People inspect the destruction at the site of an overnight Israeli airstrike on the Gouraud Barracks neighbourhood of Lebanon's eastern city of Baalbek on 29 October 2024. (Photo: Nidal SOLH / AFP) US State Department officials have identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilian harm during Israel’s military operations in Gaza involving US-furnished weapons, but have not taken further action on any of them, sources said this week.
The US on Wednesday urged Israel to protect civilian lives and cultural sites in Lebanon after Israel began heavy airstrikes on the historic city of Baalbek and surrounding villages in the eastern Bekaa region.
US working on Lebanon truce, sources say, as Israel bombards Baalbek
US mediators are working on a proposal to halt hostilities between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, starting with a 60-day ceasefire, two sources said on Wednesday, as Israel pressed its offensive by bombarding Lebanon’s historic city of Baalbek.
The sources – a person briefed on the talks and a senior diplomat working on Lebanon – told Reuters the two-month period would be used to finalise full implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, adopted in 2006 to keep southern Lebanon free of arms outside state control.
The White House said that officials Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein would visit Israel on Thursday. A US official had said they would be there to discuss a range of issues “including Gaza, Lebanon, hostages, Iran and broader regional matters”.
Hezbollah’s new leader Naim Qassem said the Iran-backed armed group would agree to a ceasefire within certain parameters if Israel wanted to stop the war, but that Israel had so far not agreed to any proposal that could be discussed.
It was Qassem’s first speech as secretary-general, a day after Hezbollah announced his election to the post after Israel assassinated the group’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The latest ceasefire efforts come as Israel’s operation against the heavily armed, Shi’ite Muslim militia Hezbollah in Lebanon continues to expand.
Its army launched heavy airstrikes on Wednesday on the eastern city of Baalbek, famed for its Roman temples, and nearby villages, security sources told Reuters, following an Israeli evacuation order. Tens of thousands of mostly Shi’ite Lebanese, including many who had sought shelter in Baalbek from other areas, fled after the warning was issued.
Responding to a question about Israel’s bombardment of Baalbek, the US State Department reiterated on Wednesday that Washington supported Israel’s right to go after legitimate Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. But it said Israel had to do so in a way that did not threaten civilians, critical civilian infrastructure and significant cultural heritage sites.
Bilal Raad, regional head of the Lebanese civil defence, said the largely volunteer force had been calling on residents to leave via megaphones after receiving phone calls from someone identifying themselves as being from the Israeli military.
“People are all over each other, the whole city is in a panic trying to figure out where to go, there’s a huge traffic jam,” he said ahead of the bombardment.
Some of the areas they are fleeing to are already full of people displaced earlier by the Hezbollah-Israel conflict.
Antoine Habchi, a lawmaker representing Christian-majority Deir al-Ahmar to the northwest of Baalbek, said more than 10,000 people were already sheltering in homes, schools and churches.
“We welcome everyone, of course, but we need immediate government help so that these people don’t stay out in the cold,” he told Reuters.
Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 11 people had been killed in an Israeli bombing of one town in the Bekaa Valley region where Baalbek is located but did not have an immediate toll for the entire day’s strikes.
It said 2,822 people have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon since October 2023. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced.
Following the airstrikes, the Israeli military said it had targeted Hezbollah fuel reservoirs in the Bekaa. A Lebanese security source told Reuters that a massive explosion followed by a huge column of black smoke had been caused by strikes on Hezbollah’s fuel stores.
For a third consecutive day, Hezbollah reported intense fighting with Israeli forces in or around the southern town of Khiyam – the deepest Israel’s troops are reported to have penetrated Lebanon since fighting escalated five weeks ago.
Hezbollah also said that it had targeted a military camp southeast of Tel Aviv in Israel with missiles.
Resolution 1701 has been the cornerstone of talks to end the past year of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah, which erupted along the border in parallel with the war in Gaza and has dramatically intensified since late September.
“We’d like to reiterate that we seek a diplomatic resolution that fully implements 1701 and gets both Israeli and Lebanese citizens back to their homes on both sides of the border,” said Sama Habib, spokesperson at the US Embassy in Beirut, when asked about the reported proposal.
