Israeli envoy warns Lebanon against pulling out of talks after deadly wave of IDF strikes

Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter warns the Lebanese government against pulling out of talks with Israel after today’s deadly wave of IDF strikes in southern Lebanon.

“If the Lebanese government uses this incident as a pretext to delay or discontinue peace talks, it would hand a tactical victory to the enemies of peace. Derailing the talks is precisely what Hezbollah is trying to achieve,” Leiter writes on X.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said earlier Saturday that the Israeli strikes sent a “clear message” regarding the negotiations between the two countries, but did not explicitly threaten to pull out of them.

The next round of US-mediated talks is set for early September.

Leiter — who heads Israel’s negotiating team in the Lebanon talks — defends the Israeli strikes, asserting that Hezbollah attacked IDF troops first, targeting those positioned in the army’s south Lebanon buffer zone.

“In response, the IDF acted decisively against the Hezbollah commander who ordered the attack — a terrorist who used his own family as human shields inside a Hezbollah military headquarters,” Leiter says, referring to an early morning IDF strike which was said to have killed a Hezbollah battalion commander and several women and children.

Israel regularly highlights adversarial terror groups’ use of human shields to justify strikes that also take the lives of civilians.