Empires still plant flags on old stones to prove they are winning – but modern wars are decided by what is circling overhead, not what is fluttering from a wall.
The Cradle
The castle changes hands. The banners change. The kingdom keeps bleeding. The men obsessed with holding stone are usually the last to realize the battle has moved elsewhere.
Southern Lebanon, 31 May 2026. The “lord” is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The castle is Beaufort, a 900-year-old Crusader fortress on a cliff above the Litani River, seized by the occupation army’s Golani Brigade and crowned with an Israeli flag for the first time since 2000.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed the invaders would hold it “as part of the security zone in Lebanon,” and Netanyahu declared the occupation had returned stronger than ever.
The same brigade took the same rock in 1982, buried its own men doing it, held it for 18 years, and in 2000 blew up the position before retreating south under cover of darkness. Crusaders raised those stones, Saladin took them, then Baibars. Every army that ever planted a flag on that ridge eventually carried it back down.
The Israeli press knew exactly what to do with the image. Haaretz acknowledged that a single photograph of the flag above the fortress was enough to bury the only conversation that mattered: what, exactly, this war is winning.
So look at what the flag was raised over.
The same day the banner went up, a Hezbollah drone eliminated a 21-year-old Israeli soldier a few kilometers away. The weapon driving this reality across the front costs a few hundred dollars and trails a thread of glass that Tel Aviv’s air defense industry still cannot stop. Across the Galilee, more than 50 rockets and a swarm of drones landed throughout the same afternoon. The Israeli army captured a castle and could not secure a single quiet hour.
This is the game of drones: an army staging photo opportunities on empty ruins while a wire bleeds it in the open, then calling the photograph a victory.
Hunting the king’s men
The occupation army crossed into Lebanon to push the fighting away from its northern settlements. Three months later, it is burying soldiers killed on its own side of the border by the very weapon it claimed the war would neutralize.
On 22 May, a Hezbollah drone liquidated Staff Sergeant Noam Hamburger at Biranit, an outpost on the Israeli side of the line, roughly 1 kilometer from Lebanon. Sergeant Nehoray Leizer, 19, was killed two days later near Bint Jbeil. “TikTok soldier” Sergeant Rotem Yanai, 20, was killed by two drones near Shomera on 27 May.
The siren was supposed to save them. Against a drone guided by fiber optics, it often does the opposite.
The alarm sounds, and soldiers sprint for shelter, yet that desperate dash for cover often becomes the very moment the camera overhead has been waiting for. Both Leizer and Yanai were struck while fleeing for safety after the warning had already gone off, and their deaths reflected a pattern that has become increasingly familiar.
Most soldiers killed since the war resumed on 2 March have died in similar circumstances, caught in the open and exposed at the precise moment they sought protection, with nowhere to run that a fiber-optic drone could not follow.
Hezbollah films nearly all of it. Its military media has turned the strikes into a genre, with new clips appearing almost daily. Al Jazeera describes them as raw and unedited: the view descends from above, fixes on a target, and in the final second sometimes catches a soldier looking up. The drones hit tanks, armored Caterpillar bulldozers, troop carriers, parked vehicles, military outposts, and the men moving between them.
And the hunt no longer stops at the border. Drones have struck a pickup truck at Misgav Am, landed in Kibbutz Snir, and hit the air-traffic-control base on Mount Meron, 5 kilometers inside the Galilee. Schools remain closed and shelters full across a stretch of territory the occupation promised this war would finally make safe.
It pushed the war north to quiet the border. The war returned and turned the north into a hunting ground.
Beaufort and the return of an old script
Beaufort is a Crusader fortress perched 700 feet above the Litani, its weathered walls dominating the river and valley below. For nine centuries, it has stood over one of southern Lebanon's most strategic corridors, drawing every army that sought to control the region. That is why so many have fought to possess it, and why none has managed to keep it.
The Crusaders rebuilt and fortified it. Saladin captured it in 1190. The occupation has now raised its flag over the same ridge for the second time in 44 years, and the second time echoes the first.
In June 1982, the same Golani Brigade stormed the same hilltop, losing six men in the trenches, among them Major Goni Harnik, who assumed command after his commander was killed. Hours later, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and then-defense minister Ariel Sharon arrived with photographers in tow. Sharon announced the fortress had been captured without a single casualty. Begin gazed across the battlefield and asked only whether the defenders had possessed machine guns.
Harnik’s mother heard on the evening news that no one had died and went to bed. Her son was already dead. As the lord stood on the parapet and the photographers took their pictures, the dead remained outside the frame. History barely bothered changing the script.
The flag now proclaims the return of the “security zone,” the same phrase used to describe the strip of territory the occupation held between 1985 and 2000. The casualties returned on schedule. Hours after the flag went up, an explosive drone killed Staff Sergeant Adam Tzarfati, 20, and wounded three others at a position beside the fortress.
Then, Hezbollah released its own image of Beaufort, with the operation executed while Netanyahu boasted over its capture. Capturing the fortress took an afternoon. Holding the surrounding ground took 18 years the last time, and ended in retreat.
In a statement, Hezbollah’s Operations Room said:
“Given the significant negative impact that the video footage broadcast by Hezbollah of its operations against the Israeli enemy army forces has had on the consciousness of the settlers within the occupation entity, the enemy army has desperately sought to obtain an image it could promote as a crushing victory, in the hope of calming the terror of the northern settlers. The target was the historic Beaufort (Al-Shaqif) Castle in southern Lebanon, located only about 4 kilometers from the Lebanese–Palestinian border.”
It added:
The wire no jammer can touch
The weapon itself is no longer a mystery.
