Two years after the death of Hassan Nasrallah, his face is still everywhere in Dahieh, the vast southern suburb of Beirut, which for decades was the main showcase of Hezbollah's power. On the walls, in the shops, on the posters remembering the dead leaders. But the city that Nasrallah left behind is no longer the same.Nasrallah died on September 27, 2024, in an Israeli bombardment on Haret Hreik, in the heart of Dahieh. For more than three decades, he had led Hezbollah and had turned the movement into much more than an armed organization. Under his leadership, the party built an extensive network of institutions, schools, clinics, media outlets, and social services, in addition to a powerful military and political structure.Dahieh was the natural setting for this power. But reducing it to a "Hezbollah bastion" is an understatement. It is a densely populated part of Beirut that grew from ancient villages, fields, and informal settlements to become a huge urban extension of the capital. A Shiite majority lives there, but also other communities. And its streets physically blend with other neighborhoods of Beirut.It is enough to travel a few kilometers for the city to change. In Gemmayzeh or Mar Mikhael, restaurants, bars, galleries, and terraces project an image of a cosmopolitan Beirut. In these neighborhoods, other urban codes and a different political history predominate. In Hamra, universities, hotels, offices, and shops are concentrated. In Dahieh, on the other hand, Hezbollah built for years a much more visible and daily presence. It was not just a party that was voted for. It was part of the life of the neighborhood.The 2024 war broke a good part of this landscape. And the 2026 one has done it again. In March, the southern periphery of Beirut, once again, emptied out. Closed shops, deserted streets and families displaced to other areas of the capital. Some residents returned during the day to check the state of their homes, collect belongings or feed their pets. At the Camille Chamoun stadium, the same setting that months earlier had hosted the massive funeral of Nasrallah, tents were set up for displaced families.The image summarizes well to what extent Hezbollah's territory has changed. The organization survived the death of a large part of its leadership, including that of Nasrallah and his designated successor, Hashem Safieddine. Naim Qassem assumed leadership in October 2024 and Hezbollah began to reorganize. There is no longer the charismatic leader who for decades concentrated much of the movement's identity. There is a more battered and more decentralized structure, and a different relationship with its regional environment.But the loss of power does not mean the disappearance of its social base. In March of this year, when Dahieh was being bombed again, some residents continued to say that they supported Hezbollah and that they would return to their neighborhoods. At the same time, others expressed something that a few years ago was much more difficult to hear publicly: weariness at the price of wars and questions about the role of Hezbollah and its disarmament.The burial and the cult of a symbol

Perhaps that is why Nasrallah's anniversary continues to be of great importance to the movement. His death has not closed an era; it has become one of its main symbols. Due to the war, the funeral had to wait. Nasrallah was initially buried provisionally and when conditions allowed it, on February 23, 2025, almost five months after his assassination, the great farewell arrived. Hundreds of thousands of people went to the sports complex to pay tribute to him and then accompanied the funeral procession to his mausoleum in Dahieh.That day, the stadium stands were filled with yellow flags and portraits of Nasrallah. Delegations from Iran, Iraq, and Yemen attended, and thousands of people followed the ceremony from outside the Sports City. Afterwards, the crowd accompanied the coffin to the place where he was finally buried.In September 2025, his followers gathered again for the first anniversary of his death, this time around his mausoleum in Dahieh. Days earlier, Hezbollah had also brought his image to the center of Beirut. His portraits and those of Hashem Safieddine were projected onto the Raouché rock, in a ceremony that sparked criticism and a dispute with the capital's authorities.And this Sunday, two years after his martyrdom, they will gather again to remember it. Nasrallah's image remains present on the streets of Dahieh. But around this face, the movement he built, the neighborhood that for decades symbolized his power, and Beirut itself have changed.

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In a public school in Sidon, the start of the academic year is unlike any other year. Some classrooms remain occupied by displaced families. Their belongings fit into a few bags, and the spaces where desks should be placed remain divided into small corners for sleeping. More than a million people were displaced during this year's hostilities in Lebanon, among whom were about 390,000 children, according to Unicef. The organization also warns that 340 schools have been damaged or destroyed, leaving thousands of students at risk of starting the school year without a classroom.

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Israel has used more than 1,100 tons of explosives to blow up one of Hezbollah's largest underground military infrastructures in southern Lebanon. The network of tunnels, over two kilometers long, housed, according to the Israeli army, a command center for the Badr unit, weapons depots, missiles, and drones. The detonation was of such magnitude that the United States Geological Survey recorded a 4.1 magnitude earthquake in southern Lebanon.

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Sixty days. This was the deadline that the United States and Iran gave themselves to transform the memorandum of understanding signed in June into a final agreement. The deadline expires this Monday without this agreement having been reached. And during these two months, the understanding that was supposed to contain the war has been on the verge of causing it to explode again. In fact, in the last few hours Tehran has raised its tone again: a high-ranking commander of the Revolutionary Guard has warned that its defensive stance will become "offensive" and has threatened with "strategic surprises" against the enemy.

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Every few minutes an explosion interrupts the conversation. A dry crackle. Then another. And another. In the background, on Ali Taher hill, a column of smoke rises again. An Israeli drone slowly flies over the entrance to Zautar al-Gharbiyah while a small Lebanese army checkpoint regulates access to the village. It is the first "pilot zone" of the agreement negotiated between Lebanon and Israel under the auspices of the United States. On paper, it was supposed to symbolize the beginning of the Lebanese state's return to the south. On the ground, it is hard to imagine anyone living there again.

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The armored vehicle advances slowly. Not out of caution, but because every kilometer requires relearning a territory that has changed. A few weeks ago, this road was still closed even to the United Nations Blue Helmets. For the first time in several months, a patrol from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) travels from the east to the west sector of the south of the country. For the soldiers, it is a journey. For Lebanon, the reflection of a new reality.

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The explosions continue to set the pace in southern Lebanon while in the negotiation rooms, attempts are being made to shape the future of the border. In Washington, they are talking about taking steps towards the first "pilot zones" foreseen in the framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel. But just a few kilometers from the demarcation line, the reality is very different: the Israeli army maintains its positions and continues operations against what it considers Hezbollah infrastructure, and the border towns are still waiting for a withdrawal for which no date has been set.

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A week ago in Washington there were smiles, handshakes and an agreement presented as the beginning of the end of the war between Israel and Lebanon. However, the situation on the ground has barely changed. Israeli soldiers remain deployed in parts of southern Lebanon and thousands of residents are still displaced, waiting to return to their war-torn villages. The document, presented by the United States as the first step to stabilize the border and restore the authority of the Lebanese state, leaves the most important question unanswered: when will the Israeli occupation really end?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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