Israel Slaughters Christians in Lebanon While the World is Distracted by Iran - Redacted News
Jim Fetzer and Ben Swan condemn Israel's "savage massacre" in southern Lebanon, citing unannounced airstrikes on Christian sites like the Wedding at Cana as part of a "Greater Israel Project." They argue this deviation from standard evacuation protocols signals an intent to conquer up to the Litani River while distracting the U.S. via the Iran conflict. Comparing the devastation to Gaza's bulldozer destruction, they allege genocide and warn that targeting Chinese infrastructure could escalate tensions into World War III, despite international condemnation from France, Italy, and China. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Eradicating Christianity in Lebanon00:08:39
We just got a comment here, a super chat from Ayman Rommel from Lebanon, who's watching us live right now in Beirut, Lebanon, says today was very tough.
It's awful.
Yeah, of course it was because devastation has rained down on southern Lebanon.
The problem, well, if you've seen the, it's continuing right now as we speak.
So we're like in real time continuing to bomb, Israel's continuing to bomb southern Lebanon.
And new reports from the IRGC on the Iranian side, they have called this an Israeli savage massacre.
Killing hundreds of people in one of the biggest series of attacks yet on its capital, killing hundreds, according to the civilian defense.
The IRGC Aerospace Force has pledged revenge for this attack, according to Tehran, is a breach of the ceasefire agreement with the United States.
And they said this represents a historic and crushing defeat for the United States.
And so they are going to respond to Israel.
Now, the IDF is saying as long as Hezbollah continues to threaten our civilians, we will continue to operate against them.
So They have no remorse.
They have no explanation for targeting civilian infrastructures.
You've seen the videos.
We're going to show you a few here as I speak.
These are apartment buildings.
Of course, every time they never have to prove.
Nope, Hezbollah was there.
We were targeting Hezbollah.
But you can see these are attacks across a populous city center.
This is a capital city.
You know, you're not just that.
Can we call that a precision strike?
Is that what we'd call on the street?
You're just going for Hezbollah there?
No, you know what the casualties are.
Before we went to air, the number was about 256, I'm sure.
Dead.
It's far higher than that.
Now, we've had condemnations from Qatar, from various foreign leaders, but again, Israel's saying it's our prerogative.
We're going to do it because Hezbollah is attacking us.
And again, I remind you that Hezbollah was created in 1982 when Israel first invaded Lebanon.
That was the impetus for this group saying, we shall never have this happen to us again.
Are they religious extremists?
Yes.
But did it have to be like this?
Obviously not.
And so now it's an entire civilization that's being attacked that I guess they're thinking we let Gaza slide.
We watched dozens and dozens of children die every day on our screens before our very eyes.
So we're going to say some bad words.
We're not going to like it, but we'll abide it.
Because we did already.
I mean, right?
People will go along with this, but Iran is having enough of this.
So, yeah, the international community has gone along with this for far enough.
Why the heck not?
I mean, you know, kill some Muslims, we'll just keep going.
That's what they've done.
They can just keep going, I suppose.
We're going to talk to Ben Swan now about this.
He's been following the situation in Lebanon and the international response.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Good to see you again.
Independent journalist.
Great to see you, Ben.
So, where do things stand right now as we come to air on what the response is and what you've been tracking inside of Lebanon?
Yeah, we actually just finished interviewing a crew that's on the ground in Lebanon right now, in Beirut.
So, the numbers right now, anywhere from about 280 to 350 who are dead.
Again, as you said, it's very dynamic because right now you have over 100 different locations that were bombed this morning.
And so the death toll is always changing, injuries close to 1,500 now.
So, it's a very serious situation in that respect.
Something that's very interesting, though.
You know, normally there's kind of a SOP, a standard operating procedure that Israel will use when they bomb any kind of area.
And one of the things they'll do is they'll, you know, with their pager technology, with leaflets, with advertisements that start running across people's cell phones, they let people know this is the area we're going to strike.
This is when we're going to strike.
If you're a civilian in this area, you need to get out.
Israel does this all the time.
They do it in Gaza, they do it in Lebanon, they do it everywhere.
Today, they did not.
There was, from everyone we've spoken to on the ground who was in Beirut, there was no warning ahead of time.
There was no indication this was going to happen.
There was no description of where these areas that were going to be hit.
Normally, they'll say, We're going to hit this building because Hezbollah is there.
In Gaza, we're going to hit this building because Hamas is there.
So if you're a civilian, get out.
They did not do that today.
And so you had people, women and children who were killed as a result of these strikes.
People had no idea they were coming.
