Biden, Macron 'set to announce Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire' - sources; Netanyahu's Cabinet to vote on truce deal

The pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper reported that Biden and Macron would declare a 60-day ceasefire on Tuesday. 

A senior Israeli official said on Monday that Israel’s Cabinet will meet on Tuesday to approve a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah, while a Lebanese official said Beirut had been told by the US that an accord could be announced “within hours”.

Biden, Macron set to announce Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire – Lebanese sources

US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron are expected to announce a ceasefire between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel within 36 hours under existing plans, four senior Lebanese sources said on Monday, 25 November.

The French presidency and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Earlier, the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper reported that Biden and Macron would declare a 60-day ceasefire on Tuesday. Officials in Washington declined to respond when asked about a possible announcement on Tuesday. In Paris, officials said only that talks were ongoing.

Israeli Cabinet to meet Tuesday to vote on Lebanon ceasefire deal - official

A senior Israeli official said on Monday that Israel’s Cabinet will meet on Tuesday to approve a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah, while a Lebanese official said Beirut had been told by the US that an accord could be announced “within hours”.

The signs of a diplomatic breakthrough were accompanied by heavy Israeli air strikes on Beirut’s Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs, as Israel pressed on with the offensive it launched in September after almost a year of cross-border hostilities.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on reports that both Israel and Lebanon had agreed to the text of a deal. But the senior Israeli official told Reuters that Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting was intended to approve the text.

Israeli officials had said earlier that a deal to end the war was getting closer though some issues remained, while two senior Lebanese officials voiced guarded optimism even as Israel continued to bombard Lebanon and Hezbollah kept up rocket fire.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said Israel would maintain an ability to strike southern Lebanon under any agreement. Lebanon has previously objected to wording that would grant Israel such a right.

The US has pushed for a deal to end more than a year of hostilities between Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel, which erupted in parallel with Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, and has drastically escalated over the past two months.

In Beirut, Elias Bou Saab, Lebanon’s deputy parliamentary speaker, told Reuters there were “no serious obstacles” left to start implementing a US-proposed ceasefire with Israel, “unless Netanyahu changes his mind”.

He said the proposal would entail an Israeli military withdrawal from south Lebanon and regular Lebanese army troops deploying in the border region, long a Hezbollah stronghold, within 60 days.

A sticking point on who would monitor compliance with the ceasefire had been resolved in the past 24 hours with an agreement to set up a five-country committee, including France and chaired by the US, he said.

A Western diplomat said another stumbling block had been the sequencing of Israel’s withdrawal, the Lebanese army’s deployment and the return of displaced Lebanese to their homes in south Lebanon.

Israeli airstrikes on Beirut continue 

Hostilities have intensified in parallel with the diplomatic flurry: over the weekend, Israel carried out powerful air strikes, one of which killed at least 29 people in central Beirut, while Hezbollah unleashed one of its biggest rocket salvoes yet on Sunday, firing 250 missiles.

In Beirut, Israeli air strikes levelled more of the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs on Monday, sending clouds of debris billowing over the Lebanese capital.

Efforts to clinch a truce appeared to advance last week when US mediator Amos Hochstein declared significant progress at talks in Beirut, then held meetings in Israel.

Michael Herzog, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, told Israel’s GLZ radio an agreement “could happen within days … We just need to close the last corners”, according to a post on X by GLZ senior anchorman Efi Triger.

Israel has dealt major blows to Hezbollah, killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah and other top commanders, and inflicting massive destruction in areas of Lebanon where the group holds sway.

Israel says it had no choice but to launch its ground and air campaign, to allow tens of thousands of Israelis to return to homes they were forced to evacuate after Hezbollah began firing across the border a day after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 that precipitated the war in Gaza.

Lebanon’s health ministry says Israeli attacks have killed 3,768 people in Lebanon and forced more than a million people from their homes. Its casualty figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Hezbollah strikes have killed 45 civilians in northern Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. At least 73 Israeli soldiers have been killed in northern Israel and the Golan Heights, and in combat in southern Lebanon, according to Israeli authorities.

The outgoing US administration of President Joe Biden has emphasised diplomacy to end the Lebanon conflict, even as all negotiations to halt the parallel war in Gaza are frozen.

Diplomacy over Lebanon has focused on restoring a ceasefire based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last major war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

It requires Hezbollah to pull its fighters back around 30km from the Israeli border, behind the Litani River, and the regular Lebanese army to enter the frontier region.

Israel and Hezbollah have accused each other of failing to implement the resolution in the past; Israel says a new ceasefire must allow it the means to strike any Hezbollah fighters or weapons that remain south of the river.

Any agreement could reveal rifts in Netanyahu’s right-leaning government. The far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said Israel must press on with the war until “absolute victory”. Addressing Netanyahu on X, he said: “It is not too late to stop this agreement!”

But agriculture minister Avi Dichter said Israel should reach an agreement in Lebanon. “If we say ‘no’ to Hezbollah being south of the Litani, we mean it,” he told journalists.

Hezbollah leader Sheikh Naim Qassem said last week that the group had reviewed and given feedback on the US ceasefire proposal, and any truce was now in Israel’s hands.

G7 seeks unity on ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu

The Group of Seven (G7) democracies are seeking a common position on the arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued last week by the International Criminal Court (ICC), Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said in Fiuggi on Monday.

“We need to be united on this,” Tajani said, after hosting the first working session of a two-day meeting of foreign ministers from G7 nations.

The US, part of the G7, has rejected the ICC decision, with President Joe Biden describing it as outrageous.

Tajani, part of a coalition government that has itself appeared divided on the ICC issue, said he wanted the G7 to speak with one voice.

