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Source: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rkhyrgvqmg
Israel: Lebanese Army Sidelining Shiite Troops Who Won't Confront Hizbullah
(Ynet News) Itamar Eichner - Israel's ambassador to U.S. Yechiel Leiter said Thursday that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) is sidelining Shiite troops and officers who are unwilling to confront Hizbullah, reflecting a growing readiness in Beirut to act under the new framework agreement with Israel. Leiter said the LAF are more capable of confronting Hizbullah than they sometimes appear. "There has to first be will. There are elements within the LAF that didn't have the will to confront Hizbullah, because you have about 25% to 30% of the army which is Shia, and of the Shia Muslims you have anywhere between 30% and 50% support for Hizbullah." "The solidification of the government now has moved those elements within the army to the side. So there's a greater will because of the degrading of Iran, and the degrading of Hizbullah and the fall of Assad. They were always intimidated by Assad, which was a long arm of Iran sitting on their border. Now, Assad has been toppled, thanks in no small measure to Israel. By degrading Hizbullah, Assad didn't have a proxy to defend him either." "We came to our senior partner here in the United States and we said...you're already funding, to a large extent, the Lebanese Armed Forces. If you fund them a little bit more, but now make it progress-based, performance-based, not timelines; that's another piece of magic we put into this agreement. The focus of this agreement is the dismantlement of Hizbullah. It's not the withdrawal of Israel....Hizbullah is dismantled, Israel withdraws, and we have full peace." Leiter said Israel would not leave its current security zone until all of southern Lebanon south of the Litani River is under Lebanese army control. Moreover, Hizbullah's tunnel infrastructure in southern Lebanon must also be destroyed. "These are the tunnels that Hizbullah built with tens of millions of dollars that are aimed to do two things: Number one, provide them cover so that they can come out of the tunnels, shoot missiles into our northern towns, and run back in and we can't get them. The other one is to use these tunnels to penetrate Israel by foot like the Nukhba did in Gaza and actually attack our citizens."