And you made the comment as we started.
You know, we just kill some more Muslims.
But actually, these aren't just Muslims who are dying.
You know, Lebanon has the largest Christian population that remains in the Middle East.
The areas in southern Lebanon that are being hit aren't just Christian areas, they are so historically Christian.
The wedding in Cana, where Jesus performs his very first miracle, where he turns water into wine, is in southern Lebanon.
Where Simon Peter is laid to rest is in southern Lebanon.
The Christian communities there.
Are as old as Christianity itself.
And these are the people who are being hit.
These are the people that are being targeted.
Israel says, just like they said about Gaza, we're going in there because we're going to take out the Hezbollah fighters because they're attacking us.
That's not what they're doing.
They are taking southern Lebanon all the way up to, I got to get the name of the river right, but it's the Latani River.
Up to the Latani River, the goal is to take.
All of southern Lebanon and to basically make it part of greater Israel.
That is what they are doing.
Today, Netanyahu's office put out a statement essentially telling the members of the Lebanese army to get away from the final bridge that they have not yet blown that connects northern and southern Lebanon.
There's one left that crosses the Latani River.
And today, I don't know if they've hit it yet or not, but that was the warning that went out this morning.
So the one place they warned about was they were going to hit this bridge.
When they hit that bridge, they have now severed.
Geographically, physically severed northern and southern Lebanon.
Southern Lebanon is what Israel intends to essentially conquer and keep.
I mean, that's what Ambassador Mike Huckabee told Tucker in that interview when he pressed him on it.
The Greater Israel Project.
Should Israel take this land as part of what they believe they have a right to?
And he said, Yeah, take it all.
Take it all.
He tried to walk it back later, but it was really an admission of, of course, exactly what this Greater Israel Project is.
Yeah, it absolutely is.
And again, I guess I struggle with the Lebanon situation as a Christian myself.
You know, over Easter weekend, we just had our Easter.
The idea is you should be praying for and thinking of Christians around the world.
We have a president who says he cares deeply about Christians in Nigeria.
And again, as I mentioned, you know, one thing that the war on terror has done over the last 25 years, and virtually no Americans really recognize this or acknowledge it, is we have decimated, Americans have decimated the Christian communities in the Middle East.
We decimated the Iraqi Christian population, which was about 5 million people.
Many of them died.
Those who didn't die fled into Syria, into Lebanon.
They fled into other areas.
Syria became really the main country for that.
They, with the war in Syria and us trying to overthrow Assad and hand it over to ISIS and to Al Qaeda, we decimated the population there.
There has been a systematic decimation of these groups.
Christians in Syria, right, are again.
Go back 2,000 years, the very first churches ever planted by the apostles were in Syria.
And those are the places that we've watched this happen.
And now Lebanon almost feels to me like it's one of the last steps in this process to eradicate Christianity from this region of the world.
And so, just from a religious perspective, I think not only is it sad and is it a horrific thing to watch happening, but also to know that it's American evangelicals who are largely responsible for giving Israel the pass to do this.
The World Turns Against Israel00:14:15
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What is the corner that we've mopped ourselves into as Americans?
Because is Trump really willing to restart the war so that Israel can take Lebanon?
At the other end of the spectrum, does Trump have any influence whatsoever to make them stop?
Because here's how it's gone as Israel has utterly destroyed Gaza.
Here's the American response No, stop.
Stop.
Don't do that.
Please don't.
Yeah.
What power do we have to stop them if they're going to keep going?
And yes, we can stop selling them weapons, but that's not going to stop them at this point in time.
They have enough to keep going.
So this is, can you see the corner that I painted?
What do you think of it?
Well, I think it's, first of all, I don't think it's a real corner.
Do we have the ability to say you will stop?
Yes.
The president has that ability.
The United States still has the leverage and the power over Israel, especially when you're watching so much of the world turn against Israel right now.
You mentioned the French have condemned these actions.
The Italians have condemned these actions.
Maloney in Italy, the prime minister there, is talking about wanting to bring up Netanyahu on war crime charges.
So I think the world has turned against Israel in a lot of ways.
They need the United States and they need that support.
But there's the reality of it versus what's actually happening because I would have told you six weeks ago.
There's no way Netanyahu can walk into the Situation Room and make Trump go to war.
Now, I don't think he made him go to war, but whatever influence he had was enough to be able to convince Trump and the people within Trump's circle were able to convince him that this was a good idea.
Having said that, Trump will not restart the war, I don't think, over this.
I think he'll demand it ends because this war is a humiliation.
The U.S. has been so badly damaged in terms of our reputation as a global military power.
