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The battle of perception: From Israel’s Fauda to Hezbollah’s FPV footage

The battle of perception: From Israel’s Fauda to Hezbollah’s FPV footage

The footage lasts just three minutes. An Israeli flag flies over a position in the village of al-Bayada, in occupied southern Lebanon. One drone approaches the flagpole while another observes from above. The flag falls after the impact. The final frame displays a digitally rendered, torn Israeli flag with the words: “Al-Bayada does not welcome you.” The video’s caption reads: “Flag lowering ceremony”. This is the latest video released by Hezbollah, which reflects a broader context beyond a single hillside in southern Lebanon. Journalists and observers who covered southern Lebanon in the late 1990s may recall Hezbollah’s media strategy before the Israeli withdrawal. Al-Manar TV functioned as more than a television channel; it operated as a psychological campaign in plain view. Repeated footage of Israeli soldiers screaming after being attacked with a roadside bomb, retreating, positions abandoned, and flags lowered, created the perception in the Arab world that Israel was already departing before any official decision to do so had been taken. Back then, the image pushed forward a new reality, one that played a vital role in mobilising support for Hezbollah and adding pressure on the Israeli government internally to withdraw its forces from Lebanon. Then the withdrawal occurred in May 2000, and to many, it felt like a natural result of all that was happening. This approach was never abandoned, but it became unnecessary for a long period due to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s commanding presence and speeches. Advertisement For two decades, Nasrallah was the face of the media war. A man whose son was killed in battle. A leader who said things and then made them happen. What he had could not be taught or replicated; it was credibility accumulated over years of real achievement, giving him the rare ability to reshape how his audience understood events. When something went wrong, he could reframe it. When a setback came, he could place it inside a longer story that made sense. He was the frame that held everything together. The war in Syria badly damaged Hezbollah’s image. Seeing its fighters in Qalamoun, Aleppo, Homs, and other Syrian cities, in what much of the Arab world saw as a sectarian war, was hard to absorb. But Nasrallah was there to absorb it for his base, give it logic, and keep the narrative from collapsing. He framed it as a war to preserve resistance against Israel, rather than one to defend an ally combating a revolution. Without him, the organisation could have faced an even worse image, not only among his critics but also among his supporters. The image itself could not survive without him. Then came 2024. Fuad Shukr, one of Hezbollah’s most senior commanders, was killed in Beirut at the end of July. Less than two months later, the pager operation tore through Hezbollah’s ranks, hundreds of devices detonating at once, an intelligence penetration so complete it felt almost unreal. Then the assassinations kept coming. Senior commanders, one after another. And on September 27, Nasrallah himself was killed in an Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut. His successor, Naim Qassem, was the deputy leader for 30 years. His organisational capabilities helped the party restructure and rebuild, but he is not a communicator. What Nasrallah had was not a transferable skill. It grew from decades of confrontation, presence, and delivery. Qassem’s words lack the crucial layer of strategic narrative his predecessor mastered. So Hezbollah’s media machinery, which always depended on the leader’s voice to shape everything, found itself, for the first time in decades, without a centre, without the voice capable of putting things together, and giving a hint to supporters of what’s to come. As for Israel, its communications strategy wasn’t something it wandered into by accident. For years, Israel had been building it on two tracks simultaneously. The first was operational. A well-resourced apparatus of military spokespersons, carefully managed press access, and rapid-fire media briefings, all designed to get the Israeli military’s version of any story to people’s mobile phones and newsrooms before any alternative could take hold. Advertisement An investigation by Swiss public television SRF released in October revealed how the Israeli military had been quietly producing slick 3D animation videos weeks before major operations, ready to deploy the moment the strikes began, justifying hits on hospitals, residential blocks, and civilian infrastructure. Many broadcasters ran them, and many did not even ask questions about the accuracy of what they were showing. The second track was cultural and ran deeper. Fauda, the Netflix thriller written by veterans of Israeli undercover units, spent several seasons building audiences worldwide, painting Palestinian and Hezbollah fighters as brutal and ultimately incompetent, always outthought, always outmanoeuvred. Tehran, on Apple TV+, did the same job on Iran: Mossad as professionals, the Islamic Republic as a paranoid bureaucracy lurching from one failure to the next. Neither series was crude propaganda, and that was their leverage. They entered living rooms in countries with no prior opinion or knowledge of the conflict and quietly arranged the furniture before the next war arrived. When Israel attacked Iran in June 2025, a LEGO animation video with the soundtrack from Tehran started circulating online. The Iranian responded with another LEGO video that didn’t leave a real impact, but it was just the beginning. By the time the United States and Israel launched their campaign in February, aimed openly at Iran’s nuclear programme and its leadership, Tehran had assembled a media response that caught many observers off guard. Explosive Media, a Tehran-based group producing animated short videos in English, began releasing Lego-style animated films at a pace matching the news cycle. One showed US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu beside the devil, looking at Epstein Files, before Trump presses a button and a rocket flies towards Iran. The camera then cuts to the rubble of an Iranian girls’ school that was attacked by Israel and the US military. In another video, missiles are flying towards their targets, each dedicated to a different victim

