BEIRUT:
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said Thursday that he was determined to disarm Hezbollah, a step it has come under heavy US pressure to take, despite the group’s protests that doing so would serve Israeli goals.
Hezbollah and Israel fought a two-month war last year that left the militant group badly weakened, though it retains part of its arsenal.
Israel has kept up its air strikes on Hezbollah targets despite a November ceasefire, and has threatened to continue them until the group has been disarmed.
In a speech on Thursday, Aoun said Beirut was demanding “the extension of the Lebanese state’s authority over all its territory, the removal of weapons from all armed groups including Hezbollah and their handover to the Lebanese army”.
He added it was every politician’s duty “to seize this historic opportunity and push without hesitation towards affirming the army and security forces’ monopoly on weapons over all Lebanese territory… in order to regain the world’s confidence”.
Under the November ceasefire, Hezbollah was to withdraw its fighters north of the Litani river, about 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the Israeli border.
Israel was meant to withdraw all its troops from Lebanon, but has kept them in five areas it deems strategic.
The truce was based on a two-decade-old UN Security Council resolution that said only the Lebanese military and UN peacekeepers should possess weapons in the country’s south, and that all non-state groups should be disarmed.
However, that resolution went unfulfilled for years, with Hezbollah’s arsenal before the latest war seen as far superior to the army’s, and the group wielding extensive political influence
