JERUSALEM — While insisting that Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon would continue, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that he had authorized direct talks with Lebanon focused on disarming Hezbollah and “the formalization of peaceful relations” between Israel and Lebanon.
“In light of Lebanon’s repeated requests to open direct negotiations with Israel, I instructed the Cabinet yesterday to initiate direct talks with Lebanon as soon as possible,” Netanyahu posted on X, adding: “Israel appreciates the call made today by the Prime Minister of Lebanon to demilitarize Beirut.”
Netanyahu’s announcement came as he otherwise appeared to ignore international calls to respect President Donald Trump’s two-week truce agreement with Iran, and to extend the pause in fighting to Lebanon.
Israel on Thursday continued its bombing campaign against Hezbollah after unleashing some of its heaviest attacks on Beirut a day earlier. Those strikes drew a wave of international condemnation.
“We continue to strike Hezbollah with force, precision, and determination,” Netanyahu posted earlier Thursday morning. “Our message is clear: Whoever acts against Israeli civilians — will be struck. We will continue to strike Hezbollah wherever required, until we restore full security to the residents of the north.”
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam told reporters Thursday that he had requested Lebanese military and security forces “immediately reinforce the state’s full control” over Beirut, including by ensuring weapons were in the hands of only “legitimate security forces.”
Salam’s statement appeared to be a response to the Israeli military’s assertions that Hezbollah was operating deeper in Beirut and elsewhere outside the militant group’s strongholds in southern Lebanon, which Israel said justified Wednesday’s strikes.
Last month, as Israel stepped up its military operations against Hezbollah, Lebanese officials, in a diplomatic scramble from Beirut to Paris to Washington, called for a ceasefire, support for the Lebanese military to seize Hezbollah’s arsenal and eventual direct peace talks with Israel “under American sponsorship,” an adviser to President Joseph Aoun said at the time.
Pakistan, which helped broker this week’s ceasefire between Tehran and the White House, said originally that the halt in hostilities included Lebanon. And senior Iranian officials warned Thursday that Israel’s continuing onslaught could derail the tenuous truce. Already Iran said it was pausing plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz because of the Israeli attacks.
On Wednesday, Israeli forces inflicted heavy destruction in a 10-minute aerial barrage on over 100 targets, including in the center of Beirut, the capital, for the first time in weeks. More than 200 people were killed in the attacks, according to Lebanese authorities.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, wrote on X that Israel’s attacks Wednesday have made it “hard to argue that such heavy-handed actions fall within self-defence.”
“Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into the war,” she said, “but Israel’s right to defend itself does not justify inflicting such massive destruction.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, posting Wednesday on X, held the Israeli prime minister personally responsible and called for Lebanon’s inclusion in a ceasefire. “Netanyahu launches his harshest attack against Lebanon since the offensive began,” Sánchez wrote. “His contempt for life and international law is intolerable.”
In Beirut, the destructive chaos gave way on Thursday to an apocalyptic calm in the capital’s rubble-strewn streets as families buried some of the dead.
“It was a black Wednesday,” said Mike Antoun, a salesman in Beirut’s east. “I want Hezbollah gone, maybe more than Israel, but I cannot see a baby 1-year-old losing her parents or innocent people losing their children. Let them go fight each other in the south.”
Salam declared Thursday a national day of mourning. Central Beirut’s streets were mostly quiet except for the strike sites, where civil defense workers with excavators were still struggling to remove bodies from under piles of rubble.
At a mosque in the capital, several funeral prayers were held amid another reminder of the conflict: Tented settlements for the internally displaced were located across the street. Some 1 million people have been uprooted from their homes by the war. An-Nahar, a leading newspaper in Lebanon, published an advisory on what readers should do if they find a parentless child.
“Targeting Hezbollah leaders is one thing, and the random bombing of areas with civilians is another,” said Jean Pierre, who owns a grocery store on the eastern side of Beirut. Pierre said he believes Israel has a right to defend its residents along the border, but yesterday, he said, was “too much.”
He said he easily could have died — “or my wife or children, for this matter” — had they been passing by in the wrong place when missiles rained down from the sky.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday that the Israeli military killed more than 200 Hezbollah militants the day before, bringing the number of fatalities to more than 1,400.
“The Hezbollah terrorist organization is desperate for a ceasefire, and its Iranian patrons are also applying pressure and making threats — out of heavy fear that Israel will crush Hezbollah,” Katz said.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he told both Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian that he hoped the ceasefire would extend “across all areas of confrontation, including in Lebanon.”
On Wednesday in calls to Lebanon’s president and prime minister, Macron also expressed France’s “full solidarity in the face of the indiscriminate strikes carried out by Israel in Lebanon.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, addressing Kallas directly on X, said her demand to extend the truce to Lebanon was “exactly the Iranian terror regime’s position.” Saar called the Israeli military action in Lebanon a “precise strike.”
Pezeshkian on Thursday called Israel’s renewed attacks a “blatant violation of” and “dangerous sign of deception and lack of commitment to” the ceasefire agreement. “The continuation of these actions will render negotiations meaningless,” the Iranian president said.
Vice President JD Vance chalked the disagreement over Lebanon’s inclusion in the ceasefire up to a “legitimate misunderstanding,” telling reporters: “I think the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon, and it just didn’t.”
But in his announcement of the ceasefire, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who served as a mediator, said the parties “have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”
Netanyahu and the Israeli military soon after said the truce would not stop their offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iranian leaders, however, say a truce in Lebanon is key to the deal.
In a call with Macron, Pezeshkian said ending attacks in Lebanon was one of Iran’s “central conditions,” according to Iranian state media outlet IRNA.
Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, saidthat “Lebanon and the entire Resistance Axis” form an “inseparable part” of the deal. Referencing the Pakistani prime minister’s original statement, Ghalibaf said, “There is no room for denial and backtracking.”
“Ceasefire violations carry explicit costs and STRONG responses. Extinguish the fire immediately,” Galibaf posted Thursday on X.
During a call with Salam, the Lebanese premier, Sharif said he “strongly condemned Israel’s ongoing aggression” and reaffirmed Pakistan’s commitment to advance peace efforts.
El Chammaa and Haidamous reported from Beirut. Heba Farouz Mahfouz in Cairo contributed to this report.
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