Lebanese PM says Israel refusing to negotiate on border disputes, will raise issue with the US

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam charges that Israel is refusing to engage in negotiations over border disputes and charges that it is not abiding by the terms of the ceasefire, in an interview with Bloomberg published this morning.

The interview comes days before the one-year anniversary of a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon that ended more than a year of fighting with the Hezbollah terror group. The ceasefire has remained largely intact, although Israel regularly strikes what it says are Hezbollah threats in southern Lebanon, as it says it is allowed to do per the agreement.

Now, however, Salam charges that Jerusalem has been unwilling to engage with Beirut to resolve a border disagreement that has seen IDF troops remain stationed at five key points on the Lebanese side of the border even after the rest of the Israeli military withdrew.

“They ask for negotiations and when we show readiness, they don’t agree to the rendes-vouz,” Salam tells Bloomberg, adding that he plans to raise the issue with the US, which has overseen the ceasefire.

He argues that the locations still held by Israel within Lebanon “have no military or security value,” and that they are instead being used as “a tool to pressure the Lebanese.”

Responding to Israeli criticism that the Lebanese army isn’t deploying quickly enough in southern Lebanon, Salam argues that his country’s military is working as fast as it can, but has limited resources.

“We need to recruit more people into the army and we need to better equip the army and we need to be able to raise the salaries of the army,” he says.

Nevertheless, he says, Beirut is still “on track” to deploy fully across the country’s south by the end of the month and demilitarize Hezbollah there — a condition of the ceasefire agreement that the Iran-backed terror group has repeatedly said it will not agree to.