US envoy Hochstein told reporters in Beirut earlier this month that better mechanisms for enforcement were needed as neither Israel nor Lebanon had fully implemented the 18-year-old resolution.
The two sources told Reuters that the 60-day truce had replaced a proposal last month by the United States and other countries that envisioned a ceasefire for 21 days as a prelude to 1701 coming into full force.
Both, however, cautioned that the deal could still fall through. “There is an earnest push to get to a ceasefire, but it is still hard to get it to materialise,” the diplomat said.
The push for a ceasefire for Lebanon comes days before the US presidential election and alongside a similar diplomatic drive to end hostilities in Gaza.
US tracks nearly 500 civilian-harm incidents in Israel’s Gaza war
US State Department officials have identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilian harm during Israel’s military operations in Gaza involving US-furnished weapons, but have not taken further action on any of them, three sources, including a US official familiar with the matter, said this week.
The incidents – some of which might have violated international humanitarian law, according to the sources – have been recorded since 7 October 2023, when the Gaza war began. They are being collected by the State Department’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons.
State Department officials gathered the incidents from public and non-public sources, including media reporting, civil society groups and foreign government contacts.
The mechanism, which was established in August 2023 to be applied to all countries that receive US arms, has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment, and coordinated department action, according to a December internal State Department cable reviewed by Reuters.
None of the Gaza cases had yet reached the third stage of action, said a former US official familiar with the matter. Options, the former official said, could range from working with Israel’s government to help mitigate harm, to suspending existing arms export licences or withholding future approvals.
The Washington Post first reported the nearly 500 incidents on Wednesday.
The Biden administration has said it was reasonable to assess that Israel had breached international law in the conflict, but assessing individual incidents was “very difficult work”, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday.
“We are conducting those investigations, and we are conducting them thoroughly, and we are conducting them aggressively, but we want to get to the right answer, and it’s important that we not jump to a pre-ordained result, and that we not skip any of the work,” Miller said, adding that Washington consistently raised concerns over civilian harm with Israel.
The administration of President Joe Biden has long said it is yet to definitively assess an incident in which Israel has violated international humanitarian law during its operation in Gaza.
Israel’s military conduct has come under increasing scrutiny as its forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the enclave’s health authorities.
Lebanon ceasefire possible within weeks – Cypriot president
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides said on Wednesday he and President Joe Biden discussed US efforts to halt hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, and expressed optimism that a ceasefire could be reached in the next weeks. Christodoulides, speaking after his meeting with Biden at the White House, said the two leaders discussed the US efforts, but declined to give any details.
Christodoulides said, “The situation changes every day. Today, I’m kind of optimistic that we can reach a ceasefire in the next one, two weeks,” underscoring the urgency of ending the fighting in the region.
Christodoulides said Cyprus, an EU member, was sending humanitarian assistance to Gaza, and stood ready to evacuate third-country nationals in the region if needed.
He said he had spoken recently with the leaders of Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon about the situation there, calling the push for a ceasefire in the region the most important concern.
Top US officials headed to Middle East for talks – White House
Officials including CIA Director William Burns and envoys Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, will visit Egypt and Israel on Thursday, the White House confirmed, as Washington seeks to de-escalate tensions in the region.
Centcom’s commander, US Army General Erik Kurilla, also is in the region and will visit Israel as part of the American effort to discuss Iran, Lebanon and the release of hostages in Gaza, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Wednesday.
The latest diplomatic push comes amid efforts to halt hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.
Asked about the potential for such a ceasefire, potentially within the next week or two, Jean-Pierre said the White House remained hopeful and was committed to reaching some kind of diplomatic resolution, but gave no other indication about the negotiations.
“We’re going to certainly be optimistic,” she said at a regular daily press briefing.
Jean-Pierre also said the US was talking to Israel’s government about the Israeli parliament’s vote banning the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA and that the Biden administration was troubled by any legislation that could shut down the aid agency.
