Qatar's Ministry of Municipality has announced the completion of nationwide preparations for Eid Al Adha festival, unveiling a comprehensive plan aimed at ensuring public health, safety and comfort during the holiday period. Eid Al Adha, the "Festival of Sacrifice", is expected to begin Wednesday, May 27, according to astronomical calculations. It is observed by Muslims worldwide to commemorate the willingness of Prophet Ibrahim, known as Abraham in Christianity and Judaism, to sacrifice his son in obedience to God.In a statement issued on Monday, the ministry said inspection teams had intensified monitoring of food establishments across the country, including restaurants, traditional kitchens, butcher shops, bakeries, fish markets and poultry outlets. Officials said specialists were conducting routine sampling and laboratory testing to verify compliance with approved health and safety standards. The ministry also said additional veterinarians and inspectors had been deployed to slaughterhouses ahead of the festival, with round-the-clock shifts introduced throughout the Eid holidays. The measures are intended to ensure sacrificial animals are examined both before and after slaughter to confirm they are disease-free and fit for consumption. Authorities added that crowd management procedures had been introduced at slaughterhouses to reduce congestion and maintain the smooth flow of operations during peak periods. Alongside regulatory efforts, municipalities have launched public awareness campaigns advising residents on how to select healthy sacrificial animals and safely store and handle meat. The ministry also stressed theimportance of carrying out slaughter only at licensed facilities under veterinary supervision. Municipal teams have meanwhile expanded inspections targeting violations and unlicensed advertisements, while preventive pest-control campaigns have been carried out in mosques, prayer grounds, markets, residential neighborhoods and waste collection sites. In preparation for an expected rise in visitors during the holiday, municipalities said maintenance and cleaning work had been completed at parks, beaches, the Corniche and other recreational facilities. Officials confirmed that playgrounds, water coolers, washrooms and public amenities had been checked to ensure readiness. The ministry said emergency services, sewage operations and public reporting channels would remain available around the clock throughout Eid via the unified contact center 184 and other communication platforms.

US President Donald Trump said he would "hold off" an attack on Iran scheduled for today at the request of Gulf leaders.Trump said on his Truth Social network yesterday that "serious negotiations" were now underway with Iran and that Gulf states believed "a deal will be made."But he said Washington was ready for a "full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment's notice, in the event that an acceptable Deal is not reached."On his Truth Social platform, Trump said he was asked by His Highness the Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan “to hold off on our planned military attack” on Iran, “which was scheduled for tomorrow”.His comments came after Iran said it submitted a response to the latest US proposal via mediator Pakistan.Iran sent the proposal to the US with terms that appeared similar to offers Washington has previously rejected, although a senior Iranian official told Reuters yesterday that the US had softened positions on some issues.A Pakistani source confirmed that Islamabad, which has conveyed messages between the sides in the war in ⁠the Middle East since hosting the only round of peace talks last month, had shared the latest proposal with Washington. But the source suggested progress had been difficult.The sides "keep changing their goalposts," the Pakistani source said, adding: "We don't have much time."Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei confirmed that Tehran's views had been "conveyed to the American side through Pakistan" but gave no details. Washington did not immediately comment.The Iranian proposal, as described by the senior Iranian source, appeared similar in many respects to Iran's previous offer, which US President Donald Trump rejected last week as "garbage".It would focus first on securing an end to the war, reopening the Strait of Hormuz — a major oil supply route that Iran ⁠has effectively blockaded — and lifting maritime sanctions.Contentious issues around Iran's nuclear programme and uranium enrichment would be deferred to later rounds of talks, the source said.However, in an apparent softening of Washington's stance, the senior Iranian source said the United States had agreed to release a quarter of Iran's frozen funds — totalling tens of billions of dollars — held in foreign banks. Iran wants all the assets released.The Iranian source also said Washington had shown more flexibility in agreeing to let Iran continue some peaceful nuclear activity under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.Iran's Tasnim news agency separately quoted an unidentified source as saying the US had agreed to waive oil sanctions on Iran while negotiations were under way.Iranian officials did not immediately comment on Tasnim's report, which a US official, ⁠who declined to be named, said was false.A fragile ceasefire is in place after six ⁠weeks of war that followed US-Israeli ⁠airstrikes on Iran. But talks mediated by Pakistan have stalled and Trump has said the ceasefire is "on life support".Washington has previously demanded Tehran dismantle its nuclear programme and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas supply.Iran has been demanding compensation for war damage, an end to a US blockade of Iranian ports and a halt to fighting on all fronts, including in Lebanon.Trump is expected to meet top national security advisers today to discuss options for resuming military action, Axios reported.Baghaei said Tehran was prepared for all scenarios."As for their threats, rest assured that we are fully aware of how to respond appropriately to even the smallest mistake from the opposing side," he told a televised weekly press conference.

