<\/p>\n
A French soldier was killed and three others wounded in an attack Saturday on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon that appeared to have been carried out by Hezbollah, French President Emmanuel Macron said, an accusation the group has denied.<\/p>\n
The attack follows an agreement between Israel and Lebanon on Thursday for a 10-day ceasefire to negotiate an end to six weeks of fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed group Hezbollah.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything points to Hezbollah being responsible for this attack,\u201d Macron said on X, urging Lebanese authorities to arrest the perpetrators.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But Hezbollah \u2014 which is strongly opposed to the planned talks with Israel \u2014 denied involvement in the attack that killed the French peacekeeper, identified as staff sergeant Florian Montorio.<\/p>\n
\u201cHezbollah denies any connection to the incident that occurred with UNIFIL forces in the Ghandouriyeh-Bint Jbeil area,\u201d it said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The group urged \u201ccaution in making judgments and assigning responsibilities\u201d pending the results of the Lebanese army\u2019s investigation into the incident.<\/p>\n
The fighting in Lebanon \u2014 one of the fronts in the Middle East war \u2014 has seen the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) deployed there repeatedly targeted, by both Israeli and Hezbollah forces.<\/p>\n
Montorio, was caught in an \u201cambush\u201d as his unit headed to a UNIFIL outpost and he died from a \u201cdirect gunshot\u201d, France\u2019s armed forces minister Catherine Vautrin said on X.<\/p>\n
She said the outpost they had been heading to had been \u201ccut off for several days by combat in the area\u201d.<\/p>\n
The ambush was carried out \u201cby an armed group at very close range\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n
Vautrin added that Montorio was \u201cpicked up by his comrades under fire\u201d but they were unable to resuscitate him.<\/p>\n
He is the second French soldier to die since the start of the war in the Middle East, after an Iranian-designed drone killed Arnaud Frion last month in Iraq\u2019s Kurdistan region.<\/p>\n
The attack came as Lebanon is eyeing the first direct negotiations with Israel in decades, a move Lebanon\u2019s President Joseph Aoun insisted was not a \u201cconcession\u201d in an apparent rebuttal of Hezbollah criticism.<\/p>\n
But senior Hezbollah official Mahmud Qamati on Saturday said that his group was \u201cnot concerned with the negotiations being conducted by the state\u201d, saying they were \u201ca failure, weak, defeated\u2026 and submissive negotiations\u201d.<\/p>\n
Aoun condemned the attack and pledged to bring those responsible to justice, while Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said he had ordered an investigation.<\/p>\n
Macron\u2019s office said he held calls with Aoun and Salam to urge them to \u201cguarantee the security of UNIFIL soldiers\u201d.<\/p>\n
UNIFIL, in an online statement, said the peacekeepers \u201ccame under small-arms fire from non-state-actors\u201d as they were \u201cclearing explosive ordnance along a road in the village of Ghanduriyah\u201d to get to the outpost.<\/p>\n
\u201cTragically, one peacekeeper succumbed to his injuries and three others were injured, two of them seriously,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
Its initial assessment indicates the incoming fire was \u201callegedly Hezbollah\u201d, it said, adding that it had launched its own investigation into what \u201cmay amount to war crimes\u201d.<\/p>\n
UNIFIL patrols in south Lebanon near the Israeli border where Israel and Hezbollah have been fighting since last month after the Iran-backed militant group drew Lebanon into the Middle East war with rocket fire at Israel in support of its backer Iran.<\/p>\n
Three Indonesian peacekeepers were killed last month, with a preliminary UN investigation finding one was killed by Israeli tank fire, while the two others were killed by an improvised explosive device likely planted by Hezbollah.<\/p>\n
Other UNIFIL peacekeepers have also been wounded since the war erupted, and in April, Israeli soldiers destroyed surveillance cameras in UNIFIL\u2019s headquarters, the peacekeeping body said.<\/p>\n
Last week, an Israeli tank twice rammed peacekeeping vehicles, causing damage but no injuries, according to UNIFIL.<\/p>\n
United Nations peacekeepers have served as a buffer between Lebanon and Israel for decades, but their mandate concludes at the end of this year.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Rephrase in a different way as if you were a native American speaker as a content creation expert and do not talk about yourself or your experience in the text and do not show yourself as an artificial intelligence who wrote and fill the bullet point in the topic and speak the heart of the topic itself and dont take date of blog in ther first and dont take text like box of newsliter subscribe on post from content and romove all linke insert in content and and remove all affiliate disclosure phrases on content like this “This post may contain Amazon or other affiliate links that allow us to earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Please see our Disclosure Policy for more info” and “#” put in its place bullet point, and romove name of the web site or his links we are take a content from our new creation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A French soldier was killed and three others wounded in an attack Saturday on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon that appeared to have been carried out by Hezbollah, French President Emmanuel Macron said, an accusation the group has denied. The attack follows an agreement between Israel and Lebanon on Thursday for a 10-day ceasefire to negotiate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":13980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[940,5719,3092,3096,3097,627,1182,234,3095,771,1006,10497,879,3093,11935,3088,3094,3098],"class_list":["post-13979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-international","tag-american","tag-blames","tag-characters","tag-content","tag-creation","tag-death","tag-dont","tag-experience","tag-expert","tag-france","tag-french","tag-hezbollah","tag-lebanon","tag-native","tag-peacekeepers","tag-rephrase","tag-speaker","tag-talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13981,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13979\/revisions\/13981"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}