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Lebanon’s Aoun calls on US to pressure Israel to withdraw
President Joseph Aoun has urged a US military delegation, headed by Major-General Jasper Jeffers, the co-chairman of the cessation of hostilities implementation and monitoring mechanism, to pressure Israel to withdraw from areas it still controls in the country and to release Lebanese prisoners.
Aoun told the delegation that the Lebanese army is carrying out its work along the border with Israel, where troops have been confiscating weapons and preventing armed presence.
Israel bombs Syria in ‘warning strike’
The Israeli military carried out an attack against what it says are “extremists” who were preparing to attack members of the Druze minority in the Syrian town of Sahnaya, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said in a joint statement with Defence Minister Israel Katz.
“Israel expects it to act to prevent harm to the Druze,” it added, addressing Syria’s leadership.
Their comments come after sectarian clashes between forces linked to Syria’s new authorities and Druze fighters spread overnight near Damascus, leaving 13 people dead, state media and a monitor group said.
Deadly clashes the previous night in Jaramana, a mainly Druze and Christian suburb southeast of the capital, followed the circulation of an audio recording attributed to a Druze citizen and deemed blasphemous.
Israel has been positioning itself as a defender of the religious minority group for the last several years, using its defence of them as pretext to carry out bombing raids on both Syria and Lebanon.
Last year, a bombing in the Druze town of Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, killed at least 12 people and wounded 30 others. Israel accused Lebanon’s Hezbollah of responsibility, which it denied. The weeks after saw a heightening of tensions between Israel and Hezbollah and a rash of bombings across disparate areas of Lebanon, with Israel saying its actions were taken to punish the attackers and defend the Druze.
