Politics & Diplomacy
Haaretz warns Israeli strikes push the Lebanon talks into a minefield
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Israel's strike near the southern Lebanese town of Mansouri, and its renewed order for residents to leave their homes, cut short the Rome talks with Lebanon and exposed how fragile the negotiations have become, the Middle East analyst Zvi Bar'el wrote Thursday in Haaretz.
Lebanon's government turned to American liaison officers demanding a halt to the attacks and cancellation of the evacuation order, he reported, while the talks remain hostage to Hezbollah's conduct on the ground and Iran's appetite for disruption.
The central dispute is the verification mechanism for June's framework agreement: Israel demands a seat inside it, Lebanon calls that a breach of sovereignty, and the compromise under discussion is a third party — a multinational force, UN inspectors, or Italian and French contingents — with Washington as supreme referee without troops on the ground.
Until that mechanism exists, Bar'el wrote, Israel refuses to widen the test zones it is meant to hand to the Lebanese army, and the entire framework risks collapse while Beirut fights on two fronts, against Hezbollah's sabotage and against Israel's demand for freedom of action even in areas it agreed to leave.
He noted some 800,000 displaced Lebanese have returned home while 300,000 remain without shelter, and closed with a warning: while Lebanon, Syria and Turkey weave a new political fabric around reconstruction, Israel concentrates on holding more villages in the south and may find itself outside the emerging order.
