The forgotten war that will decide the future of the Middle East: Trump and Iran are still exchanging fire. But as this riveting dispatch revealed, there will NEVER be peace until Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah ends
This Daily Mail dispatch reports from southern Lebanon on the ongoing and largely overlooked conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which the correspondents argue is the true obstacle to lasting peace in the Middle East even as attention focuses on the exchanges between Donald Trump's US and Iran. The piece frames the Israel–Hezbollah war as the conflict that will ultimately decide the region's future, contending that no settlement is possible while it continues. Its significance lies in shifting focus from the more widely covered US–Iran hostilities to a grinding border war whose civilian toll receives little international attention.
The report centres on Augeni Karam, a 51-year-old housewife in the Christian village of Qlayaa, roughly a mile from the border and on the edge of the IDF's declared "buffer zone", who has stayed indoors for more than four weeks in grief rather than fear. Her entire family was killed in what the article describes as an unprovoked Israeli drone strike on 1 June: her husband, Dr James Karam, a 61-year-old dentist; their son Tony, 22, an engineering student; and their daughter Theodosia, 21, a medical student. The IDF said it "regrets" the attack, which it attributed to a mistake; at the funeral two days later she reportedly clung to the coffins for over an hour. The dispatch is set against a backdrop of continued IDF mortar and drone strikes and a crumbling ceasefire, with Iran warning Trump of a "crushing response" to further attacks.