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U.S. Aims to Revive UN Plan for Lebanon War

(New York Times) Michael Crowley - At the heart of U.S. diplomatic efforts to halt Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon is a UN resolution adopted in 2006 that was intended to demilitarize the area and protect Israel from cross-border attacks by Hizbullah. "The outcome that we want to see is the full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday. Miller said that would mean the withdrawal of Hizbullah forces from the Israel-Lebanon border, and the deployment of UN and Lebanese army forces into the buffer zone in southern Lebanon that the resolution had sought to create. On Thursday, Israeli government spokesman David Mencer said, "Key to that resolution was the UN deploying a force on our northern border inside southern Lebanon. It's called UNIFIL, and its purpose was to ensure that Hizbullah did not exist between the gap between the Litani River and our northern border. They've never fulfilled that task. UNIFIL has been an abject failure, as evidenced by the more than 10,000 rockets which this country has received from Hizbullah." Israeli officials have also noted that Lebanon's army had no appetite for clashing with Hizbullah. On Wednesday, Miller said the U.S. sees Israel as "having the right to conduct these limited incursions" to weaken Hizbullah and force it to withdraw behind the Litani River. Mencer said, "We have no territorial aims or ambitions in Lebanon. In the absence of any diplomatic resolution to stop that rocket fire, we will do the job of pushing Hizbullah back behind the Litani River for the simple objective of getting our people back home."
2024-10-13 00:00:00
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