UNITED NATIONS, United States: The UN aid chief warned on Tuesday that southern Lebanon could become another occupied territory in the Middle East after renewed Israeli threats to seize the area following its war with Hezbollah.
The aid chief, Tom Fletcher, drew parallels to Gaza, the Palestinian territory facing a humanitarian crisis, as he told the Security Council that fighting in Lebanon has already displaced 1.1 million people.
“Given the trajectory that some Israeli ministers have described and given what we have seen in plain sight in Gaza, how will you protect civilians?” he said.
“Given the intensity of the coercive displacement that we are seeing, how should we prepare, collectively as the international community, for a new addition to the list of occupied territories?”
Earlier on Tuesday, Israel´s Defence Minister Israel Katz said the military would occupy a swathe of southern Lebanon even after the end of the war against Hezbollah.
Katz´s statement was not the first Israeli declaration signalling an intention to occupy parts of the south, but it was the clearest since the Middle East war spread to Lebanon on March 2.
Fletcher, who addressed the Security Council from Beirut, said he had witnessed “anxiety and tensions at levels I have not witnessed in many years, working in and on Lebanon.”
