Israel resumed its bombing campaign on Thursday in the Hezbollah-controlled area south of Beirut, as a top U.S. envoy visited Israel to talk to officials there and try to nail down the terms of a cease-fire between the two warring sides.
Amos Hochstein, the senior Biden administration official, was expected to meet on Thursday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Omer Dostri, the prime minister’s spokesman. A day earlier, Mr. Hochstein wrapped up two days of talks with Lebanese officials and spoke of having made “additional progress” in the quest to end Israel’s yearlong conflict with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Speaking to reporters in Beirut on Wednesday, Mr. Hochstein said he would go to Israel “to try to bring this to a close if we can.”
After days of tense calm in the Lebanese capital, Israel issued new evacuation orders early on Thursday for the Dahiya, the densely packed area south of the city where Hezbollah holds sway. That was soon followed by airstrikes, which the Israeli military said had targeted the group’s command headquarters and military infrastructure.
Israel’s attacks in and around Beirut intensified in the run-up to Mr. Hochstein’s visit to Lebanon, a strategy that analysts said was intended to pressure Hezbollah into agreeing to a cease-fire on terms favorable to Israel.
There still appear to be a number of sticking points that would need to be hashed out in any truce deal, including Israeli officials’ demand that they be able to act militarily against Hezbollah if it were to break the terms of an agreement. That is likely to be viewed by Hezbollah and the Lebanese government as an infringement on the country’s sovereignty.
In a televised address on Wednesday during Mr. Hochstein’s visit to Beirut, Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, said that the group had provided its response to the U.S. cease-fire proposal, and that peace now depended on Israel’s response and the “seriousness” of Mr. Netanyahu.
If negotiations broke down, he warned, Hezbollah was prepared for a “long war.”
Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah, a group backed by Iran, escalated in September, and has killed more than 3,500 people in Lebanon and displaced almost a quarter of the population. It is now the bloodiest conflict inside Lebanon since the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990.
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