Lebanese president steps up calls for Hezbollah to disarm
The comments reflect mounting pressure over the issue of Hezbollah's arms, which has loomed over Lebanon since the Iran-aligned group was pummeled in a war with Israel last year. Washington wants Hezbollah disarmed - a demand echoed by the Beirut government as it aims to establish a monopoly on weapons.
Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said in a televised speech on Wednesday that calls for its disarmament served only Israel.
In a speech to army officers, Aoun said the government would next week discuss Lebanon's amendments to a U.S. roadmap to disarm Hezbollah, deemed a terrorist group by Washington.
Lebanon's counter proposal demands an immediate halt to Israel's attacks, its withdrawal from positions held in the south, the establishment of state control over all Lebanon and the disarmament of armed groups including Hezbollah, he said.
Aoun urged all parties "to seize this historic opportunity ... and push for the exclusivity of weapons in the hands of the army and security forces". He said the government would set a timeframe to implement the steps.
Shi'ite Muslim Hezbollah, backed by Tehran, was the only Lebanese group allowed to keep its weapons at the end of the 1975-90 civil war on the grounds it needed them to fight Israeli troops who occupied the south but withdrew in 2000.
Hezbollah's arsenal has long divided Lebanese, with critics saying it has undermined the state and dragged Lebanon into conflicts.
Washington has been pushing Lebanon to commit to disarming Hezbollah before talks can resume on halting Israeli military operations, Reuters reported earlier this week. Hezbollah has so far refused, though the group has been considering scaling back its arsenal.
Addressing Hezbollah and its followers but without naming them, Aoun called on those who "have faced the aggression" to "rely solely on the Lebanese state".
"You are too honorable to risk the state-building project, and too noble to provide pretexts for an aggression that wants to continue the war against us," he said.
Israel killed many Hezbollah commanders and thousands of its fighters last year, while also destroying much of its arsenal.
The U.S. proposal delivered in June would require Hezbollah to disarm within four months in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli troops occupying several posts in south Lebanon, and a halt to Israeli air strikes.
Hezbollah had already relinquished a number of weapons depots in southern Lebanon to the Lebanese army in line with a U.S.-brokered truce designed to end last year's war.
Aoun said the proposals to be discussed next week include seeking $1 billion annually for 10 years to support the army and the security forces and plans for an international conference to later in the year to support reconstruction efforts.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South Wales Guardian
15 minutes ago
- South Wales Guardian
Hundreds of children from Gaza to be brought to UK for medical treatment
The plans are reportedly set to be announced within weeks. A parent or guardian will accompany each child, as well as siblings if necessary, and the Home Office will carry out biometric and security checks before travel, the Sunday Times reported. This will happen 'in parallel' with an initiative by Project Pure Hope, a group set up to bring sick and injured Gazan children to the UK privately for treatment. More than 50,000 children are estimated to have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023, according to Unicef. Sir Keir Starmer said last week that the UK was 'urgently accelerating' efforts to bring children over for treatment. A Government spokesperson said: 'We are taking forward plans to evacuate more children from Gaza who require urgent medical care, including bringing them to the UK for specialist treatment where that is the best option for their care. 'We are working at pace to do so as quickly as possible, with further details to be set out in due course.' The UK and Jordan have been working together to air drop aid amid warnings of widespread malnourishment in Gaza. It comes as the UK seeks to put pressure on Israel to change course with a plan to recognise a Palestinian state in September ahead of the UN General Assembly. Sir Keir has said the UK would only refrain from recognising Palestine if Israel allows more aid into Gaza, stops annexing land in the West Bank, agrees to a ceasefire and signs up to a long-term peace process over the next two months. Concerns have been raised this could see a Palestinian state recognised by the UK without Hamas releasing the remaining Israeli hostages. British families of hostages say the Government has made clear to them that releases would 'play no part' in the UK's plans to recognise Palestine and that it could see those still held 'rot in Hamas dungeons'. Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the UK's demands for Hamas to release all hostages and play no role in the future of Gaza are 'absolute and unconditional'. He told The Sunday Times: 'The UK position on recognition is part of (a) co-ordinated international effort. It must begin with an immediate ceasefire that frees the hostages and ends the agony of their families, and which lifts the inhumane aid restrictions.'
The National
34 minutes ago
- The National
What 'top lawyers' got wrong on Palestinian recognition
These warnings came from what was described as 'top lawyers' – 40 members of the House of Lords, including several high-profile barristers with enough letters before and after their name to populate a small alphabet. Lawyers, as you may have noticed, are one of those professions where any lawyer deemed worth quoting on any topic is automatically classified as 'top'. Try and think of the last time you ever saw a barrister or advocate described as one of the 'bottom KCs' in the stable, and you'll ponder in vain. Journalistic cliché has its catechism, and the cub reporter can only follow its rules. This approach sometimes produces absurd results. READ MORE: Donald Trump – peacemaker-in-chief or a global agitator? I remember, as a callow PhD student in the 2000s, one arch-Unionist newspaper picked up on a blog post I'd written, critical of some aspect of Scottish Government policy of the day. In their write-up, I was described as a leading 'boffin' – like 'revellers', a curious species which only exists inside the pages of tabloid newspapers – who'd 'blasted' the hapless Holyrood regime. On any objective analysis, what I'd written was a fairly well-informed reflection as a minnow swimming in the shallow end of legal academia – but because the paper liked the critical line I was advancing, I was polished up, puffed up, and field promoted in my mid-twenties to the status of 'top lawyer'. In this case, however, many of those reported to have added their signatures to this menacing message to Keir Starmer are lawyers of significant eminence, including established academics in the field of international law, leading silks coming down with experience of advocating in the highest courts in the land, and even one former Supreme Court judge. And given all this legal eminence, it is sad to see them putting their names to hokum like this, which most of the signatories must know is a transparent distortion of the true position, pitched in a way which is not only guaranteed but apparently designed to be misunderstood. I can't think of a clearer example in recent years of the cynical exploitation of real expertise to push a feeble argument for nakedly ideological reasons. Politically, Starmer's intervention has prompted a range of reactions. First, why the conditionality? Why should recognition of Palestinian statehood be contingent on what the occupying power does or ceases to do to its civilian population? The International Court of Justice recently recognised 'the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including its right to an independent and sovereign state'. This includes its territorial integrity. If the Palestinian people already have these rights as a matter of international law, why should the UK wait for an Israeli ceasefire before recognising them, or delay full recognition if the killing stops and basic necessities begin to flow back into the region? In law and in politics, neither stance is logical. You might also ask yourself where precisely the line is being drawn on 'intolerability' by the UK Government. Why here? Why now? Experience over the past year suggests Starmer and those around him have remarkably strong stomachs for violations of conduct actually prohibited by international law, such as the use of lethal force on civilian populations and indiscriminate deployment of deadly munitions in urban areas occupied by men, women and children who cannot be classified as combatants. The problem for our 'top lawyers' is that they're making bricks without straw. Their main argument is that because Palestine might not meet the criteria for statehood identified in the Montevideo Convention – an international treaty the UK has not even signed – then it would be unlawful for the UK to press ahead and extend diplomatic recognition of the Palestinian regime. They argue that Palestine lacks a permanent population, clearly defined territory, a specific government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states – and therefore shouldn't be recognised as one. For the purposes of this intellectual exercise – and that's exactly what this intervention amounts to – we are apparently not to think about how all these population displacements and territorial encroachments on Palestinian territory might have happened and who might have been responsible for them. It isn't just the weakness of the underlying argument which rankles. It is the cynical framing. Describing recognition of the state of Palestine as 'breaking' international law might imply to the average reader that the UK might face some kind of criminal sanction or judicial challenge if the Government recognises Palestine. It won't. It can't. That isn't how it works. READ MORE: Rhoda Meek: The drive to go digital has real implications in rural and island areas [[UK Government]] ministers are quite right to push back hard, underscoring that this is a political judgement for states to exercise. To give you some kind of context on exactly how persuasive these 'top lawyers'' analysis is internationally, [[Palestine]] is already recognised as a sovereign state by almost 150 members of the United Nations. In total, there are only 193 member states of the UN. You work out the percentages. If these legal peers were right, that's a lot of breaches of international law nobody noticed before. The intervention is pure pettifoggery. The top lawyers must know this. It is the kind of basic legal fact which you must have tripped over in that long climb to the top, which won you your ermine macintosh and all those magic post-nominals. This story is a little microcosm of the uses and abuses of legal ambiguity in thinking and reporting on what has happened in Gaza over the past two years. A huge amount of energy has been expended online and on air asserting, denying and quibbling about whether or not what is being done by Israeli forces to the civilian population in Gaza meets the legal tests for genocide under international law. Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the international crime of genocide as encompassing 'any of the following acts' committed with intent to destroy a 'national, ethnic, racial or religious group' in 'whole or in part'. Prohibited conduct includes killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to them, or 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part'. The definition also extends to 'imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group' and 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'. Language matters. What we call things matters. Allegations of genocidal violence are dire ones to make. But an extraordinary wattage of intellectual energy over the past two years has gone into disputes over whether this threshold has been reached – as if it is the only legally and morally significant issue at stake in Palestine. This illustrates what a powerful distraction legalistic reasoning can be. Imagine you're sitting in your office and a masked man kicks in the door. He's armed with a gun, and opens fire, killing one of your colleagues. If my first reaction to this terrifying event was 'that man just violated Kenny's right to life', you might well think my legalistic mindset had got the better of ordinary human reactions to witnessing violence like this, and finding the right words to describe what you saw. If I immediately started quibbling about whether the shooting was murder or culpable homicide, you might reasonably think I'd missed the enormity of what I'd just seen. This should be a moral caution. Legal analysis can sometimes have a powerful distancing effect, transforming living people into bloodless abstractions, and tales of human horror into fine conceptual disputes over nice points of law. It can do so in a way which doesn't recognise and capture an injustice, but actually obscures and distracts from the evidence of our own eyes and a full moral engagement with what you witness. If there is any consolation here, it is that it won't work. Throughout this conflict, ordinary people across the United Kingdom have demonstrated a much keener sense of the injustice being visited on the civilian population in Gaza by the IDF than the UK Government, the Conservative opposition and the tangled web of increasingly manic media opinion formers, who are still trying to persuade the public that their concern about dead, dying and amputated and malnourished civilians somehow represents support for an extremist cause, or amounts to an unjust and exaggerated critique of Israel, itself in some versions of the argument amounting to a form of antisemitism. 'Technically, we are not committing genocide but only systematic violations of international humanitarian law against the civilian population' may not be the persuasive defence argument some very online lawyers seem to think it is. This is one kind of stupidity that only very smart people fall into. Most people, mercifully, have more sense.
ITV News
an hour ago
- ITV News
Hundreds of children from Gaza to be brought to UK for medical treatment
Up to 300 children could be evacuated from Gaza and given NHS treatment in the UK. The plans are reportedly set to be announced within weeks. A parent or guardian will accompany each child, as well as siblings if necessary, and the Home Office will carry out biometric and security checks before travel, the Sunday Times reported. This will happen 'in parallel' with an initiative by Project Pure Hope, a group set up to bring sick and injured Gazan children to the UK privately for treatment. More than 50,000 children are estimated to have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023, according to Unicef. Sir Keir Starmer said last week that the UK was 'urgently accelerating' efforts to bring children over for treatment. A Government spokesperson said: 'We are taking forward plans to evacuate more children from Gaza who require urgent medical care, including bringing them to the UK for specialist treatment where that is the best option for their care. 'We are working at pace to do so as quickly as possible, with further details to be set out in due course.' The UK and Jordan have been working together to air drop aid amid warnings of widespread malnourishment in Gaza. It comes as the UK seeks to put pressure on Israel to change course with a plan to recognise a Palestinian state in September ahead of the UN General Assembly. Sir Keir has said the UK would only refrain from recognising Palestine if Israel allows more aid into Gaza, stops annexing land in the West Bank, agrees to a ceasefire and signs up to a long-term peace process over the next two months. Concerns have been raised this could see a Palestinian state recognised by the UK without Hamas releasing the remaining Israeli hostages. British families of hostages say the Government has made clear to them that releases would 'play no part' in the UK's plans to recognise Palestine and that it could see those still held 'rot in Hamas dungeons'. Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the UK's demands for Hamas to release all hostages and play no role in the future of Gaza are 'absolute and unconditional'. He told The Sunday Times: 'The UK position on recognition is part of (a) co-ordinated international effort. It must begin with an immediate ceasefire that frees the hostages and ends the agony of their families, and which lifts the inhumane aid restrictions.'
