Lebanese president defends bid for talks with Israel to stop offensive

In a televised Easter address, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun defends his decision to seek negotiations with Israel to stop airstrikes and a growing ground incursion by troops into the south of the country.

Responding to journalists’ questions, Aoun says Israel has not yet responded to Lebanon’s demand for a ceasefire as a precondition for entering full negotiations.

But he says that talks are the only way to end Israel’s military campaign against Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group, fearing it will leave the country in ruins.

“It may be that Israel wants to operate in southern Lebanon as it does in Gaza, but our duty is not to drag it into doing what it does in Gaza,” he says. “Negotiations are not surrender. Gaza is destroyed and more than 70,000 have been killed, and only afterward do they negotiate. We have no choice but to negotiate to stop the tragedy in Lebanon.”

He adds that he is calling on countries to intervene to stop what he describes as “this madness,” referring to Israel’s strikes.

Israel launched its military operation in response to Hezbollah rocket fire, which the Tehran-backed terror group resumed last month in response to the war in Iran.

Aoun also aims oblique criticism at Hezbollah for sowing internal discord and dragging Lebanon into the war, saying anyone who “harms civil peace is serving Israel, and that is worse than the Israeli attacks.”

On the expelled Iranian ambassador, who has refused to leave the country, the president says that “he is not an ambassador; he is at the Iranian embassy without an official role.”