Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdullah Bou Habib, has sent a message to Israel through Azerbaijan that the Lebanese people do not want war and prefer to live in peace.
The unusual message comes as the Iranian-backed terrorist army, Hezbollah, which is illegally occupying southern Lebanon, escalates attacks on Israel that began on October 8, after the Palestinian terror group Hamas, which is also backed by Iran, launched a massive terror attack inside Israel.
Israel has evacuated its northern border region, displacing tens of thousands of civilians, as Hezbollah has fired projectiles across the border, including anti-tank missiles that fly too low to be detected by current defense systems.
The Israeli military has responded by attacking the sources of fire, and then by attacking Hezbollah commanders and operatives. It has also begun a buildup of forces in preparation for a large-scale war to remove the Hezbollah threat.
Though Israel has said that it prefers a diplomatic solution — one that makes Hezbollah comply with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1707, and move north of the Litani River in Lebanon — it is also preapred to use force.
Amid rising tensions that have seen several countries warn their citizens not to visit Lebanon and to leave if possible, Habib sent a message to Israel via Azerbaijan, a Muslim country that has ties with Israel.
The Jerusalem Post reports:
The Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdullah Bou Habib sent a special third-party message to Foreign Minister Israel Katz explaining to him that his country did not want a war to break out between them.
“We are interested in peace, we do not want war,” Habib said, in a statement that was delivered through the Azeri Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov who spoke with Katz on Tuesday. Their conversation was conveyed to The Jerusalem Post by Katz’s spokesperson.
…
Katz sent a message back to Habib stating, “We need to return our residents to their homes, if it is not through a diplomatic solution, it will be through war.”
Lebanon is supposed to patrol its southern border to monitor Hezbollah’s compliance with United Nations rules. In reality, Hezbollah dominates the Lebanese government, and the country operates as a vassal state of Iran.
It is expected that a war between Israel and Hezbollah would be even more destructive than the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza, owing to the larger and more sophisticated arsenal that Hezbollah has amassed in southern Lebanon.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.