2024-01-11T15:37:55+00:00
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/ The US President’s special envoy for global energy security, Amos Hockstein, stressed on Thursday the importance of calming the situation in southern Lebanon, unless a final solution agreement can be reached at the present time, calling for working on a temporary compromise to prevent matters from developing for the worse. .
This came during Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s reception with Hochstein this afternoon at the Government Palace in the capital, Beirut, and held a special meeting with him, followed by an expanded meeting in which the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants, Abdullah Bou Habib, the Charge d’Affaires of the US Embassy in Lebanon, Amanda Bales, and the accompanying American delegation participated.
Mikati said that the priority must be to cease fire in Gaza and stop Israeli operations in Lebanon, and since the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel on October 7, the Lebanese-Israeli border has witnessed a daily exchange of bombing between Hezbollah and the Israeli army.
The party announces that it is targeting Israeli military sites and points in support of Gaza, while the Israeli army responds with air and artillery bombardment, which it says targets the party’s “infrastructure” and the movements of fighters near the border.
Since the start of the escalation on both sides of the border, 188 people have been killed in Lebanon, including 141 party members and more than twenty civilians, including three journalists, according to a tally compiled by Agence France-Presse. On the other hand, the Israeli army, for its part, counted the killing of 14 people, including nine soldiers.
The killing of the deputy head of the Hamas political bureau, Saleh Al-Arouri, along with six of his companions, in an air strike targeting them in the southern suburb of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, on the second of this month, and then the killing of the party’s prominent military leader, Wissam Al-Tawil, on Monday, raised fears of an expansion of the scope of escalation.