U.S. envoy visits Lebanon and warns that regional tensions could easily slip 'out of control'

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U.S. envoy visits Lebanon and warns that regional tensions could easily slip 'out of control'

2024-08-14 22:44 Last Updated At：22:52

BEIRUT (AP) — A senior adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden said Wednesday it's critical to take advantage of “this window for diplomatic action” to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and ongoing hostilities along the Lebanon-Israel border, fearing that escalations could spiral "out of control.”

Amos Hochstein, tasked with shuttle diplomacy between Lebanon and Israel, spoke to journalists after meeting Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, as the region anxiously anticipates retaliatory attacks from Iran and the allied Lebanese Hezbollah group on Israel. Hochstein met with Israeli officials Tuesday.

Cease-fire talks between Hamas and Israel are expected to resume in Qatar on Thursday with Qatari, Egyptian, and U.S. mediators.

Hezbollah and Israel have traded strikes since Oct. 8, a day after Palestinian Hamas militants' surprise attack into southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.

“The more time goes by of escalated tensions, the more time goes by of daily conflict, the more the odds and the chances go up for accidents, for mistakes, for inadvertent targets to be hit that could easily cause escalation that goes out of control,” Hochstein said.

An Israeli strike last month in southern Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top commander, whom Israel accused of leading a rocket attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that killed 12 youths. Hours later, an explosion widely blamed on Israel killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. Both Tehran and Hezbollah vowed to retaliate.

Hochstein said he and speaker Berri agreed there were “no more valid excuses from any party for any further delay” on a cease-fire based on a framework Biden presented months ago.

“The deal would also help enable a diplomatic resolution here in Lebanon,” the U.S. envoy added.

A diplomatic official told The Associated Press that Hochstein during his meetings discussed plans for a long-term diplomatic solution for Lebanon and Israel that the U.S. and France have preparing after a cease-fire in Gaza is achieved. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Hochstein also met with Lebanon's caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Army chief Gen. Joseph Aoun Hochstein.

Fighting continued as the meetings took place. Lebanon’s Health Ministry and state media said an Israeli airstrike targeting a motorcycle in the southern Lebanese village of Abbasiyeh wounded 17 people. Hezbollah later said its fighters fired rockets toward the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona in retaliation. There were no immediate reports of injuries in Israel.

The “broad consensus” is that a cease-fire in Gaza would help bring calm to hostilities in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region, said Maha Yahya, the director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center. She believes that Hezbollah and Iran did not expect the war in Gaza to continue for so long.

“Nobody counted on the fact that this would last 10 months and still going, with an increasing humanitarian toll,” she told the AP. “Put aside the rhetoric and public anger, which is very much there and not for show, they have been open to diplomatic back-channel discussion to try to resolve this.”

Yahya said Iran and Hezbollah not attacking over the past two weeks slightly dims the element of surprise, while the U.S. military increases its naval reinforcements in the area and diplomatic discussion takes place.

If war breaks out between Hezbollah and Israel, it would be the first since a six-week war in the summer of 2006 ended in a draw. Hezbollah's military capabilities have developed significantly since then.

War would further devastate Lebanon, which already has a deeply divided government and a battered economy. Mikati's caretaker government has met to discuss an emergency response plan should war break out.

About 100,000 Lebanese people have been displaced from the country's south, a similar number to Israelis who fled the north there. Health Minister Firas Abiad has told the AP that donors need to step up their support given that Lebanon also hosts over 1 million Syrian refugees.

Environment Minister Nasser Yassin, who leads the emergency response plan, said 200 schools were being prepared as makeshift shelters.

“We estimate we might have one million displaced from Lebanese towns and cities in case they are under attack,” Yassin told the AP.

Associated Press video journalist Fadi Tawil and writer Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.

Rare Israeli airstrike in Beirut kills Hezbollah commander and more than a dozen others

2024-09-21 08:29 Last Updated At：08:30

BEIRUT (AP) — Israel launched a rare airstrike that killed a senior Hezbollah military official in a densely populated southern Beirut neighborhood on Friday. It was the deadliest such strike on Lebanon’s capital in decades, with Lebanese authorities reporting at least 14 people killed and dozens more wounded in the attack.

The Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the strike on Beirut's southern Dahiya district killed Ibrahim Akil, a commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, as well as 10 other Hezbollah operatives.

“We will continue pursuing our enemies in order to defend our citizens, even in Dahiya, in Beirut,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, describing the Israeli strike that targeted Akil as part of “a new phase of war.”

Several hours later, Hezbollah confirmed Akil's death. In a statement, the Lebanese militant group described Akil as “a great jihadist leader” and said he had “joined the procession of his brothers, the great martyr leaders, after a blessed life full of jihad, work, wounds, sacrifices, dangers, challenges, achievements, and victories.”

