Israel’s strikes on the group “Hezbollah” “should encourage negotiations and make them much more serious, not the other way around,” B. Netanyahu’s spokesperson Doron Spielman told the news agency AFP.
“I think that will be the case. I hope it will encourage these negotiations, because the enemy here is clear, and that enemy is Hezbollah,” he said.
Israel stated that it struck after Hezbollah carried out an attack in an area that Israel calls a security zone in southern Lebanon. Three Israeli soldiers were seriously injured, Netanyahu’s office reported.
Spielman said that Israel still adheres to an agreement brokered by the US, under which Lebanese security forces are to gradually take control and remove Hezbollah – the Shiite movement supported by the Iranian clerical regime, which has long played a key role in Lebanon.
“We believe in this agreement. We very much hope that the Lebanese Armed Forces will be able to engage in actions and together we will remove Hezbollah from the scene,” Spielman said.
Israel stated that in taking retaliatory action it struck the headquarters of Hezbollah’s elite forces “Radwan,” during which the commander Ali Samiras al Hajas Hassan was killed.
The Jewish state acknowledged that members of A. S. H. Hassan’s family were also at the headquarters at the time, but claimed they were not the target.
Lebanese officials earlier reported that seven people, including several children, were killed in an Israeli strike in the village of Ansar, and four more people were killed in another strike in a different location.
