Julian Borger & Patrick Wintour
The Guardian / September 27, 2024
Israeli airstrikes killed 92 people in Lebanon on Thursday; John Kirby says White House had believed Israel was ‘on board’ with ceasefire proposal.
Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel “will not stop” its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon despite calls from the US, France and other allies for an immediate three-week ceasefire aimed at containing the spread of a conflict that is beginning to engulf Lebanon.
The calls for an immediate ceasefire were backed on Thursday night by Lebanon’s minister for foreign affairs, Abdallah Bouhabib, who told the UN general assembly his country was enduring a crisis that “threatens its very existence”.
Bouhabib welcomed the US/French initiative, saying “Diplomacy is not always easy, but diplomacy is the only way to save innocent lives … Lebanon views the US-French initiative as an opportunity to generate momentum, to take steps towards ending this crisis.”
Bouhabib said peace was incumbent on Israel’s government, and that there can be no lasting peace without a “two-state solution”.
Israeli airstrikes continued in Lebanon on Thursday, killing 92 people including the head of Hezbollah’s drone force, Mohammad Surur, and at least 150 rockets were fired from Lebanon at northern Israel, according to the Israeli military.
The Israeli prime minister told reporters that his government’s policy was clear as he landed in New York, where he is due to address the UN general assembly on Friday.
“We are continuing to strike Hezbollah with full force, and we will not stop until we reach all our goals – chief among them the return of the residents of the north securely to their homes,” Netanyahu said.
His office had earlier distanced the Israeli government from the ceasefire plan, which it described as “an American-French proposal that the prime minister has not even responded to”.
The prime minister’s office said Netanyahu had “directed the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to continue fighting with full force, according to the plan that was presented to him. The fighting in Gaza will also continue until all the objectives of the war have been achieved.”
Those war goals include the safe return home of more than 60,000 Israelis forced to abandon their homes in northern Israel by Hezbollah bombing, which began on 8 October last year, the day after the start of the Gaza war.
US officials hope to persuade Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire proposal by the time he addresses the UN general assembly on Friday. They argue that a pause in the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah could also provide a breathing space in which to revive long-stalled negotiations with Israel and Hamas over the release of Israeli hostages in return for a truce in Gaza.
On Thursday, the White House said the Biden administration had believed that Israel was “on board” with the proposal.
John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesperson, said “we had every reason to believe that in the drafting of it and in the delivery of it, that the Israelis were fully informed and fully aware of every word in it. We wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t believe that it would be received with the seriousness with which it was composed.”
Kirby said it was unclear why Netanyahu appeared to dismiss the idea.
The US, France and some of their allies had on Wednesday called for an urgent cessation of hostilities, which they said presented “an unacceptable risk of a broader regional escalation”.
“We call for an immediate 21-day ceasefire across the Lebanon-Israel border to provide space for diplomacy,” a joint statement said. “We call on all parties, including the governments of Israel and Lebanon, to endorse the temporary ceasefire immediately.”
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said on Thursday that it would be “a mistake” for Netanyahu to refuse a ceasefire in Lebanon, which he warned could not become “another Gaza”.
Hezbollah has yet to respond to the call for a truce, although it and its backer, Iran, have previously insisted it would halt its strikes only if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, while the Israeli response has been overwhelmingly negative. After Netanyahu’s remarks, the defence minister said he had met the country’s top generals to discuss further military operations on the Israel’s northern front.
“We are continuing our sequence of operations – eliminating Hezbollah terrorists, dismantling Hezbollah’s offensive infrastructure and destroying rockets and missiles,” Yoav Gallant said.
“We have additional missions to complete in order to ensure the safe return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes. We will continue throwing Hezbollah off balance and deepening their loss.”
US officials have urged Israel to accept a ceasefire on the grounds that it could lead to a negotiated withdrawal of Hezbollah forces from the border area, from where they have been firing rockets and missiles at Israel. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has argued that diplomacy is the best way to create conditions to allow residents to return to their homes.
“Getting into a full-scale war is not the way to achieve that objective,” he told the US TV channel MSNBC. “There’s no way in that situation that people are going to be able to go back.”
But western diplomats gathered in New York for the UN general assembly expressed doubt that Netanyahu would agree to such a deal, despite his long history of juggling contrary demands from the US and the extreme right in his cabinet.
Meanwhile, efforts by the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and foreign secretary, David Lammy, to secure a New York meeting with either Netanyahu or his strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, did not bear fruit, possibly reflecting Israel’s unhappiness over the UK’s limited ban on arms exports.
The families of the Gaza hostages have also said they are pushing for any Lebanon ceasefire deal to include clauses on Gaza, focused on securing the release of the roughly 70 hostages thought to still be alive and the bodies of about 30 others.
An Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Thursday hit a school sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinians, killing at least 11 people and wounding 22, including women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The Israeli military confirmed it had struck the school, in the Jabalia refugee camp, but claimed the attack had been aimed at Hamas militants hiding there.
Hezbollah has said that it will continue fighting Israel as long as the IDF keeps up its military operations in Gaza, but the ranks of the Iran-backed Shia militia have been shattered over the past nine days by a coordinated attack using booby-trapped communications devices, followed by a withering aerial bombing campaign.
Lebanon’s health ministry said 19 Syrian refugees and a Lebanese citizen had been killed in one strike in north-east Lebanon on Thursday, bringing the death toll from several days of Israeli bombardment to about 700 people, about a quarter of whom the ministry said were women or children.
The UK was one of the allies that backed the US-French call for a 21-day ceasefire. “I urge President Netanyahu and the Lebanese Hezbollah leaders to pay heed to the combined voices at the United Nations to do just that,” the British defence secretary said after a meeting with his US and Australian counterparts in London. John Healey said 700 British troops had been sent to Cyprus to help a potential emergency evacuation of civilians from Lebanon should a full-scale war break out.
The domestic political repercussions of a ceasefire for Netanyahu were made clear when his national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told the prime minister that his party, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), would not vote with the coalition if the government agreed a ceasefire with Hezbollah.
“We will not abandon the residents of the north. Every day that this ceasefire is in effect and Israel does not fight in the north, Otzma Yehudit is not committed to the coalition,” Ben-Gvir said at a party meeting.
The leader of the opposition Democrats party, Yair Golan, also argued against committing to a three-week ceasefire, saying Israel should initially agree to a truce of a few days, and see how well it was enforced.
Israel has said it is prepared to launch a ground incursion into Lebanon alongside its aerial bombing, and on Thursday the IDF announced its troops had completed training drills near the northern border, simulating combat in Lebanon.
The IDF called up two reserve brigades at short notice on Wednesday to deploy to the northern border, where they will join Israel’s 98th Paratrooper Division, which was put under the control of the northern command last week. However, Haaretz described this as “a relatively limited reserve call-up”. The Israeli newspaper said that after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, in the run-up to the ground invasion of Gaza, “hundreds of thousands of reservists were called up, as were several divisions”.
Haaretz’s military correspondent, Amos Harel, argued that an Israeli invasion of Lebanon “is still not a done deal”.
Julian Borger is The Guardian’s world affairs editor based in London
Patrick Wintour is diplomatic editor for The Guardian
