Wyatt Reed· The Grayzone
As the deadly Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon continues, the fabulously wealthy banker-turned-“philanthropist” Antoun Sehnaoui has assembled a network of business and media operatives – and a fascist Christian goon squad – in Beirut and Washington dedicated to doing Israel’s dirty work.
In late July, Lebanese daily L’Orient Today exposed a wealthy banking heir named Antoun Sehnaoui as a driving force behind recent efforts to push the country to normalize relations with Israel as the apartheid state continues to occupy hundreds of square miles of southern Lebanon.
According to L’Orient, Sehnaoui is now actively seeking to manipulate Lebanese public opinion by lavishly funding local outlets including French-speaking Ici Beyrouth, English-language This Is Beirut, and Hunna Lubnan in Arabic. The report also built on local reports indicating the mysterious Sehnaoui has been wielding a fascist Christian militia to protect his banking empire and reputation.
After photos emerged in late July showing the financier cavorting with Israeli Prime Minister and international fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu at a private gathering in Washington DC, Sehnaoui has been publicly denounced by his uncle as a willing tool of Israel. While currently wanted for questioning by law enforcement in Lebanon, where publicly associating with Israelis is punishable by law, Sehnaoui has emerged as the man behind the curtain of the Lebanese government, injecting money and manpower into Beirut’s dangerous theater of normalization with Israel.
The banker and the convert
Long before his debut as a public proponent of Zionism, Antoun Sehnaoui was known across Lebanon for both his tremendous wealth and his tendency to serve as a kingmaker among the right-wing parties catering to Lebanon’s Christian minority. When Lebanon’s economy collapsed in 2019 after it became clear that the country’s banking class had effectively been running a state-sponsored pyramid scheme, Sehnaoui emerged as the face of an amoral Lebanese elite that managed to squirrel over $15 billion out of the country by using their connections with Lebanon’s central bank. While ordinary Lebanese residents were turned away from branches empty-handed, it emerged that billions were being funneled abroad via the Sehnaoui-owned Banque Richelieu France bank.
Since then, Sehnaoui has become romantically involved with US President Donald Trump’s former Special Representative for Lebanon, Morgan Ortagus. Ortagus, a formerly evangelical Christian convert to Judaism, is a fanatical Zionist who flaunts her ideology with her choices of jewelry. In late 2024, after being chosen to serve as Trump’s envoy to Lebanon by Steve Witkoff, Ortagus suggested to Israeli military leaders that they attack the 2024 funeral of assassinated Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah at the Sports City stadium in Beirut. Israel ultimately decided to stage an intimidating overflight of the funeral rather than launch an attack that would have killed thousands of civilians.
This April in Washington DC, in the midst of talks between Lebanon and Israel, Ortagus introduced Sehnaoui at the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Remembrance Day,” where Sehnaoui’s name was inscribed on the institution’s Donor Wall. In revealing comments, Ortagus praised Sehnaoui’s family as “committed Christian Zionists” who had “trained [him] to be a supporter of the state of Israel and the Jewish people.” She then volunteered her opinion that “what Antoun [Sehnaoui] is doing today is technically illegal in Lebanon.”
One of the Lebanese lawyers who sought an arrest warrant for Sehnaoui after his meeting in DC with Netanyahu this July stated that Sehnaoui is now credibly accused of conspiring to force the country to submit to Israel’s will “using the money that the Lebanese people have been robbed of from the banks.”
Dawn of a media empire
A review of the media ventures uncovered by L’Orient confirms that Sehnaoui’s empire of media outlets are little more than thinly-disguised pro-Israel propaganda mills. Many of This Is Beirut’s employees openly moonlight at Israeli influence vehicles like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy (WINEP).
Chief among them is columnist Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a former Shiite Muslim who first came to prominence as the face of Alhurra Iraq, a US-funded Arabic satellite network launched by Washington to promote Western-aligned narratives in Iraq following their catastrophic invasion. Abdul-Hussain also works as a so-called “research fellow” at FDD, which was revealed by a senior Israeli military-intelligence official in 2017 to be a co-conspirator in an Israeli government-led plot to spy on critics of the apartheid regime on American soil. In fact, FDD emerged out of an organization called EMET, which outlined a mission in its founding documents “to enhance Israel’s image in North America.”
