities that had been embedded in civilian areas. Hezbollah launched more than 90 projectiles towards Israel on Wednesday (October 16, 2024), wounding four civilians, according to Israel Rescue Services.

Israel also resumed its barrage on Beirut’s southern suburbs after a six-day pause, hitting what it said was an arms warehouse under an apartment building, without providing evidence. The military warned residents to evacuate before the strike, and there were no reports of casualties.

During an assessment of the situation in Israel’s north on Wednesday (October 16, 2024), Israel Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was gleaning intelligence from their capture of Hezbollah militants that was significantly weakening Hezbollah’s ability to launch attacks. “We will conduct negotiations under fire, I said that on the first day, I said it in Gaza, I said it here – this is our tool,” he told soldiers operating in southern Lebanon.

The strikes on southern Beirut came after Mikati said the United States had given him assurances that Israel would curb its strikes on the capital.

Hezbollah has a strong presence in southern Beirut, known as the Dahiyeh, which is also a residential and commercial area home to large numbers of civilians and people unaffiliated with the militant group.

The Israeli military posted an evacuation warning on the social media platform X ahead of the strike in Beirut. An Associated Press photographer saw three airstrikes in the area, the first coming less than an hour after the notice.

In Nabatiyeh, more than half a dozen strikes hit the city and surrounding areas, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which said at least six people were killed and 43 wounded, with rescue efforts still underway. The city’s mayor, Ahmad Kahil, was among those killed, provincial governor Huwaida Turk told The Associated Press.

In his statement about Nabatiyeh, Mr. Mikati, the caretaker Prime Minister, said the international community has been “deliberately silent” about Israeli strikes that have killed civilians.

U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert called reports of Kahlil’s death “alarming.”

“This attack follows other incidents in which civilians and civilian infrastructure have been targeted across Lebanon,” she said.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on October 8, 2023, in solidarity with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, following the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.

A year of low-level fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border escalated into all-out war last month, and Israel invaded Lebanon at the start of October. Israeli airstrikes have killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and most of his senior commanders, and Israel has vowed to continue its offensive until its citizens can safely return to communities near the border.

Some 2,300 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon since last October, more than three-quarters of them in the past month, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. The fighting has displaced some 1.2 million people in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s rocket attacks, which have extended their range and grown more intense over the past month, have driven around 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the north. The attacks have killed nearly 60 people in Israel, around half of them soldiers.

Hezbollah has said it will keep up its attacks until there is a cease-fire in Gaza, but that appears increasingly remote after months of negotiations brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar sputtered to a halt.

Israel is still at war in Gaza more than a year after Hamas’ attack, in which some 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and another 250 were abducted. Around 100 captives are still being held, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel has been carrying out a major operation for more than a week in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in the territory’s north dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. Israeli forces have repeatedly returned to Jabaliya and other areas after saying that Hamas militants had regrouped.

Hospitals have received around 350 bodies since the offensive began on October 6, according to Dr. Mounir al-Boursh, the director-general of Gaza’s Health Ministry.

He told the AP that more than half the dead were women and children, and that many bodies remain in the streets and under the rubble, with rescue teams unable to reach them because of Israeli strikes. “Entire families have disappeared,” he said.

Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 people, according to the Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters but says more than half were women and children. The offensive has left large areas in ruins and displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people, forcing hundreds of thousands into crowded tent camps or schools-turned-shelters.

A woman walks outside accommodations housing Lebanese fleeing the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, in al-Harjalah, south of the Syrian capital Damascus, on October 15, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Israel, which began incursions into south Lebanon two weeks ago to battle Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, has issued military evacuation orders affecting more than a quarter of the country, the U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday (October 15, 2024).

The figures underscore the heavy price Lebanese are paying as Israel steps up its campaign to defeat Hezbollah and destroy its infrastructure in their one-year conflict.

The U.N. refugee agency’s Middle East [West Asia] Director Rema Jamous Imseis told a press briefing in Geneva that new Israeli evacuation orders to 20 villages in southern Lebanon meant that over a quarter of the country was now affected. “People are heeding these calls to evacuate, and they’re fleeing with almost nothing.”

Israeli strikes have killed at least 2,309 people over the last year, the Lebanese government said, and more than 1.2 million people have been displaced.

The majority have been killed since late September when Israel expanded its military campaign. The toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Around 50 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed, according to Israel.

Israel says its operation in Lebanon aims to secure the return of tens of thousands of its residents forced to flee their homes in northern Israel due to Hezbollah attacks.

Israel expanded its bombing campaign in Lebanon on Monday (October 14, 2024), killing at least 22 people — most of them women — in an airstrike in the north on a house where displaced people were seeking refuge from Israeli strikes further south, health officials said.

“What we are hearing is that amongst the 22 people killed were 12 women and two children,” U.N. human rights office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence told the same press briefing in response to a question about Monday’s strike on Christian-majority Aitou.

“We understand it was a four-story residential building that was struck. With these factors in mind, we have real concerns with respect to IHL (International Humanitarian Law), so the laws of war, and the principles of distinction proportion and proportionality,” he said, calling for an investigation into the incident.

Rescue workers were still pulling bodies out of the rubble in Aitou on Tuesday (October 15, 2024), local media reported, following one of the deadliest strikes on displaced families in Lebanon, after strikes earlier this month on the southern Lebanese town of Ain Deleb that left more than 30 dead.

Israel has not commented on the Aitou strike, but has repeatedly said it takes all possible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.

U.N. concerned over peacekeeper attacks

So far the main focus of Israel’s military operations in Lebanon has been in the Bekaa Valley in the east, the suburbs of Beirut, and in the south, where U.N. peacekeepers have said that Israeli fire has hit their bases on numerous occasions and wounded peacekeepers.

The U.N. Security Council on Monday (October 14, 2024) expressed strong concern after several peacekeeping positions in southern Lebanon again came under fire amid clashes between the Israeli military and Hezbollah.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting a military base in central Israel where four soldiers were killed on Sunday (October 13, 2024) by a Hezbollah drone strike, said Israel would continue to attack the movement “without mercy, everywhere in Lebanon – including Beirut”. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah resumed a year ago when the militant group began firing rockets at Israel in support of Hamas at the start of the Gaza war.

Meanwhile, the Middle East remains on high alert for Israel to retaliate against Iran for an October 1 barrage of missiles launched in response to Israel’s assaults on Lebanon.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office said Israel would listen to the United States but would decide its actions according to its own national interest.

The statement was attached to a Washington Post article which said Netanyahu had told President Joe Biden’s administration that Israel would strike Iranian military, not nuclear or oil, targets – suggesting a more limited counterstrike aimed at preventing a full-scale war.

Qatar’s emir accused Israel on Tuesday (October 15, 2024) of exploiting “international inaction” on the Middle East crisis to move beyond its “aggression” in Gaza to build more illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and send troops into Lebanon.

“Israel deliberately chose to expand the aggression to implement pre-planned schemes in other locations such as the West Bank and Lebanon because it sees that the scope for that is available,” Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani said in his annual speech to open Qatar’s Shura Council.

Qatar, the United States and Egypt have repeatedly mediated in an attempt to end the war in Gaza, which broke out a year ago when fighters from the Palestinian militant group Hamas burst into Israel from Gaza and killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 42,000 people in Gaza, turned the enclave into piles of cement and twisted metal and created severe shortages of food, water and fuel.