The fisherman mends the nets in the Phoenician port of Tyre while children jump into the water from the pier. A few meters away, the terraces reopen and some Lebanese visitors have returned to the beaches. At first glance, it seems that summer has returned to one of the oldest inhabited cities in the Mediterranean.

The “memorandum of understanding” that extends the ceasefire between Iran and the United States and that is intended to allow progress towards a peace agreement is so fragile that all parties involved have intensified diplomatic moves to try to consolidate the foundations and prevent everything from exploding just days after its announcement. This Tuesday there are several parallel meetings in different parts of the world, all with the same objective on the table: to guarantee the mechanisms to try to maintain peace in the region. Iran's chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and the Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, have met in Oman with Sultan Haitham bin Tariq al-Said. Iran's President, Masoud Pezeshkian, has traveled to Pakistan, a mediating country, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has planned meetings with leaders from Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition, in Washington today, talks between Israel and Lebanon resume, as always, without the presence of Hezbollah.

The first round of negotiations between the United States and Iran in Switzerland has ended with "significant progress" to end the war in Lebanon, according to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who thanked the "tireless mediation of Pakistan and Qatar" in a social media message. The two countries have agreed to create a committee to promote a roadmap that will allow them to reach a final agreement to end the conflict within 60 days.

Where for decades the commercial life of southern Lebanon was concentrated, today tons of concrete, twisted beams and gaping facades accumulate. The arches that survived the bombings rise over empty shops, broken shop windows and streets where it is difficult to recognize where one business began and the next ended. Several mosques and husseiniyas, the religious buildings of the Shiites, still show the wounds of the attacks. In some streets in the center, the silence is only broken by the noise of machinery removing rubble.

After hours of Israeli bombings this Friday over southern Lebanon and the Baalbek region, which left at least 47 dead and 97 injured, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, the United States announced that Israel and Hezbollah have accepted a new truce negotiated with the mediation of Qatar and Iran. However, even after the agreement came into effect, Israeli attacks continued to be registered around Nabatieh, while Hezbollah claimed to have begun to respect the cessation of hostilities from the moment the agreement with Tel Aviv was announced.

This Tuesday's statements from Tehran and Washington show that the battle to interpret the agreement between the United States and Iran has only just begun. While the official signing of the memorandum of understanding remains scheduled for next Friday in Geneva, the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abbas Araghchi, has increased pressure on Israel by stating that the end of the war in Lebanon constitutes an inseparable condition for the end of the conflict with Iran.

The memorandum that the United States and Iran have virtually signed and plan to formalize this Friday in Switzerland is presented as an attempt to extinguish several fires simultaneously in the Middle East. It is not a definitive treaty, but a framework of understanding that opens sixty days of negotiation and seeks, above all, to avoid a new regional escalation.

