Only Israel has opened fire since the start of the “ceasefire”, and Israel has done so repeatedly. Nobody has fired back.
Israel has for three days in a row attacked alleged Hezbollah rocket sites with bombs or missiles, killing at least four people and probably more. Israel has opened fire on journalists. It has critically wounded two mourners at a funeral. There are numerous reports of Lebanese civilians returning to their homes in the South coming under fire from Israeli troops.
This video shows the two people shot by snipers at a funeral. The man is saying that they had permission for the funeral from UNIFIL and from the Lebanese Army.
Israel has also used the “ceasefire” to advance its forces including tanks into towns and villages from which they had been repulsed and which Israel could not take by fighting. It has entrenched positions in Southern Lebanon, issued orders to Lebanese civilians not to return to over sixty villages in South Lebanon – none of which it had managed to permanently occupy in the fighting – and is reinforcing, re-arming and re-equipping.
South Lebanon | ambulance smashed
— Younis Tirawi | يونس (@ytirawi) November 29, 2024
Israeli soldiers of the 7th brigade deliberately runs over a Lebanese ambulance as published today on their private social media accounts pic.twitter.com/NXo8Xw15D2
Israel in fact is treating the “ceasefire” as unconditional surrender. All of this was entirely predictable, not only from Israel’s past and normal behaviour, but also on the face of the “ceasefire” document itself, which is a wildly unbalanced document.
It offends my own sensibilities as a former diplomat that the Lebanese foreign ministry signed up to such an abject and undisguised document of submission.
Let us start by analysing paragraph 2 of this document:
2. From 4am, November 27, 2024 forward, the Government of Lebanon will prevent Hezbollah and all other armed groups in the territory of Lebanon from carrying out any operations against Israel, and Israel will not carry out any offensive military operations against Lebanese targets, including civilian, military or other state targets, in the territory of Lebanon by land, air or sea.
You see the imbalance immediately.
Lebanese armed groups will be stopped from carrying out “any operations against Israel” whereas Israel will not carry out “any offensive military operations.”
There is no way that Lebanon should ever have accepted that the term “offensive” is inserted for one side only. There is no possible way of parsing this, other than that Israel is still allowed to fire, and nobody else can. Israel has in fact fired, killed and wounded with abandon since the ceasefire came in to force, and of course characterises this as “defensive” military action.
The Lebanese government have recorded 51 breaches of the ceasefire by Israel in three days.
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