Lebanon conflict spillover

Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, is asking for something that would have been politically radioactive in his country not long ago: direct talks with Israel. On Sunday, April 5, he said Lebanon needed negotiations, under international sponsorship, to stop Israel from doing to southern Lebanon what it did to Gaza. He said the goal was not diplomacy for its own sake, but to keep villages in the south from being flattened in a widening war. (english.aawsat.com) (bloomberg.com) The timing made the appeal feel less like a policy proposal than an alarm bell. The Lebanese army said Sunday that one of its soldiers was killed in an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon. Asharq Al-Awsat, citing the army, reported that the same day also brought an Israeli strike in south Beirut, near Rafik Hariri University Hospital. (english.aawsat.com) This is how the Gaza war keeps spilling north. The border between Israel and Lebanon has never really been quiet, but the current danger is that the fighting is no longer staying at the level of limited cross-border fire. Reuters reported on April 2 that Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said the war that began on March 2 had already displaced 1 million people in a month. Reuters also reported in late March that more than 400 Hezbollah fighters had been killed since the group launched the opening salvoes of this new war with Israel. (usnews.com) (msn.com) Aoun’s proposal matters because Lebanon and Israel are still formally enemy states. They have held indirect or tightly managed talks before, usually over borders, gas fields, or ceasefire arrangements, but “direct talks” carries a heavier charge. It suggests the Lebanese state is trying to deal with the crisis itself, instead of leaving the border file to Hezbollah’s guns and Israel’s air force. Bloomberg reported in March that Aoun wanted internationally mediated direct negotiations and a truce to halt Israeli attacks. (bloomberg.com) There is already a framework on paper for how the border is supposed to work. After the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 called for a full cessation of hostilities, for Lebanese forces and U.N. peacekeepers to deploy in the south, and for Israeli forces to withdraw as that deployment took hold. UNIFIL, the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, says its job is to monitor the cessation of hostilities and support the Lebanese armed forces along the Blue Line, the U.N.-drawn withdrawal line between Lebanon and Israel. (digitallibrary.un.org) (unifil.unmissions.org) (peacekeeping.un.org) The problem is that every new strike makes that framework look thinner. In recent days, UNIFIL has also been operating under fire. The U.N. said this week that the killing of three peacekeepers in south Lebanon underscored the danger facing both the mission’s roughly 10,000 troops and the civilians around them. (news.un.org) So the story here is not simply that Lebanon wants talks. It is that the Lebanese state is trying to pull the border back into the world of negotiation while the war keeps dragging it into the world of escalation. On Sunday, those two realities sat side by side: a president on television calling for talks, and a dead soldier in the south. (english.aawsat.com 1) (english.aawsat.com 2)