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Lebanon said an Israeli strike Tuesday left one person dead in the south as Israel said it killed a Hezbollah “platoon commander”, its latest raid despite a ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed group.
President Joseph Aoun, in remarks published on Tuesday by news outlet Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, said he was seeking a state monopoly on bearing arms this year, referring to disarming Hezbollah, whose military positions the Lebanese army is dismantling as part of the truce.
A “drone strike carried out by the Israeli enemy on a vehicle in the town of Aitaroun killed one person and wounded three others including a child”, the health ministry said in a statement.
The Israeli army said in a statement that it “struck and eliminated a platoon commander in Hezbollah’s Special Operations Array” in the area.
Israel has continued to strike Lebanon since the November 27 ceasefire that largely halted more than a year of hostilities with Hezbollah, including two months of all-out war.
The United Nations Human Rights Office said on Tuesday that “at least 71 civilians have been killed by Israeli forces in Lebanon since the ceasefire came into effect”.
Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah said last week that 186 people had been killed since the truce, without saying how many were the group’s fighters.
Lebanon’s health ministry has not responded to AFP requests for updated figures.
The truce accord was based on a UN Security Council resolution that says Lebanese troops and United Nations peacekeepers should be the only forces in south Lebanon, and calls for the disarmament of all non-state groups.
Under the truce, Hezbollah was to withdraw fighters from south of Lebanon’s Litani River and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure there.
Israel was to pull out all its forces from south Lebanon, although it continues to hold five positions that it deems “strategic”.
Lebanon’s army has been deploying in the south near the border as Israeli forces have withdrawn.
– State monopoly –
President Aoun, who was travelling to Qatar on Tuesday, told London-based news outlet Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that “I seek to make 2025 the year of restricting arms to the state”.
“The decision has been taken” on the matter, he said, adding that implementation would be “through dialogue, which I see as bilateral between the presidency and Hezbollah”, according to the report.
Analysts have said the once unthinkable disarmament of Hezbollah could finally be within reach, with the group weakened in the recent war and Washington pushing Lebanon to act and applying pressure to the group’s backer Iran over its nuclear programme.
Aoun floated the idea of Hezbollah members joining the army and being retrained, as happened with various armed groups after Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, according to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
But Lebanon would not “absorb Hezbollah into the army” as a whole, “nor will it become an independent unit” within the force, Aoun added.
A source close to Hezbollah told AFP on Saturday that the group had ceded to the Lebanese army around 190 of its 265 military positions identified south of the Litani.
In an interview on Monday with Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera, Aoun said the army was “dismantling tunnels and warehouses and confiscating weapons bases” south of the Litani “without any problem from Hezbollah”.
He also said the army was “carrying out its duties north of the Litani” without objection from Hezbollah.
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