The United States is leading a diplomatic drive to deter Israel from striking Lebanon’s capital Beirut or major civil infrastructure in response to a deadly rocket attack on the Golan Heights.
Washington is racing to avert a full-blown war between Israel and the Iranian-backed Lebanese movement Hizbullah after the attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan killed 12 youths at the weekend, according to five people with knowledge of the effort, who include Lebanese and Iranian officials plus Middle Eastern and European diplomats.
Israel and the US have blamed Hizbullah for the rocket strike, though the group has denied responsibility.
Irish citizens who are in Lebanon have been urged to leave the country by commercial means, with Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin saying the Government “may be limited” in the level of assistance it can provide if the security situation deteriorates.
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“A significant number of the Irish community in Beirut are aid workers and most of them have decided to stay,” said Enda Nevin, from Co Galway, a project development manager with French NGO Acted.
Speaking from the Lebanese capital on Monday, he said: “Everyone’s just in a wait-and-see mode ... Beirut is very much carrying on as normal: the cafes, the restaurants and the bars are open.”
About 100 Irish citizens living in Lebanon have registered with the Irish embassy in Cairo, Egypt, according to a spokesman for Mr Martin.
The focus of the high-speed diplomacy has been to constrain Israel’s response by urging it against targeting densely populated Beirut, the southern suburbs of the city that form Hizbullah’s heartland, or key infrastructure such as airports and bridges, sources said. They requested anonymity to discuss confidential details not previously reported.
Lebanon’s deputy parliament speaker Elias Bou Saab, who said he had been in contact with US mediator Amos Hochstein since Saturday’s Golan attack, said Israel could avert the threat of major escalation by sparing the capital and its environs.
“If they avoid civilians and they avoid Beirut and its suburbs, then their attack could be well calculated,” he said.
Israeli officials have said their country wants to hurt Hizbullah but not drag the region into all-out war. The two Middle Eastern and European diplomats said Israel hadn’t made any commitment to avoiding strikes on Beirut, its suburbs or civil infrastructure.
The US state department said it wouldn’t comment on the specifics of diplomatic conversations. “Our support for Israel’s security is ironclad and unwavering against all Iran-backed threats, including Hizbullah,” a spokesperson said.
White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that Israel had every right to respond to the Golan strike. “But nobody wants a broader war,” he added. “As for conversations over the weekend, you bet we’ve had them and we had them at multiple levels. But I’m not going to detail the guts of those conversations.”
The office of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu didn’t respond to a request for comment, while Hizbullah declined to comment.
The five people with knowledge of the diplomatic push over the past two days either have been involved in the conversations or have been briefed on them. They said the efforts aimed to achieve a calibrated approach similar to that which contained April’s exchange of missile and drone attacks between Israel and Iran, sparked by an Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
An Iranian official said the United States had also conveyed messages to Tehran at least three times since Saturday’s attack on the Golan Heights, “warning that escalating the situation would be detrimental to all parties”.
Hizbullah is the most powerful of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” network of regional proxy groups and allied with Palestinian group Hamas. It has been trading fire with the Israeli military across Lebanon’s southern border since the Gaza war erupted last October.
A French diplomat said that since the Golan attack, Paris had also been involved in passing messages between Israel and Hizbullah to de-escalate the situation.
France has historic ties with Lebanon, which was under French mandate from 1920 until it gained independence in 1943.
The French foreign ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The Israeli Homefront Command, a military unit responsible for protecting civilians, has not changed any of its instructions to citizens so far, an indication that the military is not expecting imminent danger from Hizbullah or any other group.
On Sunday, Mr Netanyahu’s security cabinet, which comprises 10 ministers and has dictated policy on the Gaza war and Hizbullah, authorised the premier and the defence minister to “decide on the manner and timing of the response” against Hizbullah.
– Additional reporting: Reuters