Akil served on Hezbollah’s highest military body, the Jihad Council. He was sanctioned by the United States for his alleged involvement in the 1983 bombing that killed more than 300 people at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks.

Last year, the U.S. State Department posted a $7 million reward for information leading to his identification, location, arrest or conviction, citing his role in the embassy bombing and in the taking of American and German hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s.

The strike came as a new cycle of escalation between the enemies raised fears of a full-out war erupting in the Middle East.

Hours before the Israeli strike, Hezbollah pounded northern Israel with 140 rockets as the region awaited the revenge promised by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah over this week’s mass explosions of pagers belonging to members of the Shiite militant group.

The Israeli military did not provide the identities of the other Hezbollah commanders allegedly killed in its strike on the crowded neighborhood just kilometers from downtown Beirut.

Lebanon's Health Ministry said at least 14 people were killed and 66 others were wounded in the attack, which leveled the apartment building where the Israeli army claimed Akil had been meeting with other militants in the basement. Nine of the wounded were in serious condition, the ministry added.

Local networks in Lebanon broadcast footage showing first responders sifting through the rubble of a collapsed high-rise in the Jamous area in the heart of Dahiya, where Hezbollah conducts many of its political and security operations.

The rescue operation continued into the late hours of Friday, hours after the attack, as first responders wrestled to remove the rubble to reach the basement of the building where apparently many of the bodies were located.

Friday's airstrike — the deadliest such attack on a neighborhood of Beirut since Israel and Hezbollah fought a bloody, monthlong war in 2006 — hit during rush hour, as people were leaving work and children heading home from school.

At Beirut's St. Therese Hospital near the scene of the airstrike, crowds flocked to donate blood for those wounded in the attack.

“We are all together in this situation, so it’s my obligation,” said Hussein Harake, who lined up to donate blood.

From Israel, Gallant said he briefed senior military officials on the strike and vowed Israel would press on against Hezbollah "until we achieve our goal, ensuring the safe return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes.”

The strike came after Hezbollah launched one of its most intense bombardments of northern Israel in nearly a year of fighting, largely targeting Israeli military sites. Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted most of the Katyusha rockets. The few that got through sparked small fires but caused little damage and no Israeli casualties.

Hezbollah described its latest wave of rocket salvos as a response to past Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon — not as revenge for the mass explosions of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies on Tuesday and Wednesday that killed at least 37 people - including two children - and wounded 2,900 others in attacks widely attributed to Israel.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in this week's sophisticated attacks, which signaled a major escalation in the past 11 months of simmering conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire regularly since Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel ignited the Israeli military’s devastating offensive in Gaza. But previous cross-border attacks have largely struck areas in northern Israel that had been evacuated and less-populated parts of southern Lebanon.

The last time Israel hit Beirut was in a July airstrike that killed senior Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukur.

“The attack in Lebanon is to protect Israel,” Hagari said at a news conference following Friday's strike, describing both Shukr and Akil as the two military officials closest to Hezbollah leader Nasrallah.

Hagari also accused Akil of plotting a series of attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians dating back decades, including a never-realized plan to invade northern Israel in a similar way to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks.

After Friday's Israeli airstrike, Hezbollah announced attacks on northern Israel, two of which it said targeted an intelligence base from where it claimed Israel directed assassinations.

Israel remains on edge, with Nasrallah vowing Thursday to keep up strikes on Israel despite the humiliating “blow” he said Hezbollah suffered in the sabotage of its communication devices.

“We are in a tense period,” Hagari told reporters Friday. “We are prepared on high alert both offensively and defensively.”

In recent days, Israel has sent a powerful fighting force to the northern border, designated as an official war goal the return of tens of thousands of displaced residents to their homes in northern Israel and ordered citizens near Israel's border with Lebanon to stay close to bomb shelters. Hezbollah has maintained that it will only halt its fire when there is a cease-fire in Gaza.

Hamas, which continues to fight Israel in Gaza, condemned the Israeli strike targeting Akil as a “new crime” and “violation of Lebanese sovereignty.”

Even as the world's attention turns to the surge in Israel-Hezbollah tensions, Palestinian casualties in the besieged Gaza Strip continued to mount.

Palestinian health authorities early Friday reported that 15 people, including children, were killed in Israeli strikes that targeted a family home and a group of people on the street in Gaza City. Israel's campaign in Gaza has already killed at least 41,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza-based Health Ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between fighters and civilians.

In response to a request for comment on the latest Gaza strikes, the Israeli military insisted on Friday that it took “feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm” and accused Hamas of endangering civilians by operating in residential areas.

Israel's bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip — launched in response to Hamas killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostage in southern Israel on Oct. 7 — has wreaked vast destruction and displaced about 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million.

U.S. envoy visits Lebanon and warns that regional tensions could easily slip 'out of control'

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U.S. envoy visits Lebanon and warns that regional tensions could easily slip 'out of control'

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