Go to the Wall Street Journal, type ‘Lebanon’ into the search bar — you won’t find any mention of it on the digital front page — and read the headlines. The website will first show you articles on the basis of their ‘relevance.’ Once you’ve established that the recurring headlines either mention Pope Leo or Hezbollah, filter the pieces by ‘Newest to Oldest,’ and a fuller picture of Lebanese civilian life will begin to emerge. If you then go to The New York Times, you will notice the same headline figures in the articles that are automatically suggested. The Economist, however, has been reporting far more on civilian distress than its American media counterparts which suggests the bias might be national. So is it that, to Americans, life in Lebanon can be encapsulated by the first foreign tour of the nascent pope and by the country’s secessionist strong-arm military? Hardly. It is rather that we perpetually treat Lebanon as a peripheral arena — a symptom of wider regional and international conflicts.
In many articles reporting on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, we encounter mentions of Syria and Lebanon. More often than not, they read as footnotes or evidence supporting broad claims (such as “Iran funds, trains and arms terror proxies across the Middle East and beyond,” or “Is the Middle East headed into a broader regional war?”). What we hardly ever encounter are reports on civilian life, which has, during any given week of the past year, been ravaged by civilian displacement, Israeli strikes, pillaging, agricultural destruction and journalist killings. These are not peripheral consequences, yet they are often cast as secondary clauses about someone else’s war. Analyses of Western media framing — including reviews of The New York Times — have demonstrated that coverage of the Israel-Hamas War often dilutes civilian suffering.
The worst part in this neglect isn’t the media outlets’ marginalization of core issues; it is rather the severe scarcity of reliable, frequently updated sources that showcase the reality of Lebanese quality of life and life expectancy. The source I judged to be the most reliable and recent was the United Nations' report on the socioeconomic impacts of the 2024 war on Lebanon, published in July 2025, which provided human loss estimates from January of that year. Almost a year later, I was not able to find any further research that offers updated numbers — and I do not believe that it is because losses have subdued. This is very telling — not only of incompetence, but of a Western willingness to turn a blind eye. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, the UN report suggested a human death toll of 4,285, “27 per cent of whom were women and children.” The registered injuries surpass 17,000.
Treating Lebanon as an actor instead of as a side-effect would require us to further deplore the ethicality of the United States’ military support to Israel, which has materially enabled a part of Israel’s actions in Lebanon. It would mean Israel’s military campaign, framed as preserving national security and self-determination, has formed an insatiable conflict which breaches the initial borders of Hamas-influenced territory. Although Israel’s fears are far from unfounded — their legitimacy constantly contested by neighboring states — it has become a label under which violence is propagated against any populations which could threaten autonomy. Western media’s abandonment of Lebanon as a primary theater further obstructs the consequences of U.S. military funding.
While Western reporters have failed to relay the severity of the conflict in Lebanon, Lebanese reporters have been silenced for their efforts. On Oct. 13, 2023, Issam Abdallah, a Lebanese reporter was killed by a shell fired by an Israeli tank on the Israel-Lebanon border. He was working for Reuters and was clearly marked as press when the shelling occurred. A second shell was fired seconds later, injuring six more journalists.
The aim of censoring direct reporting indicates the inhumane conditions to which the Lebanese population is subjected, to the point where even attempts to garner international attention are suppressed. Journalists killed in the course of reporting are being considered “collateral damage” rather than victims of war crimes. Punishment for attempting to report logically deters motivation to report at all.
Western coverage has understandably focused on Palestine and on the anxiety surrounding Israel’s eternally-contested “right to exist” given the proportions of the conflict and the severity of the issue. Yet, the refusal to treat Lebanon as a nation deserving of international attention and consideration remains an egregious oversight. So much so that, in reading the article on Pope Leo’s visit to Lebanon, the only time the nation was mentioned was in the title. The constantly shifting fronts and asymmetry of the conflict are not sufficient reasons to neglect the human losses and enduring consequences. This piece itself is guilty of what I am trying to accuse others of: I appear incapable of mentioning Lebanon without slipping some of the spotlight to its neighboring states. Even if my writing cannot fully center on Lebanon, it aims to pull attention back to a country that has served as a footnote of Western media coverage for far too long.
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Elise Clifford '29 is an Opinion Columnist and a Philosophy and Russian student in the College of Arts & Sciences. Her fortnightly column, State of Confusion, approaches the liberties and anxieties honed by disagreement, and the responsibility that comes with forming identity. She involves aspects of symbolism and skepticism that accompany the weight of glorification. She can be reached at eclifford@cornellsun.com.