The tradition of collaboration with Israeli assets appears to have carried over to This Is Beirut, which co-hosted a panel with MIND Israel – an Israeli “think tank” founded by former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin – at the 2026 Munich Security Conference. Israeli media lauded the military-industrial summit’s “First-ever Lebanese–Israeli civil panel” as a “meaningful step” towards normalization between the occupying power and its victims.
Founded in 2023 and re-launched in June 2026, This Is Beirut has exploited Sehnaoui’s generous funding to assemble a Zionist dream team of anti-resistance Lebanese Shiites, former US government officials, and devoted pro-Israel influencers and journalists. Its roster includes Seth J. Frantzman, an American-Israeli pundit who works for Israel’s right-wing Jerusalem Post while contributing to FDD. Sehnaoui’s English-language outlet also acquired its reporter Claudia Groeling from WINEP, a Zionist think tank founded by AIPAC members to provide an academic veneer to Israel’s aggressive US lobbying efforts.
This Is Beirut’s “About” page makes no mention of Sehnaoui’s role in funding the outlet. Instead, they describe themselves as “independent and nonpartisan, but not neutral: We do not tolerate violations of human rights, integrity, or the sovereignty of individuals and states.” Their refusal to tolerate violations of sovereignty of states, however, does not appear to apply to the Israeli regime – which violently occupies approximately 600 square kilometers of sovereign Lebanese territory as of publication.
When not regurgitating IDF press releases, This Is Beirut frequently gestures towards “peace” with Israel, a common rhetorical device used by advocates of closer ties between Beirut and Tel Aviv. “We aspire for Peace between Lebanon and Israel,” they write. Instead of covering the apartheid state’s occupation of southern Lebanon, “we aim at exposing terrorism” – focusing on what they call “Iran’s networks of terror in Lebanon and the region.”
The teaser for an August 4 op-ed by Abdul-Hussain was especially explicit in lobbying for collaboration with the Israeli military: “Whoever recognizes Hezbollah as the paramount threat should make common cause with whatever force can help dismantle it.”
If the group’s masthead or its self-description left its Zionist leanings in question, a glance at their list of interviewees clears up any remaining doubt. Recent subjects include Hagar Chemali, a co-founder of the “Lebanon Israel Peace Alliance” and a former US Treasury Department official known for ringing up her erstwhile colleagues to advocate for stronger sanctions on Hezbollah. Chemali has described herself as a “Lebanese Zionist,” and a “good friend” of Sehnaoui’s romantic partner, Ortagus.
The mission of bending Beirut to Tel Aviv’s will is shared by the director of This Is Beirut, another anti-resistance Shia named Hanin Ghadar who also moonlights as a “senior fellow” at WINEP. As This Is Beirut bragged on social media in February, “Hanin Ghaddar was the second to testify before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa during its discussion on Lebanon and the dismantling of Hezbollah.” During the course of her testimony, Ghadar repeatedly urged the US to target the resistance’s “political and economic institutions.”
De-banking Lebanon’s working class on Israel’s behalf
While Sehnaoui’s band of media mercenaries made the case for debanking Hezbollah in public, Marco Rubio’s State Department was quietly laying the groundwork for an aggressive push against any Lebanese bank that could plausibly be accused of links to Hezbollah.
At the top of the list was Al-Qard Al-Hassan, a financial institution known for providing interest-free “benevolent loans” to Lebanese of all backgrounds – whether they’re Muslim or not. Just a few months after Israel bombed the institution’s branches in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh in March, Washington announced a devastating new sanctions regime intended to destroy the usury-free financial entity once and for all.
A coordinated campaign was launched to eliminate Al-Qard Al-Hassan, beginning with the June 14 declaration by Lebanon’s Justice Ministry announcing an investigation into the charitable institution. Days later, an article appeared on the homepage of FDD, the Israel-aligned think tank in DC. “Squeezing Al-Qard Al-Hassan Could Weaken Hezbollah’s Chances of Survival,” FDD promised.
Two weeks later, the US Treasury’s “Terrorist Financing Targeting Center” appeared to take their cue from FDD, formally declaring over a dozen Lebanese individuals as terror financiers due to their alleged links to Al-Qard Al-Hassan.
Widely suspected by Lebanese citizens of ratting out Hezbollah-tied groups to the US government, Sehnaoui has made little secret of his intimate connections to the Treasury Department. After first coming into US banking regulators’ orbit when he invited former Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft to probe accounts of suspected Hezbollah members at his newly-acquired Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB) in 2010, Sehnaoui was praised by the Treasury’s then assistant secretary for terrorist financing, Daniel Glaser, as a “responsible owner.”
