Beirut, June 17: Rival Lebanese politicians on Thursday postponed until August 19 talks on a national defence strategy that would incorporate the arms of Hezbollah, the government said.
“The dialogue committee continued talks on a defence strategy and agreed on August 19 as the date for the next session,” a statement said, as the politicians failed again to reach an accord.
The defence strategy talks were launched in 2006 and have been repeatedly adjourned because of successive political crises and the thorny issue of Hezbollah’s weapons.
During the session, deputy speaker Farid Makari called for a “timetable for the process of placing Hezbollah’s military and rocket power under the command of the Lebanese army.”
Makari, who is part of a bloc led by Prime Minister Saad Hariri, urged Hezbollah to openly declare that its weapons aimed “exclusively to defend Lebanon against any aggression and are not tied to other axes or alliances.”
“Lebanon’s current defence power could turn into a risk factor if perceived as part of the wider struggle between Iran and the West,” Makari warned in a transcript released by his office.
Thursday’s session comes amid heightened tension in the region over allegations that militant group Hezbollah was stockpiling sophisticated rockets smuggled through Syria.
The resistance party, which has two ministers in the current cabinet, has warned the government for years that its arsenal is not open to discussion.
The talks are also focused on disarming Palestinian factions outside Lebanon’s 12 refugee camps. The army does not enter the camps by long-standing convention.
Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap.
The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
—Agencies