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BEIRUT: The Israeli army on Wednesday claimed that Lebanese Haytham Abdullah Bakri, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday in the town of Kfar Dajjal in the Nabatiyeh governorate in southern Lebanon, was “the head of a currency exchange who operated with Hezbollah to transfer funds for Hezbollah terrorist activities.”

In a social media post, Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee said: “The ‘Al-Sadiq’ Currency Exchange, managed by Bakri, serves as a funds storage and transfer mechanism for Hezbollah, for funds originating from the Iranian Quds Force.”

Adraee also posted photos of five other exchange centers in Lebanon that he accused of being companies that also finance Hezbollah, in what appeared to be a threat that they could be targeted similarly to Bakri.

The documented establishments include Al-Insaf Exchange under the management of Ali Hassan Shamas, and a currency house operated by Hassan Mohammed Hussein Ayyash.

The intelligence imagery also shows Yara Exchange, run by Mohammed Badr Barbir, alongside another operation managed by Ramez Mektef. Additionally, surveillance targeted Maliha Exchange, which operates under Hussein Shaheen’s management.

The post displayed photographs of these shops pinpointed on a map stretching from Beirut to Chtoura in the Bekaa and Mount Lebanon, including Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Adraee said that “these funds are used for military purposes including purchasing weapons, manufacturing means, and providing salaries to operatives, and are diverted for terrorist purposes and to finance the continuation of Hezbollah's terrorist activities.”

The Israeli forces announced the killing of Behnam Shahriari in Iran last weekend, identifying him as the head of Quds Force Unit 190 responsible for channeling hundreds of millions of dollars every year to Iranian proxy organizations. Israeli officials claim Shahriari oversaw sophisticated money transfer operations that funneled Quds Force resources to Hezbollah through a network of currency exchange firms spanning Turkey, Iraq, the UAE, and Lebanon. The killings of Shahriari and Bakri allegedly disrupted critical Iranian financing channels to the Lebanese militant group.

Dr. Louis Hobeika, an economic analyst, said to Arab News that Lebanon’s Central Bank monitors all international transfers, automatically freezing transactions above $10,000 to verify their purpose, origin, and destination.

“Money exchange operators in Lebanon operate under regulatory oversight without special exemptions based on transaction volume,” Hobeika said. “Yet Lebanon harbors financial channels that evade state monitoring and control. Legal and illegal operations sometimes blur together — a pattern visible beyond banking, including customs enforcement where contraband interdiction remains incomplete pending better scanning technology.”

Hobeika described Lebanon’s Syrian frontier as equally challenging, noting that financial flows previously moved through coordinated arrangements under Bashar Al-Assad’s government but now rely on individual smuggling operations.

Israel has repeatedly targeted Hezbollah’s Al-Qard Al-Hassan financial network, which it accuses of bankrolling the organization’s activities. During last year’s Israel-Hezbollah confrontations before November, Israeli airstrikes hit several branches of the institution, which operates a parallel banking system outside Lebanon’s regulated financial sector.

The Lebanese Ministry of Interior and Municipalities officially licensed the Al-Qard Al-Hassan Association in 1987, describing its objective as “assisting individuals by providing short-term loans to help address certain social challenges.”

Following the ceasefire agreement reached at the end of November, the Israeli army placed Beirut International Airport under surveillance, blocking an Iranian plane from landing to “prevent the transfer of funds and weapons to Hezbollah.”

This measure coincided with a period in which Hezbollah faced a severe economic crisis, struggling to secure the funds needed to pay its members’ salaries and to provide shelter for thousands of families displaced by Israel’s systematic destruction of villages along the southern border, as well as hundreds of residential buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs and the Bekaa Valley.

In February, Hezbollah called on the government to “revoke its decision to prevent (the) Iranian plane from landing at Beirut Airport and to take serious measures to stop the Israeli enemy from imposing its orders and violating national sovereignty.”

Iran is estimated to provide Hezbollah with up to $700 million a year, according to a US State Department report issued in 2022.

In a 2016 speech, the former secretary-general of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah, said: “Our budget, salaries, expenses, food, water, weapons, and missiles are provided by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

He also confirmed in a 2021 speech that Al-Qard Al-Hassan Association has provided $3.7 billion in loans to 1.8 million people in Lebanon since its founding in the 1980s, with approximately 300,000 individuals obtaining loans during that period.

In May, the US State Department announced a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the disruption of Hezbollah’s financial networks operating in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

THE HAGUE/TEL AVIV/ISTANBUL: US President Donald Trump reveled in the swift end to war between Iran and Israel, saying he now expected a relationship with Tehran that would preclude rebuilding its nuclear program despite uncertainty over damage inflicted by US strikes.
As exhausted and anxious Iranians and Israelis both sought to resume normal life after the most intense confrontation ever between the two foes, Iran’s president suggested that the war could lead to reforms at home.
Trump, speaking in The Hague where he attended a NATO summit on Wednesday, said his decision to join Israel’s attacks by targeting Iranian nuclear sites with huge bunker-busting bombs had ended the war, calling it “a victory for everybody.”
He shrugged off an initial assessment by the US Defense Intelligence Agency that Iran’s path to building a nuclear weapon may have been set back only by months, saying the findings were “inconclusive” and he believed the sites had been destroyed.
“It was very severe. It was obliteration,” he said.

