By Timour Azhari
BEIRUT (Reuters) -Hezbollah welcomes any effort to stop the war in Lebanon but does not pin hopes for a ceasefire on any particular U.S. administration, Hezbollah lawmaker Ibrahim al-Moussawi said on Thursday when asked about Donald Trump’s election victory.
“It might be a change in the party who is in power, but when it comes to Israel, they have more or less the same policy,” Moussawi told Reuters. “We want to see actions, we want to see decisions taken.”
Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah have exchanged fire for more than a year, in parallel with the Gaza war, but fighting has escalated since late September, with Israeli troops intensifying bombing of Lebanon’s south and east and making ground incursions into border villages.
Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah infrastructure and military assets, while avoiding civilians. Hezbollah and Lebanese officials point to the rising death toll, with more than 3,000 killed since October 2023, and widespread destruction in the country as evidence Israel’s fire is indiscriminate.
U.S. diplomatic efforts to halt fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which included a 60-day ceasefire proposal, faltered last week ahead of the U.S. election on Tuesday in which former president Trump recaptured the White House.
Moussawi acknowledged the heavy toll of Israeli attacks that have blown apart thousands of buildings, mostly in Lebanon’s Shi’ite Muslim-dominated south and east and the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut. But he said the group’s military capabilities remained strong.
“Our hearts are broken – we are losing very dear lives. This feeling that (Israel) cannot be punished or brought to international justice is a result of U.S. support which renders them immune to accountability,” he said.
“America is a full partner in what’s happening because they can exercise influence to stop this destruction.”
Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American billionaire who is the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, denied a report published this week by Lebanese broadcaster Al Jadeed that had quoted him saying he would be Trump’s envoy in charge of negotiating with the Lebanese side to reach a deal to end the war. Boulos told Reuters that the report was “totally wrong”.
The Israeli government celebrated Trump’s return to power, saying he was a leader who would support them “unconditionally”.
STRIKE AT ARMY CHECKPOINT
The Israeli military said on Thursday that five soldiers had been killed and 16 wounded in a combat incident in southern Lebanon. It did not say exactly when the incident occurred.
Overnight on Wednesday, Israel carried out a series of strikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs, including at least one just tens of metres (yards) from Beirut airport’s runways.
Lebanese Transport Minister Ali Hamiye said the airport was functioning normally on Thursday.
Another Israeli strike on Thursday on a car at a Lebanese army checkpoint at the entrance to the southern city of Sidon killed three people and wounded three Lebanese soldiers and four members of a U.N. peacekeeping contingent, the Lebanese army said in a statement.
A Reuters reporter at the scene said a bus with United Nations markings that was part of a large convoy of U.N. peacekeepers had sustained damage in the strike.
UNIFIL, the peacekeeping force, said in a statement that five newly-arrived peacekeepers were lightly injured in the Sidon drone strike and treated on the spot.
On Wednesday, an Israeli airstrike destroyed an Ottoman-era building near the famed UNESCO-listed ancient temples of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon, the region’s governor and an organisation that has organised cultural events there said on Thursday.
Governor Bachir Khodr told Reuters the strike hit the empty heritage building in the closest attack yet to the complex of Greco-Roman and Phoenician temples that make up the World Heritage Site, just meters away.
“It’s a very artisanal neighbourhood, typically full of tourists,” he said.
(Reporting by Timour Azhari, Editing by Sharon Singleton, Mark Heinrich and Ros Russell)
