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Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israel “must defeat Hizbollah in Lebanon”, as he vowed to continue fighting the militant group until Israeli citizens displaced by the conflict could return to their homes.
In a defiant address to the UN General Assembly, during which he also pledged to keep fighting in Gaza and accused the UN of anti-Israel bias, the Israeli prime minister insisted Israel would no longer tolerate Hizbollah’s presence on its border with Lebanon.
“We won’t rest until our citizens can return safely to their homes. We will not accept a terror army perched on our northern border, able to perpetrate another October 7-style massacre,” he said.
“As long as Hizbollah chooses the path of war, Israel has no choice, and Israel has every right to remove this threat and return our citizens to our homes safely — and that is exactly what we’re doing.”
The speech came after US President Joe Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron earlier this week put forward a proposal for a 21-day truce in a last-ditch bid to prevent the hostilities between Israel and Hizbollah from spiralling into all-out war.
US officials hope the truce would allow time to negotiate a more durable ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah, and would also put pressure on Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas to accept the terms of a ceasefire-for-hostages deal in Gaza.
But during his half-hour speech, Netanyahu did not address the US-French proposal. Instead, he pledged to keep up the pressure on Hizbollah, and insisted Israel would also continue its offensive in Gaza until Hamas had been destroyed and the Israeli hostages held there had been freed.
“Israel must . . . defeat Hizbollah in Lebanon. Hizbollah is the quintessential terror organisation in the world today,” he said. “We’ll continue degrading Hizbollah until all our objectives are met.”
Israel and Hizbollah have been exchanging fire since the Lebanese militant group began launching rockets at Israel on October 8 in support of Hamas’s attack on the country the day before.
But over the past two weeks, Israel has sharply escalated the fighting — killing a string of senior Hizbollah officials and launching intense air strikes on the south and east of Lebanon that have so far killed more than 600 people and displaced more than 90,000.
The hostilities continued on Friday morning, with Israeli strikes reported across Lebanon, killing and injuring scores of people.