It's so bad that the president of the United States wants a $1.5 trillion military budget going into next year and basically says we'll cut every domestic program we can find in order to fund that.
And it's not because he just loves war.
It's because I think we've been exposed that we are so far behind the rest of the world.
Iran, for all you can say about them, listen, they've surprised the world in the way they were able to stand up, I think, to these attacks and to this war.
But having said that, they're still just a regional power.
They are not a global superpower as they're now flexing as if they are.
But global superpowers like Russia and China, we're nowhere near.
If Iran can do to us what they've done and do to our military equipment what they've done and withstand us the way they have, we're in a very, very scary position when it comes to facing actual world powers like Russia and China.
So you're reporting from Lebanon because I don't want to discount what you were saying at the beginning, talking to the crews there on the ground as they're digging through the rubble looking for survivors.
What do they expect to happen next?
Are they expecting Iran to come to their assistance?
Are they expecting.
Another savage massacre, as Iran has called it, another round of massive attacks.
Will we see ground forces?
What are the people there expecting to happen next?
Well, from the people we're talking to, they don't know.
They don't know if anyone's coming to help.
They believe that Iran will continue to fire on Tel Aviv, but that hasn't slowed anything down.
You know, if you look at what's happened over the last, you know, six weeks or so, the Iranians have bombarded Tel Aviv.
They've bombarded all kinds of locations in Israel with missile strikes.
It has not slowed down Israel at all.
It's so interesting as while Americans are focused on the U.S. and us trying to bomb different locations, We have not really been paying attention at all to what's going in Lebanon.
It's gotten very little coverage.
Really, I would say the last two days is the only time it's gotten any really serious coverage at all.
Um, and it's because Israel has made so much progress.
It's almost as if conspiracy theory here, uh, almost as if Israel walked the U.S. into this war because they believe they would decapitate the Iranian leadership.
They would take care of that.
But that wasn't the primary goal.
The primary goal was to put up a huge curtain so that everyone's looking over here at what's happening With Iran, that the U.S. can deal with, and Israel will fire missiles and fly over and bomb locations.
But their real focus, their methodical focus, was on Lebanon and on taking, as I mentioned, everything in southern Lebanon to add to that greater Israel project.
I don't at all think that is a stretch.
It's not a stretch at all.
I don't think you're out on a limb at all.
Like you are on the base of the tree.
That's not a limb.
You're basically in the treehouse.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, the other piece of this, right, is to Natalie's point, like, I mean, to drag the United States into this, because as many astute observers have pointed out, one of the goals of Israel right now is to really hurt the United States, because we are the ones with the yoke in some ways around their neck.
We have prevented them in large part from tackling the West Bank, from fully going into Lebanon, right, from fully realizing this greater Israel project.
It's really been the United States.
So, to eliminate the United States, have us bogged down in Iran, have us, our empire crumble.
Like, that's at the heart of this story.
And I don't think most Americans even know that.
They're using us in such a nefarious way.
I hope people wake the F up.
Sorry.
Well, and it's also that Israel is incredibly good at propaganda, right?
And controlling media and controlling messaging.
Maybe the best in the world at controlling messaging.
And one of the things they were able to do by controlling the messaging is if, if, Every single day, all we've talked about, I know for our shows, all we've talked about for the last six weeks is Iran.
It completely dominates every headline.
It dominates the X feeds.
It dominates cable news.
That's what everyone's talking about, right?
And when you have something so dramatic happening, yeah, it's very easy to say, everyone, pay attention over there.
Look at what's going on.
Look at those huge explosions.
Look at what the Iranians are saying now.
And then you just move as fast as you can.
And I do believe one of the reasons we saw the kind of hits that.
Beirut took today.
Now, keep in mind, in the entire time that Israel's been engaged in this six week war and they've been attacking Lebanon, during that time, the most they have done in terms of bombings and hitting targets, the most they have done was today.
This was the most aggressive day so far.
I believe that's because Netanyahu and the Israeli government were left out of these negotiations.
There's a lot of reporting that he was very angry about the fact that Trump went in there and had this negotiation.
With Pakistan, and that's a whole thing too.
Really, I think the U.S. handed the Pakistanis, here's what we want to say, and let's get this done because they needed a quick exit.
But while that's all happening, Netanyahu was left out of that.
The Israelis were left out of that.
They were not a part of that.
Why?
Because the administration knew they'd blow it up.
They're not going to be able to be a part of that.
So, because of that, I think it changed and dramatically affected the Israeli timeline for being able to take southern Lebanon, and that's why they've accelerated the way they have today.
