FM warns UN Security Council of regional war if resolution to disarm Hezbollah not implemented

Foreign Minister Eli Cohen warns the UN Security Council that a regional war is likely if resolution 1701, which calls for the disarmament of the Hezbollah terror group, is not fully implemented.

“For the good of regional stability and to avoid further escalation, the next session of the UN Security Council must adopt a totally different approach in order to end the dangerous violations by Hezbollah and other terrorist groups on the border,” Cohen writes to the Security Council, Channel 12 News reports.

Hezbollah, Hamas and other terror groups in southern Lebanon have routinely fired rockets at Israeli cities and attacked IDF forces on the Israel-Lebanon border ever since Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, resulting in a number of Israeli fatalities.

The IDF has attacked Hezbollah operatives and positions as a result, killing dozens of their fighters.

UN Security Council resolution 1701 brought to an end the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and called for the disarmament of all non-state armed forces in Lebanon, as well as for the region between the Israel-Lebanon border and the Litani River to be freed of all armed forces other than the Lebanese army and the UN’s peacekeeping mission UNIFIL.

These clauses of the resolution were never implemented, and Hezbollah has become a heavily armed terror militia. It claims to have tens of thousands of fighters and possesses a reported arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles of different types.