In the ruined townships of southern Lebanon, a new kind of war has emerged — one that no Iron Dome can intercept and no electronic warfare suite can blind. A small quadcopter, guided not by radio waves but by a hair-thin fibre-optic cable unreeling silently behind it, skims rooftops before slamming into an Israeli Merkava tank with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. Israel’s multibillion-dollar defence architecture is, in this moment, rendered irrelevant by a spool of cable and a repurposed commercial drone. This is the battlefield arithmetic that confounds Benjamin Netanyahu’s proclaimed ambition to disarm Hezbollah — what his critics call his greatest pipe dream. Battered by a year of Israeli bombardment, stripped of key commanders, its Syrian supply corridor severed by Assad’s fall, the Party used fifteen months of fragile ceasefire not to disarm, as Beirut and Washington demanded, but to rearm — and to innovate. Israeli officials acknowledge that Hezbollah’s drone unit has launched over 160 FPV sorties since early March, 90 guided by fibtr-optic cables that defeat every electronic countermeasure in Israel’s inventory. When a medevac helicopter raced to evacuate the wounded at Taybeh, Hezbollah launched a second drone at the aircraft. Soldiers pointed their rifles at the sky. On May 7 and 8, FPV drones struck Iron Dome launchers, footage showing maintenance crews fleeing moments before impact. Netanyahu’s answer? A solution “will take time.” In the interim, front-line troops hang nets over their positions, hoping a drone snags on fabric before it finds flesh. Against this backdrop, the demand for disarmament assumes the quality of a theatre of the absurd. Behind closed doors, Lebanese officials have quietly conceded to American envoys that disarmament within any near-term horizon is not feasible. The Lebanese Armed Forces, underfunded and structurally compromised by decades of Hezbollah influence, have neither the firepower nor the political will to confront an organisation that has threatened civil war should anyone try. Secretary General Naim Qassem has warned that seizing the Party’s weapons will mean “no life in Lebanon.” In the vocabulary of Lebanese politics, that is not a threat — it is a constitutional fact. The Party’s negotiating position is a masterpiece of circular logic that happens to be tactically airtight: it will consider disarmament when Israel withdraws from all Lebanese territory — an outcome no Israeli leader, least of all Netanyahu, will accept before Hezbollah disarms. Israel retains forces at five strategic points along the border; Prime Minister Salam has noted that Israel effectively controls sixty-eight Lebanese villages in the south. The 1949 Armistice line, Lebanon demands as a baseline, remains a distant aspiration. The land Israel has seized by force shows no sign of returning for free. Washington pushes Aoun and Salam toward peace and mutual recognition with Israel — a proposition the Party categorically rejects, and that much of the Lebanese political class regards as surrender dressed in diplomatic language. The 1949 Armistice border is not merely a cartographic line; it is the architecture of national dignity. The Lebanese question cannot be understood apart from the larger battle between the US-Israel Axis and the Axis of Resistance. When American and Israeli strikes killed Khamenei on February 28, they did not merely decapitate a theocracy — they pulled the trip wire that brought Hezbollah back into combat after fifteen months of enforced restraint. Tehran, even in the convulsive aftermath, has not relinquished the Hezbollah card. It never will. The Party is the crown jewel of the IRGC’s four-decade investment in the Levant — trained, financed, and strategically directed by the Quds Force from its inception. To imagine Tehran surrendering that asset for diplomatic pleasantries is to misunderstand the Islamic Republic’s strategic grammar entirely. Now, with Trump dangling olive branches and threatening “massive maximum pressure” in the same breath, the most consequential variable hangs unresolved: what emerges from the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing? Regional sources have told CNN that progress in the Iran nuclear talks “will depend on the results of President Trump’s visit to Beijing.” Iran has already warned of ninety-percent uranium enrichment should a second round of US-Israeli strikes materialize.15 Should diplomacy collapse, and the bombs fall again, Hezbollah will unleash its remaining arsenal against northern Israel — where more than a million Israelis have already abandoned their homes, a demographic hostage to an impasse that no one in Washington, Jerusalem, or Beirut dares to resolve. Lebanon is, as it has always been, the theater in which larger powers rehearse their conflicts without suffering their consequences. The scorched villages, the families in schools north of the Litani, the iron-nerved drone operators threading quadcopters through bombed-out alleyways — all of this is the bill Lebanon pays for a geopolitical argument it did not author and cannot conclude. Disarming Hezbollah is not a policy question. It is a civilisational reckoning — with Iran’s ambitions, Israel’s appetite for security-through-dominance, America’s capacity to translate pressure into outcomes, and Lebanon’s chronic inability to imagine itself as a sovereign state rather than a corridor for other people’s wars. Netanyahu’s pipe dream of a disarmed Hezbollah will remain precisely that — a dream — as long as Iranian strategic interests, Lebanese political paralysis, and fiber-optic quadcopters make the alternative unenforceable. The Party has used every ceasefire to rearm, every setback to innovate, and every ultimatum to consolidate its base. The question no one in the triumvirate of Washington, Jerusalem, and Beirut dares answer aloud: if sixteen years of UN resolutions, three major wars, and the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader have not disarmed the Party — what, exactly, will? • The writer is a news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor.