Lebanon

The PM says the part of the plan on south of the Litani River is ‘only days away from completion’.

Lebanon is close to completing the disarmament of Hezbollah in the south of the Litani River before a year-end deadline as part of a ceasefire deal with Israel, according to Prime Minister Nawaf Salam.

Saturday’s statement comes as the country races to fulfil the key demand in the US-backed deal agreed in November last year and ended more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

The agreement requires the disarmament of the Iran-aligned Lebanese armed group, starting in areas south of the river adjacent to Israel.

Lebanese authorities, led by President Joseph Aoun and Salam, tasked the US-backed Lebanese army on August 5 with devising a plan to establish a state monopoly on arms by the end of the year.

“Prime Minister Salam affirmed that the first phase of the weapons consolidation plan related to the area south of the Litani River is only days away from completion,” a statement from his office said.

“The state is ready to move on to the second phase – namely [confiscating weapons] north of the Litani River – based on the plan prepared by the Lebanese army pursuant to a mandate from the government,” Salam added.

Committee meeting

The statement came after Salam held talks with Simon Karam, Lebanon’s top civilian negotiator on a committee overseeing the Hezbollah-Israel truce.

In a meeting on Friday, the committee focused on how to return displaced people to their homes, addressing civilian issues to help prevent renewed war if the year-end deadline to disarm Hezbollah is not met.

The 15th meeting of the committee reflected a longstanding US push to broaden talks between the sides beyond monitoring the 2024 ceasefire.

At Friday’s meeting in the southern Lebanese coastal town of Naqoura, civilian participants discussed steps to support safe returns of residents uprooted by the 2023-24 war and advance economic reconstruction, the US Embassy in Beirut said.

Since the ceasefire, Israeli warplanes have repeatedly targeted parts of Lebanon, mostly southern Lebanon, but sometimes even the capital.

Israel says it is questioning the Lebanese army’s efforts to disarm Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, a Shia Muslim armed group, has tried to resist the pressure – from its mainly Christian and Sunni Muslim opponents in Lebanon as well as from the US and Saudi Arabia – to disarm, saying it would be a mistake while Israel continues its air strikes on the country.

Israel has publicly urged Lebanese authorities to fulfil the conditions of the truce, saying it will act “as necessary” if Lebanon fails to take steps against Hezbollah.

Lebanese social media pages were filled recently with heated exchanges and views, with people commenting on developments that reflect the deep sectarianism in the country. From a Christmas decoration to stand-up comedy material to the right to citizenship, people in Lebanon are not holding back.

Presenter: Stefanie Dekker

Guests:
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Ramzi Kaiss – Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch

Washington, DC – American journalist Dylan Collins wants to know “who pulled the trigger” in the 2023 Israeli double-tap strike in south Lebanon that injured him and killed Reuters video reporter Issam Abdallah.

Collins and his supporters are also seeking information about the military orders that led to the deadly attack. But more than two years later, Israel has not provided adequate answers on why it targeted the clearly identifiable reporters.

Press freedom advocates and three United States legislators joined Collins, an AFP and former Al Jazeera journalist, outside the US Capitol on Thursday to renew calls for accountability in this case and for the more than 250 other killings of journalists by Israel.

“I want to know who pulled the trigger; I want to know what command structure approved it, and I want to know why it’s gone unaddressed until today – on our strike and all the others targeted,” Collins said.

Senator Peter Welch and Congresswoman Becca Balint, who represent Collins’s home state of Vermont, and Senator Chris Van Hollen stressed on Thursday that they will continue to push for accountability in the strike, which wounded six journalists.

“We’re not letting it go. It doesn’t matter how long they stonewall us. We’re not letting it go,” Balint told reporters.

The attack

Welch said he was sending his seventh letter to the US Department of State demanding answers, accusing Israel of obfuscation.

Israeli authorities, he said, claim they investigated the attack and ruled the shooting unintentional, but they provided no evidence that they questioned soldiers. Israel also never contacted the key witnesses – namely, Colins and other survivors of the strike.

In October, the Israeli army told the AFP news agency that the attack was still “under review” in an apparent contradiction of what Welch had been told.

“The investigation, non-investigation – there’s nothing there,” Welch said. “You’re basically getting the run-around, and you’re getting stonewalled. That’s the bottom line.”

Israel received more than $21bn in US military aid during the two years of its genocidal war on Gaza.

Throughout the war, Israel has stepped up its attacks on the press. But the country has a long history of killing journalists without accountability.

The October 13, 2023, strike, which wounded Al Jazeera’s Carmen Joukhadar and Elie Brakhia and left AFP’s Christina Assi with life-altering injuries, was well-documented in part because the journalists were livestreaming their reporting.

The correspondents, who had set up their equipment on a hilltop near the Lebanese-Israeli border to cover the escalation on the front, were in clearly marked press gear and vehicles.

Israeli drones had also circled above the journalists before the attack.

“We thought the fact that we could be seen was a good thing, that it would protect us. But after a little less than an hour at the site, we were hit twice by tank fire, two shells on the same target, 37 seconds apart,” Collins said at a news conference on Thursday.

“The first strike killed Issam instantly and nearly blew Christina’s legs off her body. As I rushed to put a tourniquet on her, we were hit the second time, and I sustained multiple shrapnel wounds.”

The AFP journalist added that the attack seemed “unfathomable in its brutality” at that time, but “we have since seen the same type of attack repeated dozens of times.”

Israel has been regularly employing such double-tap attacks, including in other strikes on journalists in Gaza.

“This is not an incident in the fog of war. It was a war crime carried out in broad daylight and broadcast on live television,” Collins said.

Earlier this year, UN rapporteur Morris Tidball-Binz called the 2023 strike “a premeditated, targeted and double-tapped attack from the Israeli forces, a clear violation, in my opinion, of IHL (international humanitarian law), a war crime”.

US response

Despite the wounding of a US citizen in the strike, the administration of then-President Joe Biden – which claimed to champion freedom of the press and the “rules-based order” – did next to nothing to hold Israel to account.

Biden’s successor, Donald Trump, also pushed on with unconditional US support for Israel.

On Thursday, Collins decried the lack of action from the US government, saying that he reached out to officials in Washington, DC, and showed them footage of the strike.

“I thought that when an American citizen is wounded in an attack carried out by the US’s greatest ally in the Middle East that we would be able to get some answers. But for two years, I’ve been met by deafening silence,” he told reporters.

“In fact, neither the Biden nor the Trump administrations have ever publicly acknowledged that a US citizen was wounded in this attack.”

Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 10 US citizens, including Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, over the past decade.

Senator Van Hollen said accountability in the October 13, 2023, attack is important for journalists and US citizens across the world.

“We have not seen accountability or justice in this case, and the State Department – our own government – has not done much of anything really to pursue justice in this case,” Van Hollen told reporters.

“It is part of a broader pattern of impunity for attacks on Americans and on journalists by the government of Israel.”

He called the US approach a “dereliction of duty” by the Trump and Biden administrations.

Israeli ‘investigation’

Amelia Evans, advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said Senator Welch’s description of the Israeli probe shows that the country’s “purported investigative bodies are not functioning to deliver justice but to shield Israeli forces from accountability”.

Evans urged the Trump administration to “take action” and demand the completion of probes into the killing of Abu Akleh in 2022 and the 2023 attack on journalists in Lebanon.

“It must demand Israel name all the military officials throughout the command chain who were involved in both cases,” she said.

“But as Israel’s key strategic ally, the United States must do much more than that. It must publicly recognise Israel’s failure to properly investigate the war crimes committed by its military.”

Israel often uses claims of investigation in response to abuses.

Former State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, who spent almost two years defending Israeli war crimes and justifying Washington’s unflinching support for its Middle East ally, acknowledged that tactic recently.

“We do know that Israel has opened investigations,” Miller, who incessantly invoked alleged Israeli probes from the State Department podium, said in June.

“But, look, we are many months into those investigations. And we’re not seeing Israeli soldiers held accountable.”

‘Chilling effect’

Amid the push for justice, Collins paid tribute to his colleague Abdallah, who was killed in the 2023 Israeli attack.

“Losing Issam was tough on everyone,” he told Al Jazeera. “He was like the dynamo of the press scene in Lebanon. He knew everyone. He was always the first person to help you out if you’re in a jam. He had a larger-than-life personality.”

The killing of Abdullah, Collins added, had a “chilling effect” on the coverage of that conflict, which escalated into a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah in September 2024.

The violence saw Israel all but wipe out nearly all the border towns in Lebanon.

Even after a ceasefire was reached in November of last year, the Israeli military continues to prevent reconstruction in the devastated villages as it carries out near-daily attacks across the country.

“If the intention was to stop people from covering the war, then it has worked to some degree,” said Collins.

In this episode of On the Record, Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem is joined by Iran’s former foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. They discuss Iran’s political and military involvement in the Middle East and beyond. Zarif reflects on Iran’s involvement with resistance groups in Syria, Gaza and Lebanon and why Iran’s nuclear ambitions have not been obliterated by either the US or Israel.

Israel says it targeted Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon, adding pressure to a US-brokered ceasefire.

Israel’s military has carried out waves of air attacks in southern Lebanon, causing damage to several homes, according to Lebanese state media, as anger mounts over repeated Israeli violations of a ceasefire with Hezbollah agreed upon last year.

Lebanon’s National News Agency reported late on Monday that Israeli jets targeted Mount Safi, the town of Jbaa, the Zefta Valley, and the area between Azza and Rumin Arki in “several waves”.

There was no immediate report of casualties.

The Israeli military, in a post on X, said it struck several sites linked to Hezbollah, including a special operations training compound used by its elite Radwan Force.

The military said several buildings and a rocket-launching site were also hit.

The attacks come days after Israel and Lebanon dispatched civilian envoys to a military committee tasked with overseeing their ceasefire, a step towards a months-old demand by the United States, which has been urging the two countries to broaden their talks.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said on Friday that his country “has adopted the option of negotiations with Israel”, and that the talks were aimed at stopping Israel’s continued attacks on his country.

The current ceasefire, brokered by Washington in 2024, ended more than a year of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah.

But Israel has continued to strike Lebanon on a near-daily basis.

A United Nations report released in November said that at least 127 civilians, including children, have been killed in Lebanon since the ceasefire went into effect. UN officials have warned that the strikes amount to “war crimes”.

Tensions spiked further last week when Israel bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing Hezbollah’s top military commander, Haytham Ali Tabtabai.

The group, still weakened after last year’s conflict, has yet to respond.

Israel has accused Lebanon of not doing enough to compel Hezbollah to relinquish its arsenal across the country, a claim the Lebanese government denies.

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said last week that Lebanon wanted to see the ceasefire monitoring mechanism play a more robust role in verifying Israel’s claims that Hezbollah is rearming, as well as the work of the Lebanese army in dismantling the armed group’s infrastructure.

Asked whether that meant Lebanon would accept US and French troops on the ground as part of a verification mechanism, Salam said, “Of course”.

The continued Israeli strikes have raised fears in Lebanon that the Israeli military could expand its air campaign further.

Hezbollah has said it is unwilling to let go of its arms as long as Israel continues its strikes on Lebanese territory and its occupation of five points in the country’s south.