(Beirut) The leader of the Christian Lebanese Forces (LF) party on Sunday accused the pro-Iranian Hezbollah of dragging the country into a war against Israel to support the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza without referring to the Lebanese.
In a scathing speech against the Lebanese Islamist party, Samir Geagea, head of the main Christian parliamentary bloc, accused Hezbollah of “confiscating the decision of the Lebanese people regarding war and peace, as if there were no state.” […] “.
Since the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas in October, Hezbollah has been exchanging daily cross-border fire with Israel in support of its Palestinian ally, a war that the LF and other Lebanese parties oppose.
“It is a war that the Lebanese reject, but which was imposed on them,” Samir Geagea said in a speech to his supporters north of Beirut.
This is a war that the Lebanese do not want and over which the government had no say. This war does not serve Lebanon, it has brought nothing to Gaza, nor alleviated its suffering one iota.
Samir Geagea, head of the main Christian parliamentary bloc
Created in 1982, in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and financed by Iran, Hezbollah is the only Lebanese faction to have kept its weapons after the civil war (1975-1990). Its arsenal, significantly larger than that of the Lebanese army, is presented by its supporters as a bulwark against Israel. But its detractors believe that the party forms a “state within a state”.
“This war, which Hezbollah has engaged in, must stop before it becomes a big war that will leave no one unharmed,” Geagea said as his supporters chanted slogans hostile to the Shiite group.
He called on the Lebanese government “to call on Hezbollah to stop this absurd war which has neither justification nor perspective.”
“One dead and eleven injured”
According to the UN, more than 110,000 people have been displaced in southern Lebanon, which borders northern Israel, by cross-border firefights that have left 607 dead, mostly Hezbollah fighters, but also 132 civilians, according to an AFP count.
On Sunday evening, the Lebanese Ministry of Health reported one dead and eleven injured, including “seven girls aged 10 to 16”, in Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah, which announced the death of one of its fighters, claimed responsibility for about ten strikes on Sunday against military positions in northern Israel, including one against an Israeli army patrol in Kfar Youval. A soldier was injured and a civilian “seriously injured,” the Israeli army said.
The Israeli army added that its aircraft had targeted Hezbollah launch pads and the Lebanese formation’s military infrastructure in several localities in southern Lebanon.
Geagea’s speech comes a week after the biggest outbreak of violence between Israel and Hezbollah since October, with the Israeli military announcing it had foiled a major Hezbollah attack on Israeli territory.
Hezbollah, for its part, had assured that it had launched hundreds of drones and rockets on Israel to avenge the death of one of its military leaders, killed in an Israeli strike near Beirut at the end of July.
The intensity of the violence has since subsided, with both sides showing restraint to avoid a regional flare-up, analysts say.