Sehnaoui would reap the benefits of these relationships for years to come, with Ashcroft offering to represent another of Sehnaoui’s banks, Société Générale de Banque au Liban (SGBL), in US court on numerous occasions. In the years that followed, Daniel Glaser walked through the revolving door of corruption and strode into a plush gig as a “senior adviser” to the bank’s chairman – Antoun Sehnaoui.
Glaser would later deliver a 2016 lecture at WINEP headquarters in Washington in which he declared that “Treasury strives to isolate Hezbollah from the global financial system,” and celebrated that “the group’s access to the Lebanese financial system has been challenged in a way many never thought possible.”
Thus far, there’s no direct proof that Sehnaoui personally wielded his banking and media connections to cripple Al-Qard Al-Hassan’s finances and prevent working Lebanese from accessing zero-interest credit. But the circumstantial evidence traces back to his network of influence.
Family dinners, Israeli spies
For the Sehnaoui clan, cozying up to the US and Israel, and working behind the scenes to eliminate their rivals, is a family tradition. According to Antoun’s estranged uncle, Maurice Sehnaoui, the slick-talking banker’s obsession with Israel was inherited directly from his father, Nabil Sehnaoui.
“My brother has always been fascinated by Judaism,” Maurice Sehnaoui told Lebanese media, adding that Nabil went as far as insisting “we had Jewish ancestors” – a claim Maurice derided as “nonsense.”
When Mossad’s then deputy director, David Kimche, sought to make inroads among Lebanon’s Christian community, he turned to Antoun Sehnaoui’s father, Nabil – who was reportedly so eager to work with Israeli intelligence that he personally hosted the senior Mossad spy at his home for dinner in the late 1970s. When not tending to his family’s business empire, Nabil had emerged as a leading figure of a clandestine ultranationalist Christian militia called Al-Tanzim (“the organization”), which was largely composed of diehard right-wing military officers who viewed themselves as modern-day crusaders confronting the Islamic “menace” by any means necessary.
Kimche was far from the only influential Israeli to make house calls. According to former schoolmates, the young Sehnaoui was known to publicly boast about visits to his family’s upscale apartment by Israel’s then-Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon. And when his father, in turn, visited Sharon at his ranch in Sderot, Antoun frequently tagged along.
Nabil’s cheerleading for Israel was so intense that he criticized even the factions in Lebanon that Tel Aviv covertly backed during the country’s civil war for being insufficiently pro-Israel – most notably, the Lebanese Forces militia, which massacred thousands of civilians in in Beirut’s Sabra neighborhood and the nearby Shatila refugee camp under the direct watch of Sharon’s Israeli forces in just three days in 1982.
Led by a young warlord named Bachir Gemayel, whose sadism was matched only by his charisma, the Lebanese Forces represented the military wing of the phalangist Kataeb party established by Gemayel’s father, Pierre. The group mimicked Spanish and Italian fascist formations when Pierre Gemayel founded it during the 1930s. Long before its infamous slaughter of Muslims in Beirut, it had gained a reputation for grotesque displays of violence. Bachir Gemayel was personally implicated in many shocking incidents, including the 1975 Beirut’s Black Saturday massacre, in which Lebanese Forces hunted down hundreds of Muslim and Druze civilians and killed them in retaliation for the slaying of four young Christian men around a dozen miles away.
Documents disclosed by Israel’s High Court of Justice in 2022 revealed that Gemayel operated with the explicit blessing of the Israeli Mossad, which agreed to arm his men during a 1976 meeting at his parents’ home. Gemayel, who was assassinated shortly after his election as President of Lebanon in 1982, initially demurred when it came to the question of normalizing ties with Israel, however.
For Antoun Sehnaoui’s father, that was tantamount to treason.
“Nabil was one of Bachir Gemayel’s fiercest critics,” a source close to the Sehnaoui family told L’Orient, because “he believed Gemayel had betrayed the Israelis by failing to sign a peace agreement immediately after his election in 1982.” Relations between the two men grew increasingly bitter after Gemayel effectively seized Al-Tanzim by force, drawing it under the banner of a single national Christian militia at gunpoint in 1980.
Today, the Sehnaoui family’s fascist militia lives on in the form of the Soldiers of God, a small but especially ruthless self-styled Christian morality police which patrols Beirut’s Achrafiyeh district dressed in all black, hunting down gays.
