BEIRUT, Lebanon: The head of Lebanon’s powerful Shiite armed group Hezbollah warned Monday night against renewing the mandate of UN peacekeeping forces in the south of the country on the same terms.
The mandate of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, which expires on Thursday, was extended last year with a slight modification that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah criticized at the time as a “violation of Lebanese sovereignty”.
He did so again on Monday.
“Foreign armed forces moving in Lebanese territory without the permission of the government and the Lebanese army, without coordination with the Lebanese army, where is the sovereignty in all this?” Nasrallah said in a televised address.
Under the revised mandate, peacekeepers can “carry out their operations independently,” the UN resolution said.
The Security Council is scheduled to meet on Wednesday to discuss the extension of UNIFIL’s mandate.
United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon was deployed over forty years ago. It regularly coordinates patrols and movements in its area of operations in the south with the Lebanese army.
But the Lebanese government also objected that the UN resolution lacks a provision that such coordination is taking place.
On Monday, Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdullah Bouhabib met UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in New York to convey Lebanon’s position, the country’s official news service ANI reported.
UNIFIL was established in 1978 to monitor the withdrawal of Israeli forces after they invaded Lebanon in retaliation for a Palestinian attack.
It was reinforced in 2006 after Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war, and a force of more than 10,000 soldiers and naval personnel is tasked with monitoring a ceasefire between the two sides.
Israel and Lebanon are technically still at war.
In December, an Irish UNIFIL soldier was killed and three colleagues wounded when their convoy came under fire in southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold, near the Israeli border.
Days later, Hezbollah handed over a man suspected of being the prime suspect to Lebanese authorities, a security official said at the time. Hezbollah has denied involvement in the killing of Private Sean Rooney, 23.
Considered a “terrorist” organization by many Western governments, Hezbollah is the only party not to have disarmed after Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, and is also a powerful player in Lebanese politics.
