UN troops to ‘stay in all positions’ inside Lebanon despite Israeli threats
UNIFIL positions have come under repeated attacks by the Israeli army in south Lebanon
The UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, confirmed on 14 October that the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) would “stay in all its positions” inside Lebanon after Israeli attacks injured at least five blue helmets.
“The decision was made that UNIFIL would currently stay in all its positions in spite of the calls that were made by the Israel Defense Forces to vacate the positions that are in the vicinity of the Blue Line,” Lacroix told reporters on Monday.
“I want to emphasize that this decision still remains,” he stressed, adding that the plan was confirmed earlier in the day by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The statement came a few hours after the 15-member UN Security Council (UNSC) for the first time unanimously voiced “strong concerns” about the safety of UNIFIL troops.
“Against the backdrop of ongoing hostilities along the Blue Line, the members of the Security Council expressed their strong concerns after several UNIFIL positions came under fire in the past days,” said the council's rotating presidency, currently Switzerland's UN ambassador Pascale Baeriswyl.
“They recalled that UN peacekeepers and UN premises must never be the target of an attack,” the UNSC statement adds, without ever naming Israel.
Over the past week, UN positions and bases in southern Lebanon have come under repeated attacks by the invading army. In the most recent of these, UNIFIL revealed that Israeli tanks “destroyed the position’s main gate and forcibly entered the position.”
According to the Israeli military, the incursion into the UNIFIL base came after fighters from Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles at Israeli troops, wounding at least 25 of them.
The UN decision to keep its troops inside Lebanon came just hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated his call for UNIFIL to “get our of harm's way.”
UNIFIL was founded in response to Israel’s invasion of south Lebanon in 1978.
Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told reporters on Monday that “attacks against peacekeepers are in breach of international law, including international humanitarian law, and they may constitute war crime.”
Last week, Hezbollah accused Israel of using the UN troops as “human shields.”
“The Israeli enemy is attempting to use UNIFIL forces as human shields to cover its failure to advance … The operations room of the Islamic Resistance instructed the fighters to hold back and not engage with the movement to protect the lives of international soldiers,” the Hezbollah statement reads.