When the elite-induced economic crash of 2019 left outraged bank patrons demanding their deposits back at gunpoint, the Soldiers of God were dispatched to branches of Sehnaoui’s SGBL banks to protect them. Several members reportedly provide security at the Beirut office of his French-language Ici Beyrouth outlet.
Sehnaoui’s Soldiers of God stormed back onto the scene in 2024 when they killed a member of the Lebanese Forces, a rival right-wing Christian militia, during a street brawl in Achrafieh.
Antoun Sehnaoui’s ultra-rightist, uber-Zionist politics represent the influence of his father, Nabil. “My brother became very close to the Israelis after the 1982 invasion, and I could never accept that,” Maurice Sehnaoui told Lebanese media, referring to Nabil. “His son followed in his footsteps.”
A separate source explained to L’Orient Today that Antoun is also “fascinated by Judaism, speaks some Hebrew, and sees in Israel what Lebanon should have become.”
That fascination – or fetishization – was shared by the US official who would become Sehnaoui’s paramour, and closest collaborator in Trump’s Washington.
Holocaust honeymoon
When a receipt dated December 13, 2025 first surfaced showing Antoun Sehnaoui had spent nearly $60,000 buying luxury jewelry for Morgan Ortagus, Trump’s former Deputy Special Presidential Envoy for Middle East Peace under Steve Witkoff, the relationship began to raise eyebrows – both because it raised serious conflict of interest concerns and because it seemed obvious Ortagus had been pursuing Sehnaoui’s affection while still married to another man.
But it was clear the pair had plenty in common, as both seemed deeply consumed by a shared infatuation with Israel. Sehnaoui, who had long been forced to contain his more exuberant Zionist tendencies among much of Lebanese high society, was in good company with Ortagus, who constantly flaunts a Star of David necklace with the sort of zeal that only a convert can muster.
As British celebrity news mag OK! explained, “those close to the couple say the relationship is rooted in a shared conviction that has defined both of their careers: that peace in the region is definitely achievable, especially for Lebanon and Israel.” It’s been suggested the pair had been seeing each other since mid-2025, when Sehnaoui held a dinner in her honor at his Beirut restaurant, La Centrale, where guests included now-dead, pro-war US Senator Lindsey Graham.
The relationship was not made public until the DC-based US Holocaust Museum held an event in April 2026 honoring Sehnaoui’s hefty donation to the institution. There, standing by his side and delivering remarks on his behalf, was his beaming girlfriend Morgan Ortagus, who heaped praise on her paramour for funding a US-Israeli opera project that, she bragged, was “technically illegal in Lebanon.”
Video from the event published by Hagar Chemali – the “good friend” of Ortagus – shows Ortagus kvelling that Sehnaoui came from a long line of “committed Lebanese Christian Zionists,” and that “his father and his mother, May and Nabil Sehnaoui, trained him to be a supporter of the State of Israel.”
The event therefore represented not only Sehnaoui’s romantic coming out as the beau of Ortagus, but also his coming out as a Zionist. At This Is Beirut, Sehnaoui’s employees boasted that the ceremony marked “the first time a Lebanese donor’s name has been inscribed on the donor wall at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.”
It wasn’t long before Antoun Sehnaoui became known around DC as “the Lebanese AIPAC guy,” according to L’Orient. Months later, he capped off this performance by hosting a memorial dinner at Washington’s Four Seasons hotel in honor of Lindsay Graham, where photos showed the Lebanese banker seated alongside Israel’s globally reviled prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Accompanying the men were their romantic partners and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose senate office is effectively run by an Israeli operative.
The photo immediately prompted shock and bewilderment in much of Lebanon. Over a dozen lawyers responded with a demand that the government seek Sehnaoui’s arrest. A Lebanese judge quickly acquiesced, ordering authorities to seize Sehnaoui and question him for 30 days should he appear in the country. But instead of denying his involvement or justifying himself, Sehnaoui has seemingly basked in the attention. At This Is Beirut, his team publicized the event, claiming it had succeeded in “bringing together a distinguished group of American, Israeli, and international political figures.”
With no apparent plans to return to Beirut, it’s unlikely that Sehnaoui will face justice anytime soon. But thanks to his vast banking and media empire, the “trained” Zionist doesn’t need to set foot in the country to continue pushing it down the perilous path of normalization with its occupier, and closer to the precipice of civil war.
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