The Cradle has already examined the fiber-optic FPV drone: guided through a glass thread beyond the reach of electronic warfare, which is precisely why the army that built Iron Dome still lacks a reliable answer.
What has changed is scale. According to the Alma Research and Education Center, more than 80 have been launched in recent weeks. Roughly one in five has found its target. Since the resumption of war in Lebanon on 2 March, Israel has admitted to the killing of 26 soldiers – with the majority of deaths being caused by Hezbollah's drones after the so-called ceasefire took effect in mid-April.
And the barrier is not even the cost. Flying one of these systems onto a moving target demands the same hand-eye coordination required by first-person video games, a reflex developed by an entire generation since childhood. This is not a Hezbollah improvisation. The US Army openly acknowledges that gaming skills are increasingly used to identify drone operators because, in its own description, flying one feels remarkably similar to playing one.
The overlap between console and cockpit is no longer theoretical, as the Israeli military is not facing improvised toys. It is confronting the cheapest and most widely available military skill on earth.
That reality has produced a debate inside Israel itself.
In late May, an unnamed cabinet minister told Channel 12 that the north was “defenseless” against the drones. Israeli military Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir described them as merely “a challenge” that the army would overcome. Both statements cannot be true.
Minor wounds, major truths
The army calls the casualties dozens of injuries, most of them “minor,” and leans on the word until it sounds clinical. But helicopters are not dispatched for minor injuries.
During the three weeks of the supposed ceasefire, explosive drones accounted for 37 of the 39 soldiers wounded in Lebanon. Rambam Hospital in Haifa alone has treated roughly 90 wounded soldiers from the front.
Its deputy director, Dr Avi Weissman, says there are “almost every day … two helicopter landings” from the combat zone, scenes that “remind me of the First and Second Lebanon Wars,” with patients arriving primarily with shattered limbs and facing lengthy rehabilitation.
Ironically, the hospital is named after Moses Maimonides – Rambam – the physician and scholar who ruled that a man must not lie, though he may bend the truth in narrow circumstances for the sake of peace. The occupation has read him in reverse. It took the exception and built a system around it, bending the truth not to preserve peace but to maintain the appearance of victory.
Each strike is reported separately – one soldier here, two there – ensuring the cost never appears as a single figure the public can grasp. What that drip-feed leaves intact, military censorship addresses directly. In 2024, the censor banned 1,635 articles and redacted another 6,265, an average of 21 interventions per day, a blade sharpened during the genocide in Gaza and now turned northward.
Yet Israeli officials themselves concede the censor cannot keep pace with Telegram, where, as one warned the Knesset, “every launch is immediately leaked,” and soldiers’ own channels circulate what official spokesmen will not.
A kingdom arguing with its own funerals
At home, the conflict has fractured the ruling class, but not along lines of war and peace. The divide runs between the right and the far right, the only axis around which Israeli politics still revolves.
No major political force is arguing for an end to the war. They are arguing that Netanyahu is losing one he refuses to finish.
Former army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot called the ceasefire “a war with one participant” and demanded the government stop restraining the military. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, opponents in nearly every other arena, joined in demanding a more forceful response.
The issue is not the bloodshed. It is that the drones keep arriving, and the man in charge has no answer beyond another flag on another hill.
The television screens mirror the same split.
Channel 12, owned by Keshet, and Channel 13, owned by Reshet, broadcast a war measured in funerals and poll numbers that show Netanyahu weakening. Channel 14, owned by Russian-Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Mirilashvili and operating as the prime minister’s loudspeaker, presents the same war as a string of victories.
There is no major platform arguing against the war itself because there is no significant political constituency for that position.
Netanyahu, whose approval ratings now trail those of his own generals, responds as he always has: promising harder blows while reminding Israelis he warned about drones years ago, never explaining why six years in power produced no solution.
Nor has the public, for the most part, turned against the war.
A Channel 12 survey found support for continued attacks on Lebanon at 79 percent. What many have stopped believing in is victory itself. Asked who won the latest round with Iran, barely a third credited their own side, while larger numbers chose either no one or Iran.
This is the mood Netanyahu himself captured when he promised a “super-Sparta” – a society rebuilt around permanent war.
On 1 June, Netanyahu and Katz ordered strikes on Dahiye, Beirut’s southern suburb with a large Hezbollah support base, for the first time in the current round of fighting. Tehran responded within hours. The ceasefire between Iran and Washington, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote, is “a ceasefire on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” and a breach on one front is a breach on all. The Islamic Republic also threatened to strike Israel and collapse negotiations with Washington, and issued formal evacuation orders to northern Israeli settlements, urging them to flee immediately in the event that Beirut was bombed. This prompted Trump to make a statement late on Monday. In an attempt to declare there will be no strikes on Beirut, the US president said Israeli “troops” were no longer on their way to Beirut.
The flaw in permanent war is that it never remains confined to the battlefield chosen by those who wage it.
The challenge facing Israel is no longer just the fiber-optic wire stretched across a hilltop in south Lebanon or the drone circling above a border outpost. It is part of a wider confrontation that links Beirut to Tehran, where decisions taken on one front quickly reverberate across another.
That was the message embedded in Tehran’s response. A ceasefire, Iranian officials argued, cannot be treated as divisible, respected in one arena and ignored in another. Whether that position holds or not, it serves as a reminder that the conflict Netanyahu seeks to manage has grown beyond any single border.
The flag raised over Beaufort was meant to project control. Yet the reality of this war points in the opposite direction. If there is a lesson in the history of Beaufort, it is that occupying the high ground is not the same as controlling the course of events below it.
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