Cairo, January 29: Israeli threats against the Lebanese opposition group Hezbollah are threats against Lebanon itself, the country’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri during a visit to Cairo on Thursday.
“We take Israeli threats seriously,” Hariri said after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
“Any threat against Lebanese territory, whether in the south, Bekaa, Dahie (Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold) or any any place in Lebanon is a threat against all of Lebanon and the Lebanese government,” Hariri said.
“The protection of any place in Lebanon is the responsibility of the Lebanese government,” he told a news conference, calling for “Arab solidarity” with Beirut “to counter these threats.”
Hariri said last week in an interview with the French daily Le Monde that he he feared “an Israeli intervention” following an increase in overflights over his country by Israeli warplanes.
An Israeli minister without portfolio, Yossi Peled, said last week that a new confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah was inevitable in the long run.
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