Lebanese caretaker PM: Hostage deal may trigger end to Israeli-Hezbollah fighting
A hostage deal would pause fighting in the Gaza Strip and could trigger indirect talks to end hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Thursday.
In an interview with Reuters, Mikati said he was confident that the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah would cease its fire if Israel did the same, a step that could end nearly five months of cross-border shelling and airstrikes sparked by the Hamas-led October 7 attack.
Mikati said a deal to halt military action in Gaza was “on the horizon” and could begin as early as next week.
“If we are able to reach a cessation of military operations in Gaza, then I believe that we will have ahead of us weeks packed with negotiations so that we can reach what I have always called long-term stability in the south,” he said.
Mikati said he had met US special envoy Amos Hochstein in February in Munich, who was “preparing for visits to Lebanon soon.”
Hochstein was last in Beirut in mid-January. He mediated a rare deal in 2022 between Lebanon and Israel, with a nod of approval from Hezbollah, that ended their long-standing maritime border dispute. He has said he hopes to do the same for their land border.
When asked whether Hezbollah had signaled a willingness to move forward with talks, Mikati suggested that the “cooperation” shown by “all sides” to facilitate the maritime deal could be replicated for a land border deal.
“I am certain that the moment that Israel stops its violations against Lebanon, I am convinced that Hezbollah will not violate – or will not respond to something that did not happen,” he said.
Hezbollah itself indicated it was ready to halt its cross-border attacks if a Gaza ceasefire came into force.
“The war in the south is linked to the aggression on Gaza on the one hand, and to securing means of protection for our country on the other,” senior Hezbollah politician Hassan Fadlallah said.
“When the [Israeli] occupation halts its aggression on Gaza, this front stops, because it is a supportive front,” he said at an event to commemorate a Hezbollah field commander killed in an Israeli strike this week.
France has also been seeking to de-escalate with proposals including a withdrawal of Hezbollah’s elite fighters 10 km. away from the border and talks to settle the course of the disputed frontier.
Mikati declined to specify what measures he believed Hezbollah was ready to take to maintain a ceasefire.
“The question can go to Hezbollah. I am speaking in the name of Lebanon and we are ready to execute 1701 in full,” he said, referring to the 2006 UN Security Council resolution that ended a month-long war that year between Hezbollah and Israel.
It calls for a halt to cross-border military activities, a withdrawal of non-state armed groups from southern Lebanon – in reference to Hezbollah and others – and an increased deployment of Lebanese army troops in the south.
Mikati said that to implement Resolution 1701, the army would need allied countries to help with everything from “fuel, to equipment to means of transportation to the barracks and even to weapons - everything the army needs.”
In Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said
that any arrangement that ended hostilities along Israel’s northern border would have to allow for the return home of the residents of that area who were evacuated on October 7.
Any arrangement to cease hostilities there must include the “restoration of security and conditions that will allow residents of the North to come home,” Netanyahu said.
“I hope that we will achieve this through diplomacy but we will achieve it in one way or the other, including militarily,” he said.
Israel, he said, has been striking and eliminating senior military leaders from Hezbollah and Iran to “prevent them from realizing their murderous intentions.”
Late Wednesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant spoke with US Secretary of State Lloyd Austin amid the Biden administration’s fears that Israel would launch a summer campaign against the Iranian proxy group.
“The State of Israel will not tolerate threats against its citizens and violations of its sovereignty, and will take the measures required to ensure their security,” Gallant said.
Gallant detailed for Austin the “ongoing attacks conducted by Hezbollah on Israel’s northern communities,” according to the Defense Ministry.
The conversation took place as an anonymous Biden administration official told CNN, “We are operating in the assumption that an Israeli military operation is in the coming months.”
The official added that such an attack would not happen “imminently in the next few weeks but perhaps later this spring. An Israeli military operation is a distinct possibility.”
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that diplomacy here was the best option and Israel has issued similar statements.
“We take the government of Israel at their word that they want to pursue a diplomatic solution,” he told reporters in Washington on Thursday. He added that the US was engaged “intensively” on this.
Last week White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby told reporters in Washington that the US doesn’t want “a second front” on Israel’s northern border.
“We don’t want to see the conflict widen and deepen. We don’t want to see the fighting that has occurred between Hezbollah and Israeli Defense Forces up in the North continue; we certainly don’t want to see it become more aggressive.
“We’re going to continue our conversations with our Israeli counterparts, continue our conversations with Lebanese counterparts as well, about not letting the tensions up there boil over to the point where it truly does deepen and widen the conflict in a way that could alleviate any kind of pressure on Hamas. And I think I’ll just need to leave it at that,” Kirby said.
Cross-border violence between the IDF and Hezbollah increased after the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October along the country’s southern border but has not escalated to the point where it is considered an all-out war.
The US and France are working on a diplomatic solution by which Hezbollah would agree to withdraw to the Litani River, leaving a buffer zone, in that southern area of its country.
Such a move would be in keeping with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701,.
Over 50,000 Israelis were evacuated from the country’s northern border on October 7 and the IDF has not set a date by which it would be safe for them to return.