Earlier this month, hundreds of Lebanese Palestinians gathered in front of Beirut’s Canadian embassy to ask for asylum in Canada or the EU. The basis of their claims? Although born in Lebanon, they cannot become Lebanese citizens, and thus have limited job opportunities and are denied many public services. No human-rights organizations have taken up their cause, notes Evelyn Gordon, nor are Western countries accepting their claims for asylum; yet, as a matter of UN policy, and unlike in the case of refugees from every other conflict, neither are Palestinian refugees given any help to resettle in the countries where they live.

[N]o Western country actually makes the argument that Palestinians aren’t real refugees; they all accept [that, unlike for other refugees], refugeehood [is] an inherited status bequeathed to every new generation of Palestinians in perpetuity, even if the “refugees” have citizenship in their country of residence, like most of those in Jordan, and even if they reside in what the United Nations itself has recognized as the Palestinian state, like all those living in the West Bank and Gaza. And so long as the West insists on defining Palestinians as refugees, it has an obligation to grant them the same rights as other refugees, including the right of resettlement.

So why has the West, with ardent support from “human-rights” organizations, continued to deny Palestinian refugees a basic refugee right that the refugees themselves want to exercise? The answer can be found in an astonishing conversation that the journalist Yoav Sorek recounted in Mosaic back in 2014. He and a colleague asked an official from ECHO, the EU’s humanitarian-aid agency, why it didn’t help Gazans who so desired to resettle in other countries. The official replied, “Because if they leave, it’d be like releasing Israel from its responsibility for the nakba”—the Palestinian term (meaning “catastrophe”) for the refugee crisis spawned by the Arabs’ war to prevent Israel’s establishment in 1948.

In other words, the West has kept Palestinian refugees in miserable limbo for 70 years and deprived them of their basic right to resettlement in order to hold a gun to Israel’s head: either make enough political concessions to the Palestinians and/or Arab states that they’ll deign to grant citizenship to their own brethren, or risk being flooded by millions of “refugees” and their descendants, who will destroy the Jewish state demographically. Just like the Palestinian Authority, the West has been treating these Palestinians as political game pieces rather than human beings with needs, wants, and rights of their own. And as the protests in Lebanon show, Palestinians are increasingly fed up with this role.

After 70 years, it’s long past time to stop treating millions of Palestinians as nothing but perpetual pawns in a war to destroy Israel.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.