When Pau Palaus returned from his first trip to Lebanon, in May, he organized an event in the Plaça d’Arbúcies to explain the experience to his neighbors. He lives on the outskirts of the village in a farmhouse called Ca l’Ocell, where he has a small stage to rehearse shows and set up small-scale performances. Roser Loscos' violin was playing in the square, and the children were asking him questions. “And did you bring food to Lebanon?”, a girl asked him. Pau is a clown; with his company, he has visited about thirty countries, won awards like the Zirkólika, and a few years ago he set up the association Contaminando Sonrisas, with which he organizes solidarity expeditions to countries in conflict or places that have suffered natural disasters. It was the bombings in April, launched by Israel over the south of the country but also in the capital, and the contacts Pau maintains with some Lebanese clowns that prompted him to travel to Lebanon. Not to bring food, precisely, but rather “hope”: “Talking so much about the number of deaths, in the end we end up dehumanizing war, and what I try to do is bring a little humanity to the conflict”. He usually shares these trips with a small team of collaborators, but this time, for logistical reasons, he had to travel alone. He performed mainly in the most popular neighborhoods of Beirut, including Dahieh, the suburbs where Hezbollah is considered to have its main urban base, and where Israel usually has its sights set. In total there were 27 performances in less than two weeks, many improvised in the middle of the street, during days when bombs continued to fall despite the theoretical ceasefire. A ceasefire that never quite is, as has been demonstrated in recent weeks. “The bombings that fall during a ceasefire are the most dangerous, because people let their guard down. I thought I would find an empty city, with everything closed and people at home, and it's the opposite, shops are open, life goes on almost normally. In Beirut I spent the day watching the drones that flew over us all the time, but they didn't pay any attention to them.” During the last two days of my stay in Beirut, the suburbs suffered a new wave of attacks, in which the government of Israel claimed to have killed a high commander of Hezbollah, the Shiite paramilitary group allied with Iran. It is estimated that since the United States and Israel launched the offensive against Iran, there have been more than 3,000 deaths in Lebanon and one and a half million displaced people, mainly due to bombings ordered from Tel Aviv to attack southern Lebanon and occupy about thirty border towns. “During a performance I was giving, a group of people received a call saying that two missiles had fallen in their village and seven people had died. There was a bit of a commotion, but the show continued, and when it ended, those same people came to congratulate me as if nothing had happened.” During his nine days in Lebanon, Pau recounts having a dream: hundreds of buses arriving in Beirut loaded with clowns and invading the country. He told this to two Lebanese documentary filmmakers who were helping him set up performances in Beirut, and from this, a new project has emerged and is now underway: to record an eight-episode series in eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa to demonstrate that the work of a clown can be a symbol of peace and also of transformation. “They stopped making documentaries focused on war some time ago because they found it too emotionally taxing, but now they see the possibility of addressing it from the perspective of hope. The intention is to invite other artists who are willing to perform with me in these places,” he explains. The series will likely begin filming in August, taking advantage of Pau being invited to a circus festival in the town of Ramallah, in the West Bank.A destroyed capitalIn recent months, Pau has met some Lebanese clowns and artists, and from this have come different collaborations. Last week, for example, Contaminando Sonrisas promoted from Catalonia – with economic and logistical support – a series of performances by a pair of local artists who perform mask and puppet shows. “They were born in Syria but had to exile themselves to Lebanon and grew up in Shatila, a refugee camp in the heart of Beirut built in 1949 to host Palestinians fleeing the war. It can be said that it is already part of the city itself, but it is a very degraded place, with mafias and corruption, where young people have many difficulties finding work. Meeting this pair of artists with so much sensitivity has been like finding a flower in the middle of the rubble," he explains. This coming Wednesday, Pau will once again leave for Lebanon to perform in other areas particularly hard-hit by the war. He will visit the Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian border; two refugee camps in Tripoli, further north, and the peripheral neighborhoods of Beirut. In addition, he will conduct a free training workshop for about fifteen local clowns. “Many public services have not been functioning for years and the population has had to self-manage. I don't know if they have much hope left, but they have a lot of resilience,” he adds. During his performances in May, he was able to personally verify the accounts that Western media correspondents have been giving in recent times. On the one hand, the destruction that continues to plague the capital. “There are many damaged buildings, and for each one, they can tell you what year it was attacked. Apart from an explosion at the port [in 2020], which was brutal and it is still unknown who was responsible. The Lebanese say that life is what happens between one war and another, because conflicts have been constant throughout their history,” he laments.

The United States and Iran have finally closed a deal that provides for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the cessation of military operations in the region. The first to announce the pact was Pakistan, which is acting as mediator, and then it was confirmed by the US President, Donald Trump, and the Iranian regime.

After decades of conflicts, interventions and containment policies, Israel is militarily safer today than many of its neighbours, but the region is more unstable than ever. In southern Lebanon, Israeli bombings continue despite the ceasefire announced in April under American mediation. On the ground, the agreement has not led to a stable situation. The Israeli army continues to carry out operations in border areas, while the Lebanese government denounces repeated attacks, destruction of homes and the blocking of the return of displaced persons. Lebanese authorities speak of thousands of incidents since the truce came into force.

