As we come to the end of another week of ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, perhaps it’s worth doing a roundup of the status of each. The top story this afternoon comes from the Board of Peace region, where the IDF ceased the fire of top Hamas commander Izz al-Din al-Haddad. The strike came after Hamas continued to balk at the agreed disarmament within the ceasefire, although the Israelis had even better reasons to fizz Izz:
The Israeli Air Force just targeted Hamas leader in Gaza, Izz al-Din Haddad, in an airstrike in Gaza City a short while ago.
The strike hit a residential building in Gaza City’s Rimal neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/iEbomtwMPS
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) May 15, 2026
Hamas military leader Izz ad-Din al-Haddad was targeted in Israeli strikes in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a Friday evening joint statement.
Senior defense sources told Walla that initial indications suggest the assassination attempt was successful. No official confirmation has been received from the IDF.
The Air Force carried out the strike after receiving intelligence from the IDF’s Southern Command and Military Intelligence Directorate on Haddad’s location, which had been identified after years of military intelligence collection.
The Times of Israel reports that the October 7 hostages have good reason to celebrate. Al-Haddad was the last of the top architects of the October 7 massacre, and personally held several of the hostages kidnapped that day. Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Israel Katz issued a joint statement explaining the strike as both vengeance for murders and atrocities and a message to Hamas to comply with the ceasefire agreement:
“Al-Haddad was responsible for the murder, abduction, and harm inflicted upon thousands of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers,” the statement said.
“He held our hostages in brutal captivity, orchestrated terrorist attacks against our forces, and refused to implement the agreement advanced by US President Donald Trump for Hamas’s disarmament and the demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip,” the statement said.
The hostages declared this “a happy moment”:
Albag, along with several other of the female surveillance soldiers abducted by Hamas from the Nahal Oz base on October 7th, had been held in captivity by Haddad when he commanded Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade.
In a post on social media, Albag celebrated Haddad’s apparent death, writing in Arabic “Every dog has its day, and you were a real bitch.” …
Another female hostage, Emily Damari, also celebrated reports of his death, thanking the security forces for killing him and calling it “a very, very, very important closing of a circle for so many people.”
“He plotted and planned the 7th [of October] and killed my friends and so many other dear people. He planned my abduction and kept me in the Hamas tunnels,” she said. “With the help of God we will reach all those garbage terrorists.”
Will Hamas comply with disarmament now? Probably not, which means that the Board of Peace will have a very difficult time sustaining its mission.
What about Lebanon? Talks went well in Washington yesterday, the Jerusalem Post reported, well enough to extend the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon for another 45 days:
Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a 45-day extension of their ceasefire after another round of talks in Washington, the U.S. State Department said Friday.
It comes after two “productive” days of talks and will be followed by more negotiations June 2 and 3, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said. A shaky truce between Israel and the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon had been due to end on Sunday.
Just how “shaky” has it been? This shaky:
While a key objective of Friday’s talks was extending the tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, both sides continue to trade strikes.
The Israeli military said Friday it struck Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon after reporting hostile aircraft alerts and launches from across the border.
Israel and Lebanon have little reason to fight each other, if it weren’t for Iran’s occupation of Lebanon via Hezbollah. The same applies to Gazans, although perhaps to a lesser degree. The real issue in both theaters is not Israel or the legitimate people of the regions, but Iran’s terror-proxy armies. As long as the IRGC remains in command of Iran and the proxies, the “ceasefires” remain just as aspirational as the US ceasefire with Tehran.
That may be the least kinetic of the three, but only in relation to American military forces. The IRGC instead has focused its attacks on internal opponents, as the New York Times reports this afternoon. Executions of political prisoners have “surged” over the last two months:
Iran has executed four prisoners this week on charges that include espionage and terrorism, according to Iranian news media, the latest in what rights groups say is a rapid escalation in the government’s use of the death penalty.
Iran has long been one of the world’s most frequent users of capital punishment. Yet the pace of sentencing and hangings appears to have surged over the last two months, amid the war with the United States and Israel, according to several Iran-focused rights groups.
In most of those cases, the groups say, the executed prisoners did not receive due process.
“Many of these executions follow extremely rapid judicial proceedings in which defendants have little or no access to legal counsel, face fundamentally unfair trials and are often convicted using forced confessions extracted under torture,” said Omid Memarian, a senior analyst at DAWN, a Washington-based think tank focused on human rights.
This has become a huuuuge concern for expat groups like the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC). The two are combining for a rally in Washington DC tomorrow at 11:15 am that will kick off in the Upper Senate Park and finish with a march to the World War I memorial. The rally will have a slate of speakers, primarily American statespeople of both parties, attempting to raise the visibility of the internal suppression taking place. Both organizations will offer a livestream of the rally, so be sure to click through to their websites and YouTube platforms.
It’s yet another reminder that “ceasefires” these days are not necessarily a sign of peace. For many Iranians, these ceasefires may be an impediment to true peace.