US urges Israel to protect civilian lives, cultural sites in Lebanon
The United States on Wednesday urged Israel to protect civilian lives and cultural sites in Lebanon after Israel began heavy airstrikes on the historic city of Baalbek and surrounding villages in the eastern Bekaa region.
While the US supports Israel’s right to pursue legitimate Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said it was critical its operations did not threaten civilians, especially in densely populated areas such as Baalbek.
Following an Israeli evacuation order, Israel’s army launched heavy airstrikes on Wednesday on the eastern city of Baalbek.
“We have made clear that the campaign they are conducting in Lebanon should not, cannot, must not look like the campaign that they have conducted in Gaza. We do not want to see that type of widespread damage,” Miller said when asked about Baalbek at a regular news briefing.
Miller said the US has ongoing conversations with Israel in pursuit of a diplomatic resolution in Lebanon. Washington would engage with the Israelis privately about the path forward, he said.
The Israeli military had made significant progress in striking and dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure along the border, Miller said.
Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah erupted in parallel with the war in Gaza and has dramatically escalated over the past five weeks.
Israeli coalition wins reprieve in military draft feud
Israel’s government has won another reprieve in a dispute over exemptions of religious Torah students from military service, with ultra-Orthodox parties ditching a demand that a new law on conscription be passed before the budget is approved this week.
Leaders of ultra-Orthodox Haredi parties in the coalition had demanded that parliament pass a new call-up law exempting full-time religious seminary students before a cabinet vote on a so-called austerity 2025 budget due on Thursday.
Without a new law, they had threatened to abstain from the budget debate, potentially crippling government finances in the middle of a war and bringing down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Both Netanyahu and his hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose religious nationalist party represents a different strand of Jewish identity, said the budget had to be passed on time, ruling out a new conscription law.
“Whoever opposes the budget will pay a price and bear full responsibility,” Smotrich told a news conference on Monday, saying there was no contradiction between religious study and service in the army.
The budget includes 40 billion shekels ($10.8 billion) of spending cuts as well as tax increases.
Ultra-Orthodox parties remain adamant on a bill to ultimately exempt full-time Torah students from military service, but agreed to pull the threat to vote against the budget after winning a promise by the state to fund Haredi day care as long as the mother works.
Moshe Roth, a senior lawmaker for United Torah Judaism, one of two ultra-Orthodox parties in the government, said the parties could be satisfied with “an arrangement instead of a law” because they did not want to bring down the government.
German lawyers ask court to block ship allegedly carrying explosives to Israeli company
Human rights lawyers have filed a court appeal in Berlin seeking to block a 150-metric-ton shipment of military-grade explosives aboard German cargo ship MV Kathrin which they say is to be delivered to Israel’s biggest defence contractor.
The European Legal Support Center (ELSC) said on Wednesday the action was filed on behalf of three Palestinians from Gaza, arguing that the shipment of primarily RDX explosives could be used in munitions for Israel’s war in Gaza, potentially contributing to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israel denies accusations that it has committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip, saying its forces abide by international humanitarian law while fighting Palestinian militants who operate in densely populated civilian areas.
Germany-based Lubeca Marine, which owns the MV Kathrin, said the ship “was never scheduled to make any port calls in Israel” and had recently discharged its cargo in Bar, Montenegro.
The company declined to disclose details of the cargo for contractual reasons, but said it complied fully with all international and EU regulations, ensuring necessary permits are obtained before any operations.
The ship has been denied entry at several African and Mediterranean ports, including in Angola, Slovenia, Montenegro and Malta, according to the ELSC.
It said Portuguese authorities recently required the ship to switch from a Portuguese flag to a German flag before it could continue.
In August, Namibian authorities blocked the vessel, which departed from Vietnam’s port of Haiphong, from entering its main harbour, Amnesty International has reported.
Germany’s economy ministry, named in the case because the ship is German-owned and flagged, said it had received letters from lawyers on the matter but declined to comment on them.
The ministry said the MV Kathrin shipment did not constitute an export from Germany, as the explosives were neither loaded nor dispatched from German territory. It said there was no legal basis for requiring an export licence under German law. DM
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