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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Thursday that Israel would press on with its offensive against Hizbollah in Lebanon, casting doubts on a US-led diplomatic push for a ceasefire to prevent a full-blown war.
Arriving in New York, where he is due to address the UN General Assembly on Friday, Netanyahu said: “Our policy is clear: we’re continuing to strike Hizbollah with all [our] strength.”
“We won’t stop until we achieve all our objectives — first and foremost the return of the northern residents to their homes securely,” he added. “This is the policy. Let no one mistake it.”
Netanyahu was speaking a day after US President Joe Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron proposed a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group.
US officials hope the truce would allow time to negotiate a more durable ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah, and also put pressure on the Palestinian militant group Hamas to accept the terms of a ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Israel in Gaza.
But the proposal was met with a chorus of criticism in Israel, particularly from far-right members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s ultranationalist finance minister, said the campaign should “end in one scenario: crushing Hizbollah and removing its ability to harm the residents of the north”.
Israeli forces kept up their assault on the Iran-backed Hizbollah in Lebanon on Thursday and expanded the bombing campaign to the border with Syria.
Despite Netanyahu’s comments and Israel’s continued attacks, John Kirby, the US National Security Council spokesperson, said Washington would continue to press for the temporary ceasefire.
Senior US and Israeli officials were discussing the plan in New York on Thursday.
Biden wants his team to “keep trying to see what we can do to give diplomacy a fighting chance”, Kirby said, stressing the US would not have released the proposal publicly if Israel had not indicated support for the plan.
“It was done after careful consultation not only with the countries that signed on to it but Israel itself. We had every reason to believe in the drafting of it and the delivery of it that the Israelis were fully informed and fully aware of every word in it,” he said.
The proposal, which was backed by the G7, EU, Australia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, did not set a deadline for the two sides to respond.
People familiar with the situation said the US hoped that Netanyahu would use his speech at the UN to announce that Israel’s war in Gaza was moving into a new phase, which might persuade Hizbollah — which has insisted it will not stop firing at the Jewish state until the offensive against Hamas is over — to agree a temporary truce.
Former president Donald Trump added his voice on Thursday to those calling for an end to the fighting, suggesting that pressure for a ceasefire could grow no matter who won the US election in November.
“Well, you have to have that ended one way or the other. The world isn’t going to take it. And I would think that we are getting close to a point where maybe it can end pretty soon,” Trump said at a press conference. “The whole thing over there is unacceptable.”
But Israeli officials lined up to pour cold water on the ceasefire proposal with a string of far-right members of the government, on whom Netanyahu depends for political survival, as well as members of his Likud party railing against a truce.
The Israeli military said its strikes on the Lebanese capital on Thursday killed Muhammed Srour, whom it said had been the head of Hizbollah’s drone command, and had previously been a commander in its surface-to-air missile unit.
Residents said they had heard three blasts in the southern suburb of Dahiyeh, which Hizbollah controls. Late on Thursday, the group confirmed Srour’s death , while Lebanese officials said the strike had killed two people, and injured 15.
The strikes were part of a massive escalation launched by Israel in Lebanon over the past two weeks, which has displaced 90,000 people and fuelled fears that the year-long hostilities between Israel and Hizbollah are on the verge of spiralling into a broader regional conflict.
Israel’s air force struck what it said were about 220 Hizbollah targets in Lebanon over the past day, the IDF said on Thursday.
Lebanon’s health ministry said 20 people were killed, 19 of them Syrian nationals, in an Israeli attack that levelled a building in the town of Younine in the Bekaa Valley. It was the deadliest strike in a day of bombings that killed a total of 92 people and injured 153 across the country according to a Financial Times tabulation of health ministry statements.
Israel and Hizbollah have been exchanging intensifying cross-border fire since the group began firing rockets at the Jewish state on October 8, a day after Hamas’s attack triggered the war in Gaza and a wave of regional hostilities.
But over the past two weeks, Israel has stepped up its assault against Hizbollah, assassinating a string of the group’s senior commanders. Until this week it had rarely targeted the Bekaa Valley, a Hizbollah stronghold along Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria.
Additional reporting by Polina Ivanova in Jerusalem and Charles Clover in Beirut
Data visualisation by Steven Bernard and Alan Smith
