Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati announced on Tuesday that U.S. officials have promised Israeli strikes on the capital city of Beirut will lessen.
Mikati said he met with U.S. authorities last week who he said were “serious about pressuring Israel to reach a ceasefire.”
The pressure to lighten military force on Lebanon comes after an Israeli strike on Monday that targeted a four-story residential building in Beirut. The attack reportedly killed at least 22 people, including 12 women and two children, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“During our contacts with the American authorities last week, we received a kind of guarantee to reduce the escalation in the southern suburbs and Beirut,” Mikati said, according to a translation from Reuters.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed during a Tuesday press conference that the U.S. has expressed grave concern to Israel regarding the attacks on Beirut.
“We have made clear to Israel that we oppose the bombing campaign that they have been launching over recent weeks in Beirut,” Miller told reporters. “We have seen strikes diminish in recent days and will continue to watch it very carefully.”
Asked for the reason behind its opposition to the Beirut bombing campaign, Miller said it is “largely the civilian toll.”
“They do have the right to go after legitimate terrorist targets,” Miller said. “We see Hezbollah continue to operate across Lebanon, and Israel does have a right to defend itself against those terrorists who pose a threat to the state of Israel. But we have real concerns about the nature of the campaign that we saw roll out across Beirut over the past weeks, and we made those concerns publicly.”
Miller affirmed Israel’s legitimate right to “attack and degrade the Hezbollah battalions that continue to be just over the border from northern Israel,” adding that the U.S. wants “a diplomatic solution” via a meaningful implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701.
“[U.N. 1701] has requirements for Hezbollah that they have not fulfilled, so it is appropriate for Israel to conduct military operations to degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities so maybe they will pull back beyond the Litani River and finally agree to the provisions of 1701 that they have blown through for 18 years now,” he said.
Resolution 1701, a 2006 document that calls for a total end of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon and the removal of Israeli troops from the region, bans Hezbollah from establishing a presence south of the Litani River. The terrorist group has continuously flouted this stipulation, which Israel claims justifies its campaign to remove hostile actors from the area via military force.
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Miller’s appeal to U.N. 1701 echoes a statement from Mikati last month in which he said Lebanon is ready and willing to implement the resolution with military action south of the Litani.
A Hezbollah drone killed four 19-year-old Israel Defense Forces soldiers at an army base on Sunday in central Israel. Several others were severely wounded in the attack, with a total of at least 60 people injured.
It marks the most casualties caused by an attack from Hezbollah since Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon approximately two weeks ago.