Lebanon PM says truce monitor negotiations with Israel not peace talks

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s prime minister said Wednesday that new negotiations with Israel taking place under the auspices of a ceasefire monitoring mechanism were not broader peace talks, while asserting the military was on track to disarm Hezbollah in the south by year’s end.

Israel and Lebanon have technically been at war since 1948, and despite the new diplomatic contact, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said in an interview with journalists including AFP that “we are not yet at peace talks”.

Since the truce went into force in November 2024, Israel has kept up frequent strikes on Lebanon, mainly saying it is targeting Hezbollah, which it accuses of rearming.

The Lebanese government has committed to disarming the group, starting with the south, where it has long held sway, though Hezbollah has refused to hand over its weapons.

Salam said Wednesday that the Lebanese army should complete the process of dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure south of the Litani River, about 30 kilometres from the Israeli border, by the end of the year, in accordance with the truce.

“There, by the end of the year, the army should be able to fully deploy and have full monopoly of arms,” he said, adding the efforts would expand to the rest of the country at a later date.

In the north, he added, “what you are aiming at is a containment of arms”.

Israel launches airstrikes on south Lebanon, says it’s targeting Hezbollah

He also said Lebanon was “open to verification by the mechanism” – whose participants include the United Nations, the United States and France – when it came to the disarmament efforts in the south.

Lebanese and Israeli civilian officials participated Wednesday in a meeting of the ceasefire monitoring mechanism in southern Lebanon, the first direct talks in decades between the two countries.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the meeting as a “first attempt to establish a basis for relations and economic cooperation” between the adversaries.

But Salam said these negotiations were aimed solely at “the cessation of hostilities”, the “release of Lebanese hostages” and “the complete Israeli withdrawal” from Lebanese territory.

Salam said Lebanon remained committed to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which offers a full normalisation of relations with Israel in return for its complete withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967, and had no intention of concluding a separate peace with Israel.

Netanyahu has repeatedly said Lebanon should join the Abraham Accords, under which a handful of Arab and Muslim countries have normalised ties with Israel.

But Salam said on Wednesday that “normalisation will follow peace. It cannot precede peace.”

Any steps towards economic cooperation would come later, he added.