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Hezbollah’s supporters and many others in Lebanon see the recent agreement with Israel as a ‘surrender of sovereignty’.
Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem refused framework agreement signed by Lebanon and Israel in Washington DC, calling it “shameful, shameful and a surrender of sovereignty” to Beirut.
In his statement released on Saturday, Qassem rejected the link between Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah, which is a key part of the US-brokered deal signed on Friday.
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The Hezbollah leader also accused the Lebanese government of agreeing to Israel’s occupation of Israel “for many years to come” by signing an agreement with Israel, saying that it “could cause these countries to become Zionist”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other officials have said that Israel can remain in Lebanon regardless of disarming Hezbollah.
“We are there until Hezbollah disarms and I think beyond that, because we need a secure border,” Smotrich. he said earlier this week.
The agreement does not force Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon.
As Al Jazeera’s Lebanese journalist Zeina Khodr put it: “The word to remove is not in the scriptures”
On the contrary, Khodr said that the text is “a way to a culture (between Israel and Lebanon) – the two countries recognize each other that they have the right to exist in ‘peace’, to declare the intention to end the war, to conduct negotiations directly under the US bank, to establish regular channels of direct communication and to start writing a peace and security agreement”.
After the signing, Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon made their anger known, marching through the streets of Beirut on Friday evening, burning tires and blocking the road to the airport.
They were protesting the agreement, as well as the Israeli army remaining in the Lebanese territory and continuing the Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon.
Despite the agreement, the National News Agency in Lebanon (NNA) said that Israeli forces bombed near the southern villages of Markaba and Nabatieh al-Fawqa on Saturday morning.
The NNA said the Israeli army detonated a bomb overnight near the town of Markaba, 1.5km (1 mile) from the Israel-Lebanon border.
Lebanon is finally ‘acting like a country’
Lebanese officials appear to be optimistic about the deal and its potential to end hostilities with neighboring Israel, although Hezbollah was not involved in the deal or the negotiations that led to it.
A member of Lebanon’s parliament and former justice minister, Ashraf Rifi, praised the deal, saying Lebanon was “behaving like a country”.
“It is no longer acceptable for Lebanese elections to remain slaves to the Iranian project, or for Hezbollah to continue to control the government and its institutions,” he said.
Lebanese MP and leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, Gebran Bassil, said that the agreement between Israel and Lebanon “requires proper action”.
In response to the protests led by Hezbollah, prosecutor Ahmad Rami al-Hajj issued a decree, tasking Lebanese security forces to quell the riots, NNA reported. The judge also requested that the security agencies work to identify the rioters so they can be arrested.
Alon Pinkas, former Israeli ambassador and ambassador in New York, told Al Jazeera that “he is very doubtful and doubtful that (an agreement) will be possible because the agreement is between Israel and Lebanon and the US, and Israel and Lebanon do not have any problem or any problem; the problem here is Hezbollah”.
Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah he told Al Jazeera that any attempt by the Lebanese army to enforce the Washington agreement would lead to “civil war”.
