Marco Rubio Says U.S. Will Deal Directly With Lebanon, Separate From Iran Talks

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington will negotiate and deal directly with Lebanon’s sovereign government on Lebanon-Israel issues, separate from the US-Iran framework.

Rubio said he had spoken with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun on Friday and that US officials are on the ground, while he framed the “Iranian issue with regards to Lebanon” as “the support and sponsorship of Hezbollah.”

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Rubio also told reporters that “That process is separate. It's separate because Lebanon is a sovereign country,” and he added that “the future of Lebanon belongs to the Lebanese people through their sovereign elected government.”

On the Strait of Hormuz, Rubio said Iran will not be able to charge tolls under any final agreement, warning it would violate international law, and he said a complete end to hostilities is impossible unless Iranian proxies are prevented from launching missiles and drones.

In southern Lebanon, Israeli troops killed two people and wounded two others after soldiers “opened fire with their machine-guns in their direction while they were standing near an excavator that was unblocking a road,” according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA).

Hezbollah denounced the attack as a “blatant” violation of the truce, while the Israeli military said it “struck armed terrorists who posed an immediate threat” to soldiers in the Ali al-Taher ridge area.

Al Jazeera

The Al Jazeera report said the deaths were the first reported from Israeli fire in Lebanon in three days, threatening a United States-brokered ceasefire that had largely held since Sunday.

Hezbollah deputy head Mahmoud Qamati warned that Hezbollah will respond to any violation “in kind,” adding that there will not be a “return to the pre-war situation.”

The same Al Jazeera coverage said a new round of US-mediated negotiations between Israel and Lebanon started at the State Department in Washington, DC, with talks expected to last until Thursday.

As US-Lebanon talks continue in Washington, Rubio reiterated that “the future of Lebanon belongs to the Lebanese people through their sovereign, elected government,” while the Jerusalem Post linked the stance to ongoing Israel-Lebanon negotiations.

“Israeli troops have killed two people and wounded two others in southern Lebanon, following two days of relative calm in the country amid a fragile truce”

Al Jazeera

The Al Jazeera report also quoted Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun saying on X that “the developments of the past few days have proven the correctness of our choice to go to negotiation,” and he said the country would accept nothing less than “the end of the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon.”

In parallel, the U.S. State Department statement carried by صـوت بيروت إنترناشونال said the United States condemns Hezbollah’s call to overthrow the democratically elected Lebanese government and said Hezbollah continued firing at Israeli sites and transferring fighters and weapons to southern Lebanon.

Rubio’s condemnation was echoed in صحـيفة الخليج, which quoted Rubio saying “the era of states being beholden to terrorist groups is coming to an end,” and it described Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem’s stance that disarming Hezbollah would be “genocide.”

The same صحـيفة الخليج account said the Lebanese government began implementing the ‘Homeland Shield’ plan to confine weapons to the state through the Lebanese army in five phases, announcing it had completed the first phase south of the Litani River.