Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon on Tuesday and vowed that Israeli troops will not be withdrawing anytime soon.
“Our insistence is that we will not leave southern Lebanon until the threat is removed,” Netanyahu told Israeli troops, according to a statement released by his office. “And as long as Hezbollah is armed and present here, posing a threat to us – we will remain here.”
The Israeli prime minister also boasted of the mass destruction of southern Lebanon villages, which he framed as necessary to create so-called “security zones” in territory near Israel’s border.
“These security zones are a paradigm shift. The meaning is that we no longer allow an army of terrorists to have a foothold on our border. We push them back – that is what you are doing. And we destroy, above ground and underground, basically anything that served them as a means of attacking us,” Netanyahu said.
“Infiltration, attack, terror tunnels, terror villages – all of that is eliminated. This is the directive: leave nothing behind, and you are doing that,” the Israeli leader added.
A day earlier, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who joined Netanyahu during his Lebanon visit, said that Israel decided the Shia villages in southern Lebanon must “disappear” and that no civilians were allowed to return to the areas Israel has destroyed.
Both Netanyahu and Katz have maintained that Israel won’t be leaving Lebanon despite the new agreement signed between Israel and Lebanon, which has been strongly rejected by Hezbollah and other political factions in the country since it allows Israel to continue its occupation.
The deal threatens the implementation of the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which states that all military operations in Lebanon must end and that the “territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon” must be ensured.