Oh.
Yeah, that does make sense.
Yeah.
Well, just a short time ago, we heard from Pakistan at the United Nations saying that this U.S. ceasefire did, in fact, include Lebanon specifically, and that Israel and the United States are lying that it was actually part of this agreement.
Any final thoughts?
Yeah.
Lying is a good word.
Lying is a good word.
Yeah.
This entire war has been a lie from day one, but go ahead.
Well, right.
I mean, I guess originally my thought was, oh, they were mad.
That they were embarrassed by the ceasefire.
So it's kind of a demonic thing.
I'm going to go take it out on these people who I can because I can't hit Iran that I've been wanting so badly.
But what you're saying, if I may just summarize, is actually it's tactical because if we're not going to focus on Iran so much, we're going to see what they've done in Lebanon.
Now, something I've seen recently, and I haven't been able to see this for myself, is that Israel's taken more territory in Lebanon than Russia has in Ukraine in the course of this four years of war.
And I need to see that for myself, but that's wild to think that that has only happened since February 28th in five weeks.
And so, yeah, if we are going to turn our attention to this now, they're not going to have the opportunity, maybe.
I say that, but they do what they want.
So I don't know.
What do you think?
Well, they do what they want, but I will say there is public ire that comes when you see the video.
When you see, I don't know if you guys have seen these, we ran them yesterday in our show, but the drone shots flying over southern Lebanon, what's left behind.
It looks like Gaza.
You could put it up to an image of Gaza and say, which one is which?
You couldn't tell the difference.
I mean, they have flattened entire towns, cities, villages.
They're doing the exact same thing.
We use the term here in the U.S. carpet bombing, right?
When we go in and we just bomb everything.
It's not carpet bombing.
It's almost like a construction project where they flatten everything and they flatten the land, and there's not going to be anything left behind because you're not going to be anything left behind because you're not coming back here.
And one of the reasons that Russia has been so slow in their war with Ukraine, you know, is that Putin has said repeatedly there are homes and villages that are.
300 years old that they're going through.
He's like, We're not going to destroy that.
So they're moving very methodically.
They're trying not to kill civilians.
It's the entire opposite of what Israel is trying to do, which is Israel wants to make sure when this is over, you're not coming back here.
We're taking this.
It's ours.
We're building here.
And that's why, again, you sever the bridges because you're saying this land is ours and we're taking it no matter what.
Right.
In fact, there's a, what you mentioned is corroborated by a group called Breaking the Silence.
It's a group of IDF soldiers, former IDF soldiers.
And they have detailed their destruction of Gaza and how it was basically a construction project, a deconstruction project, where they took these massive bulldozers called the teddy bear and they just destroyed factory, food, farmland on purpose so that nobody can go back there and actually live there.
And it's a systematic destruction of civilian necessities, basically.
And so that happened.
Go to breakingthesilence.org.il and look up the report called Not You, but Our Audience.
I assume you might have seen it.
It's called The Perimeter, and it's horrific.
So if this is what's happening right now, we got to scream louder.
We got to scream louder, and the rest of the world needs to step in.
And at this point, I think that, you know, the Chinese are condemning it, other countries are condemning it.
I think there is less tolerance at this moment for Israel continuing to do this because the world sat silent while Gaza was destroyed.
And so many people were just.
Obliterated.
It was a genocide.
It is a genocide, what happened in Gaza.
And the world did nothing to stop it.
I think many people globally did not realize what was happening until because Israel moves very fast when they do this, right?
They really are, when you do a deconstruction project the way they have, the world hasn't really seen that before.
It's a totally new concept.
And so I think it caught people by surprise.
I think now that they know what it is, there will be less tolerance for it this time.
And I would say what's happening in Lebanon is more likely to actually spark a global war, a World War III.
Than the war between the United States and Iran in actuality.
Right.
Because if you're hitting Chinese infrastructure as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, China's brought in, the world will not sit by and allow this to happen.
I hope, I hope, fingers crossed.
And we should be clear yes, Iran violated the ceasefire in response to Israel violating the ceasefire.
And there's confusion as to, you know, did Iran fire first on Bahrain and UAE and Kuwait while, you know, Israel was hitting Lebanon simultaneously while this ceasefire that President Trump was promoting was suddenly taking effect.
So, Yeah, the fog of war right now.
And of course, there's lots of propaganda from both sides.
But we'll be continuing to watch it.
Great work, Ben, on what's going on in Lebanon.
We'll be following you.
Thank you so much for joining us, Ben Swan, great investigative journalist.