Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Youssef Raggi asserted on Tuesday that the country’s armed forces will have fully disarmed the Hezbollah terrorist group in Southern Lebanon within three months.
Beirut’s top diplomat told AFP that Rodolphe Haykal, commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces, presented the government with a five-stage plan last week to implement a policy under which all weapons are controlled by the state.
Raggi said that the first stage will include the removal of all weapons south of the Litani River by November. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, adopted in 2006, requires the complete demilitarization of the Iranian terror proxy south of the Litani River and no armed groups in Lebanon other than the official army and UNIFIL. The river is located some 18 miles north of the Israeli border.
Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces continues to attack Hezbollah targets in accordance with the ceasefire agreement reached on Nov. 27, 2024.
The military on Monday struck several Hezbollah targets in eastern Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, including Radwan Force training compounds. The facilities were used to train operatives and prepare attacks against IDF troops and Israeli civilians, including gunfire drills and other weapons exercises.
Israel and Hezbollah had maintained a tense truce in Lebanon since the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, until Oct. 8, 2023, when the Iranian-backed group began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas’s invasion the previous day.
Last September, the IDF escalated its response, killing Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and several other high-ranking terrorists. Nearly a year of fighting devastated the group’s command structure and weapons stockpiles.
According to the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel has killed about 4,150 Hezbollah terrorists since the outbreak of war in more than 15,000 strikes. Some 133 Israelis have been killed, many by the more than 4,000 rockets the group fired into Israel.