He was confident Tehran would not try to rebuild its nuclear sites and would instead pursue a diplomatic path toward reconciliation, he said.
“I’ll tell you, the last thing they want to do is enrich anything right now. They want to recover,” he said.
If Iran tried to rebuild its nuclear program, “We won’t let that happen. Number one, militarily we won’t,” he said, adding that he thought “we’ll end up having something of a relationship with Iran” to resolve the issue.
Israel’s bombing campaign, launched with a surprise attack on June 13, wiped out the top echelon of Iran’s military leadership and killed its leading nuclear scientists. Iran responded with missiles that pierced Israel’s defenses in large numbers for the first time.
Iranian authorities said 610 people were killed and nearly 5,000 injured in Iran, where the extent of the damage could not be independently confirmed because of tight restrictions on media. Twenty-eight people were killed in Israel.

Both Iran and Israel declared victory: Israel claiming to have achieved its goals of destroying Iran’s nuclear sites and missiles, and Iran claiming to have forced the end of the war by penetrating Israeli defenses with its retaliation.
But Israel’s demonstration that it could target Iran’s senior leadership seemingly at will poses perhaps the biggest challenge ever for Iran’s clerical rulers, at a critical juncture when they must find a successor for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, now 86 and in power for 36 years.
President Masoud Pezeshkian, a relative moderate elected last year in a challenge to years of dominance by hard-liners, said the atmosphere of national solidarity during the Israeli attacks would spur domestic reform.
“This war and the empathy that it fostered between the people and officials is an opportunity to change the outlook of management and the behavior of officials so that they can create unity,” he said in a statement carried by state media.

Still, Iran’s authorities moved swiftly to demonstrate their control. The judiciary announced the execution of three men on Wednesday convicted of collaborating with Israel’s Mossad spy agency and smuggling equipment used in an assassination. Iran had arrested 700 people accused of ties with Israel during the conflict, the state-affiliated Nournews reported.
During the war, both Netanyahu and Trump publicly suggested that it could end with the toppling of Iran’s entire system of clerical rule, established in its 1979 revolution.
But after the ceasefire, Trump said he did not want to see “regime change” in Iran, which he said would bring chaos at a time when he wanted the situation to settle down.
A rapprochement between Tehran and the West would still require a deal governing Iran’s long-term nuclear ambitions in return for lifting US and international sanctions. Iran has always denied seeking an atomic weapon, which Western countries have accused it of pursuing for decades.
The head of the UN’s IAEA nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, said his top priority was ensuring international inspectors could return to Iran’s nuclear sites, dismissing what he called the “hourglass approach” of trying to assess the damage in terms of the months it would take Iran to rebuild.
“In any case, the technological knowledge is there and the industrial capacity is there. That, no one can deny. So we need to work together with them,” he said.
Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, said late on Tuesday that talks between the United States and Iran were “promising” and Washington was hopeful for “a long-term peace agreement that resurrects Iran.”
Iran’s parliament approved a bill on Wednesday to suspend cooperation with the IAEA, state-affiliated news outlet Nournews reported, though it said such a move would require approval of Iran’s top security body.

Qatari emir briefed on Iranian missile interception

Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani visited the Joint Operations Command of the armed forces in the Al-Mazrouah area on Wednesday.

Sheikh Tamim toured the headquarters to review the systems utilized for monitoring as well as command and control, Qatar News Agency reported.

During the visit, a briefing was provided regarding the interception of a missile attack targeting Al-Udeid Air Base, which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps launched on Monday evening.

The Joint Operations Command highlighted the precautionary measures implemented by the armed forces, emphasizing their efficiency and readiness to defend Qatar.

Israel killed at least 14 scientists in attack on Iran’s nuclear know-how

Israel’s tally of the war damage it wrought on Iran includes the targeted killings of at least 14 scientists, an unprecedented attack on the brains behind Iran’s nuclear program that outside experts say can only set it back, not stop it.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Israel’s ambassador to France said the killings will make it “almost” impossible for Iran to build weapons from whatever nuclear infrastructure and material may have survived nearly two weeks of Israeli airstrikes and massive bunker-busting bombs dropped by US stealth bombers.

“The fact that the whole group disappeared is basically throwing back the program by a number of years, by quite a number of years,” Ambassador Joshua Zarka said.

But nuclear analysts say Iran has other scientists who can take their place.

Meeting Trump, Turkiye’s Erdogan hails Iran-Israel truce

Turkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan hailed the Iran-Israel ceasefire and urged “close dialogue” to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as he held talks with US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of a NATO summit late Tuesday.
The Turkish president “expressed his satisfaction with the ceasefire achieved between Israel and Iran through President Trump’s efforts, hoping it would be permanent,” his office said.
Erdogan also stressed the need for Ankara and Washington to work closely to end the war in Gaza and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Netanyahu claims Iran will not have a nuclear weapon

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a “historic victory” against Iran despite a US intelligence report concluding that American strikes set back Tehran’s nuclear program by just a few months.

In an address to the nation after the ceasefire announcement, Netanyahu said “Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.”

“We have thwarted Iran’s nuclear project,” he said. “And if anyone in Iran tries to rebuild it, we will act with the same determination, with the same intensity, to foil any attempt.”

Israel had said its bombing campaign, which began on June 13, was aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, an ambition Tehran has consistently denied.

US intel says strikes did not destroy Iran nuclear program

 A classified preliminary US intelligence report has concluded that American strikes on Iran set back Tehran’s nuclear program by just a few months — rather than destroying it as claimed by President Donald Trump.
US media on Tuesday cited people familiar with the Defense Intelligence Agency findings as saying the weekend strikes did not fully eliminate Iran’s centrifuges or stockpile of enriched uranium.
The strikes sealed off entrances to some facilities without destroying underground buildings, according to the report.
White House Press Secretary Karline Leavitt confirmed the authenticity of the assessment but said it was “flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked.”