Oscar-winning director calls Trump, Netanyahu and Putin ‘monsters’

Oscar-winning director calls Trump, Netanyahu and Putin ‘monsters’

Oscar-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodovar called Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin ‘monsters’ during a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, where he wore a Palestine solidarity pin. Published On 20 May 202620 May 2026 Click here to share on social media share-nodes Share googleAdd Al Jazeera on Googleinfo Adblock test (Why?)

At least eight killed in Israel’s air attacks on southern Lebanon

At least eight killed in Israel’s air attacks on southern Lebanon

Israeli attacks on Lebanon continue despite the ‘ceasefire’ that was recently extended until the beginning of July. Published On 20 May 202620 May 2026 At least eight people have been killed in Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon, in the latest violation of an ongoing “ceasefire” agreement, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA). Israeli fighter jets struck in the village of Doueir on Wednesday, killing five people and injuring two others, NNA reported. Several homes were flattened in the attack, the agency said. Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list Another Israeli attack killed two people near a hospital in the village of Tibnin, while one person riding a motorcycle was killed in a drone attack on the village of Burj Shemali in the Tyre district, NNA said. The Red Cross said it recovered the body of one person on the outskirts of the town of Shebaa in the Nabatieh governorate. Israeli attacks across Lebanon continue despite the United States-mediated “ceasefire” that was recently extended until the beginning of July. The fresh wave of Israeli attacks came hours after at least 16 people were killed in Israeli air attacks across southern Lebanon on Tuesday. The Health Ministry said three women and three children were among the victims. Moreover, the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said its forces clashed with Israeli troops trying to advance to the centre of the village of Haddatha late last night. The group also reported clashes with Israeli forces in the town of Biyyada and the municipality of Rashaf. Attacks on eastern Lebanon ongoing Israeli forces continue to expand their military campaign beyond the country’s south into the western Bekaa Valley. Advertisement “For weeks, the Israeli army has been targeting Muslim Shia majority villages in the western Bekaa Valley where Hezbollah has support,” Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reported. “They lie on the road that links the southern front-line villages to the east of the country.” Yousef Hasan, displaced from the town of Yuhmor, called Israel “an expansionist state that kills women and children”. “They don’t believe in borders. For them, the border is as far as Israeli soldiers can reach. It is a state that occupies others’ lands,” Hasan told Al Jazeera. Since March 2, Israel has killed 3,073 people in Lebanon and injured 9,362 others, and displaced more than 1.6 million, about one-fifth of the country’s population, according to Lebanese authorities. Israeli forces have also destroyed entire villages in southern Lebanon, prompting comparisons with the devastation caused by Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza. Adblock test (Why?)