“We have talked about it; let’s see if we can have a part in the final communiqué dedicated to this; we are working to find an agreement," Tajani added.

The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, his former defence chief Yoav Gallant, and a Hamas leader, Ibrahim Al-Masri, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.

Israel condemned the decision as shameful and absurd.

Israel has said it killed Masri, also known as Mohammed Deif, in an airstrike in July, but Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied this.

Tajani said he invited colleagues from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Qatar to join the G7 meeting in Fiuggi, a spa town about 80km from Rome.

German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said discussions were taking place while prospects were picking up for a breakthrough Lebanon ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah.

“We are currently discussing with our partners from the Gulf States and the Arab world how we can, in this situation, at least perhaps resolve one of the major challenges, the situation in Lebanon, and finally achieve a ceasefire,” she said.

“The momentum now seems to be closer than it was a few days or even a few weeks ago,” Baerbock added.

Iran’s Khamenei calls for death sentence for Israeli leaders

The supreme leader of Iran, which backs the Hamas and Hezbollah militants fighting Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, said on Monday that death sentences should be issued for Israeli leaders, not arrest warrants.

Commenting on the ICC’s decision to issue the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: “They issued an arrest warrant, that’s not enough… Death sentence must be issued for these criminal leaders.”

Norway drops investigation into suspected links to Lebanon exploding pagers

Norway’s PST security police force said on Monday it had found no grounds to further investigate Norwegian links to the supply of booby-trapped pagers to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which exploded in September killing dozens of people and wounding thousands.

Israel has acknowledged responsibility for the pager attacks, which took Hezbollah by surprise and were followed by a major air and ground military campaign against the Iran-backed militant group.

Norway’s PST had launched a preliminary investigation into any Norwegian link to the case after it emerged that a Norwegian man was listed as the owner of a Bulgarian company under investigation in Bulgaria over possible links to the case.

“PST’s overall assessment of the findings in the case indicates that there is no basis for initiating an ordinary investigation within our mandate,” PST’s lawyer Haris Hrenovica told Reuters on Monday.

Bulgaria’s security agency, DANS, said on 20 September it had “indisputably established” that no pagers used in the Lebanon attack were made or exported from Bulgaria.

The Norwegian owner of the Bulgarian firm under investigation, Rinson Jose (39), left Norway for the United States on 17 September, the day the pagers exploded in Lebanon.

He had worked in sales at a Norwegian employer, DN Media Group, which filed a missing persons case with the police. Police said they closed the missing persons case on 5 November after Jose contacted the employer.

Norwegian authorities did not reveal Jose’s whereabouts. When Reuters called his Norwegian phone number on Monday, a voice message said the phone was switched off. He did not return a request for comment on WhatsApp.

Rains flood tents of Gaza’s displaced as Israel steps up strikes

Heavy rains flooded tent encampments of displaced Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Monday, adding seasonal winter misery to communities already devastated by 13 months of war.

Downpours overnight inundated tents and in some places washed away the plastic and cloth shelters used by displaced Gazans, most of whom have been uprooted several times during the conflict between Israel and Hamas militants.

Some placed water buckets on the ground to protect mats from leaks and dug trenches to drain water away from their tents.

Many tents used early in the war have now worn out and no longer offer protection, but the price of new tents and plastic sheeting has shot up beyond the means of displaced families.

Suad Al-Sabea, a mother of six from northern Gaza, now lives inside a classroom with broken windows at a school housing displaced families in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

Sabea sells the bread she bakes in a wood-fuelled earth oven to make a living for her children. But rainwater spoiled the flour and damaged the oven, threatening to put her out of work.

“I was scared of life or death, now we worry about the rain,” she said.

“The dough drowned in water, and many mattresses drowned in water. It was raining on top of my head and I kept baking to provide for my children,” Sabea told Reuters.

Some other encampments closer to the beach were flooded and some tents were swept away by high waves.

“The sea took away my little daughter; thank God we were able to rescue her,” said Mariam Abu Saqer, who used to live in a tent by the beach before it was flooded.

“Where should we go, wherever we go, they tell us there is no space,” she said.

The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said about 10,000 tents were either washed away or damaged due to the winter storm, appealing for international help to provide displaced families with tents.

The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said thousands of displaced people were affected by seasonal flooding.

The UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA said in a post on X that winter’s first rains mean even more suffering.

“Around half a million people are at risk in areas of flooding,” it said. “The situation will only get worse with every drop of rain, every bomb, every strike.”

Israel intensifies strikes on Gaza

Meanwhile, Israeli military strikes intensified across the enclave. In Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, an Israeli air strike killed at least four people, medics said, while tanks deepened their incursions in the northern edge of two towns of Beit Hanoun, and in Beit Lahiya and Jabalia, the largest of the enclave’s eight historic refugee camps.

Medics said seven Palestinians were killed by two Israeli airstrikes in the area of Jabalia.

On Monday, residents said Israeli planes dropped new leaflets on Beit Lahiya ordering remaining residents to leave to the south, saying the area would come under attack and providing them with a map.

Residents said Israeli forces had blown up hundreds of houses since renewing operations in an area that Israel said months ago had been cleared of militants.

Palestinians say Israel appears determined to depopulate the area permanently to create a buffer zone along the northern edge of Gaza, an accusation Israel denies.

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 44,200 people, and uprooted nearly the entire population at least once, according to Gaza officials, while reducing wide swathes of the narrow coastal territory to rubble.

The war erupted in response to a cross-border attack by Hamas-led militants on 7 October 2023 in which gunmen killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies. DM

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