NPR is continuing its one-sided destruction narrative of reporting on Lebanese villages damaged during the war that Hezbollah (re)started when it fired rockets at Israel, violating the November 2024 ceasefire, in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This stop: Nabatiyeh.
Jane Arraf and Jawad Rizkallah reached into their familiar toolbox to yet again ignore Hezbollah’s terror tactics and solely blame Israel for damage to the Lebanese city in their July 22 report, “Historic hub of south Lebanon badly damaged in war with Israel.” They did not report Hezbollah as the aggressor, neither when Hezbollah first attacked Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in solidarity with Hamas, nor when it again attacked Israel in early March 2026 after a 15-month ceasefire.
The pair reported that Israel continued attacking in southern Lebanon despite a three-month-old ceasefire and that Nabatiyeh “lies in ruins.” There is no mention of Hezbollah in the paragraph, so any uninformed reader could easily be misled to believe Israel’s war is against Lebanon and not Hezbollah, an Islamic terrorist organization, proxy for Iran and international, billion-dollar narco-terror outfit.
In fact, NPR does not say one bad word about Hezbollah. Commensurate with NPR’s notorious use of wordcraft when reporting on warcraft, Arraf reported “Nabatiyeh is a hub of southern Lebanon and an administrative center for Hezbollah, which is also a political party and a provider of social services. The small city has been one of the hardest hit in two years of war with Israel.”
What does NPR mean by “administrative center” and why does it say Hezbollah “is also” something when it does not say what it is first and foremost? Are Arraf and Rizkallah leading readers to think only politics and social services are happening there? Are they also legitimizing a Shia terrorist organization’s coercive establishment of a state within a state against the legitimate sovereign power of Lebanon?
Perhaps if NPR had reported on some of Hezbollah’s terror infrastructure in Nabatiyeh, readers might understand that it’s not a paper-pushing bureaucracy office building providing “social services.” In fact, the “administration” in Nabatiyeh is directly related to Hezbollah’s terror and military activities.
In the past two and a half years, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) eliminated a senior commander in Hezbollah’s Radwan Force (elite commando unit) in a Hezbollah military structure in Nabatiyeh. The military also operated multiple times against command centers and weapons storage facilities in Nabatiyeh and against Hezbollah Radwan Force sites there, including terror targets belonging to Hezbollah’s Executive Council in Nabatiyeh. The Executive Council is Hezbollah’s “administrative” body, responsible for reconstructing its military capabilities. It operates with the military units under Hezbollah’s Jihad Council.
The Israeli military carried out an operation against a Hezbollah Radwan Force sites in Nabatiyeh on Thursday. Among the targets the IDF hit was a building used by the group’s Bader unit to carry out attacks against Israeli targets. pic.twitter.com/LGFjTxHkjO
— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) November 15, 2024
In January 2025, the Israeli Air Force attacked vehicles transporting weapons in Nabatiyeh. In September 2025, it struck Hezbollah headquarters in Nabatiyeh. In early 2026, Israeli forces targeted 15 Hezbollah command centers in Nabatiyeh, hit Hezbollah weapons manufacturing infrastructure and other buildings used by Hezbollah in Nabatiyeh. Later in the year, the IDF struck more Hezbollah command centers there.
NPR’s stunning omission of the vast number and variety of Hezbollah infrastructure the IDF targeted in Nabatiyeh ignores Hezbollah’s well-documented human shield strategy and makes the report not only wildly incomplete, but biased.
Human interest stories on civilian suffering are appropriate and necessary, but only when paired with truth. By ignoring the vast network of command centers and weapons stores nestled inside Nabatiyeh, NPR presents a distorted reality where Israel strikes buildings for the heck of it and Hezbollah is nothing more than a local social services provider. This is narrative curation, not public radio journalism. As long as NPR refuses to mention the Hezbollah assets destroyed under the rubble, its reporting will remain fundamentally incomplete.