Lebanon won't accept any deal unless Israeli troops withdraw

**Uncle Desai** (0:00)
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Uncle Desai, and in the early hours of Wednesday the 24th of June, these are our main stories. Lebanon says it will not accept any deal that does not include Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon. An independent UN-backed commission says Israel is deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian children in Gaza in what it calls an ongoing genocide. And North Korea's leader says he is arming his navy ships with nuclear weapons.
Also in this podcast, we have a special report from a camp for internally displaced people in the Democratic Republic of Congo that's been hit by Ebola.

**Ruben Rodeau** (0:46)
And things that sort of surprise us, we tend to have a more vivid or I guess high resolution memory of than those things that we expect.

**Uncle Desai** (0:55)
Why are brains recollect unexpected things more clearly?
First, there's been a lot of focus on the peace talks between the US and Iran in recent days. But separate negotiations are also taking place between Israel and Lebanon. The two sides met in Washington on Tuesday for a fifth round of talks. Lebanon's president has insisted he will not accept any peace deal that does not include the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon. When asked about the negotiations, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted the Lebanon-Israel talks were not connected to the US-Iran negotiations.

**Marco Rubio** (1:39)
Well, that process is separate. It's separate because Lebanon is a sovereign country. It has a government. And when it comes to Lebanon and what's happening inside of Lebanon, we're going to negotiate and deal directly with the Lebanese government. There's an Iranian issue with regards to Lebanon and that is their support and sponsorship of Hezbollah. That factor will be discussed as part of our conversations with the Iranians. The future of Lebanon belongs to the Lebanese people through their sovereign elected government. And that's who we're going to be working with.

**Uncle Desai** (2:06)
A temporary pause in fighting was agreed between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on Friday. But Hezbollah is claiming that Israel has violated the ceasefire, saying that Israeli soldiers opened fire on a group of civilians in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, killing two people.
I spoke to our North America correspondent David Willis about what each side is hoping to get out of these talks.

**David Willis** (2:31)
Lebanon is insisting on Israel's withdrawal from the south of the country and the restoration of what its president Joseph Aoun calls Lebanese sovereignty, together with an end to Iran's backing of Hezbollah, the terrorist group which drew Lebanon into this conflict back in March by firing rockets at Israel in response to the killing of Iran's supreme leader.
Joseph Aoun has accused Iran in the past of using his country as a bargaining chip, as he put it, through its backing of Hezbollah. Israel has responded, of course, with both airstrikes and a ground offensive that Lebanese officials say has killed more than 4,000 people.
Iran insists that the deal to end the war with Israel and the United States requires Israel to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. Israel insists its acting in self-defense by maintaining a so-called security zone in the south of Lebanon in order to repel threats against its soldiers and its citizens.

**Uncle Desai** (3:46)
That's interesting, isn't it, because the Trump administration say that these negotiations are not connected to those U.S.-Iran talks. But Tehran is saying that that is a key red line in negotiations with Washington, that Israel must cease attacks on Lebanon.

**David Willis** (3:59)
Well, that's right. And Lebanese officials began direct talks with Israel, of course, back in April in Washington, DC., and the two countries are about to begin a fifth round of those talks, and Lebanese authorities have been trying, of course, to separate the negotiations from the U.S.-Iran deal, so far largely without success. And given the precarious nature of negotiations over that peace deal, with the United States saying that Iran has agreed to let nuclear inspectors back into the country, Iran directly contradicting that assertion, and the competing claims from the two sides over financial incentives for Iran and the long-term control, of course, of that vital waterway, the Strait of Hormuz.
Israel's parallel war in Lebanon is really just another uncertain, unpredictable element of this search for a lasting peace in the region, a peace which Donald Trump is anxious to see, given his falling approval ratings and the fact that there are elections on the horizon here in the United States in just a few months' time. Well, earlier today, Lebanese officials said that Israeli gunfire had killed two people in the south of the country, and that prompted Hezbollah to accuse Israel of violating the current ceasefire there.