The decision to start a war with Iran, led by Israel on February 28, is proving to be a real trap for Donald Trump, who more than 100 days later has still not found a way out. Far from the speed and military success of the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, the ayatollahs' regime has proven to be a much more formidable adversary, capable of regenerating itself from the blows it has received.

The exchange of attacks between Israel and Iran has stopped, at least for now. Iran has declared its military operations concluded this Monday, although it has warned that it will resume them if Israeli bombings against Lebanon continue. Iran launched several attacks this Sunday night, for the first time since the ceasefire signed on April 8, in response to Israeli bombings in the southern neighborhoods of Beirut. And, although it has announced a halt, the Iranian military command has warned that Tehran will act "even more forcefully" if attacks against its interests and those of its allies in the region resume.

100 days after the joint attack by the United States and Israel against Iran, the war is accelerating again. This Sunday, Iran has fired several waves of missiles against Israel for the first time since the ceasefire signed on April 8. This was Tehran's response to the Israeli attack on the southern neighborhoods of Beirut, just four days after the announcement of a new agreement reached between Israel and Lebanon in Washington. The bombing of Dahieh, Hezbollah's political and social stronghold, has left at least two dead and around twenty injured and has marked a new turn in a conflict that, far from showing signs of de-escalation, continues to expand on the ground.

Forty-four years after the start of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982, which led to the siege of the capital, Beirut faces an increasingly widespread feeling: exhaustion. Not that of a specific war, but that of a city that has lived for more than four decades amidst intermittent conflicts, incomplete reconstructions, and crises that never seem to be resolved.

A ceasefire is a pause in the war, a moment when the bombs fall silent, either to give a respite to exhausted civilians and soldiers or, in the best of cases, to open an opportunity for diplomacy. But in recent months, in the mouths of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu, this concept has been completely emptied of content to become merely a smokescreen behind which the war continues.

For just a few hours, Washington managed to create the impression that a new era could be opening in Lebanon. After two days of trilateral negotiations, the United States announced a ceasefire agreement late Wednesday between Israel and Lebanon, presented a roadmap for the deployment of the Lebanese army in the south, and set new talks for the end of June. But while the statement circulated among government palaces, another reality was asserting itself on the ground.

Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a ceasefire to end hostilities, the Trump administration announced this Wednesday, in the United States' attempt to close the Lebanese front, one of the main obstacles to reaching a broader agreement to end the war with Iran.

Despite de-escalation promises from Washington, in southern Lebanon nothing seems to have changed this Tuesday. The inhabitants of Nabatiyeh have barely had time to process the ceasefire announcements when sirens, evacuation orders, and Israeli bombings have once again imposed themselves over any expectation of calm.

The inhabitants of the southern suburbs of Beirut found themselves on Monday facing a scene they thought they had left behind facing a scene they thought they had left behind. After threats from Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, numerous residents began to leave the area for fear of a new bombing campaign against Hezbollah's stronghold. It was not a formal evacuation order, nor was it clear when eventual attacks might occur. But the message was enough to reignite fear. Katz warned that if Hezbollah continues to launch rockets against Israeli cities and towns, the army will respond by hitting targets in the southern suburbs of the capital. Hours later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Defense Minister himself ordered the army to prepare to attack the area, although Donald Trump, assured shortly after, that he had spoken with the prime minister and Hezbollah officials to stop the escalation. Uncertainty, as in every chapter of this war, is accentuated.

Israel took control this Sunday of the historic Beaufort Castle, located in southern Lebanon, just north of the Litani River, and considered a particularly strategic site of great military value, as it is 710 meters above sea level and offers a panoramic view of large areas of southern Lebanon and northern Israel. This makes it an observation and surveillance post. In fact, the fortress, built by the Crusaders in the 12th century, has been key in all of Israel's wars in Lebanon since 1982. Israel already occupied it during the invasion of Lebanon that year, and remained there until 2000, when it withdrew from the country.