The Lebanese government is doing everything necessary to prevent the escalation of the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement against the background of the attack on the Golan Heights, Lebanese Labor Minister Mustafa Bayram said.
“The Lebanese government is doing everything necessary to prevent the expansion of Israeli aggression against Lebanon,” the politician said.
According to Bayram, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is using the current situation to “show the Israelis that he has not turned his back on northern Israel and the Golan Heights.”
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The minister also noted that leaders of the Druze community in Lebanon, including the former head of the Progressive Socialist Party Walid Jumblatt, came out in support of the Lebanese resistance, which declared its non-involvement in the attack on the city of Majdal Shams.
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Jumblatt told Al Jazeera on Sunday that Hezbollah respects the laws of war in the operations it conducts and only responds when Israel violates them. He said Israel’s claim that Hezbollah was involved in the shelling of the Golan Heights, which killed 12 people, mostly children and teenagers from Druze families, “is a lie.” The city of Majdal Shams is Arab, where the majority of the population did not agree to receive Israeli citizenship, recalled the leader of the Druze community in Lebanon.
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The Israeli ambulance press service reported on July 27 that the strike on the Golan Heights killed 10 people, later the number of victims rose to 12. Israel blamed the strike on the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will not leave the attack on the Golan Heights unanswered. Hezbollah, he said, will pay the highest price for this, “one it has never paid before.”
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Hezbollah previously said it denied involvement in the shelling of the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Despite this, Israeli officials began to declare that war with Lebanon was imminent.
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On Sunday morning, the Israeli army said it had carried out strikes on a number of Hezbollah targets deep in Lebanon and in the south of the country. On Monday, a Lebanese military source reported that two people became victims of Israeli UAV strikes in southern Lebanon and four more were injured.
Until 1967, the Golan Heights were part of the Syrian province of Quneitra, inhabited mainly by Druze, a distinct ethno-religious group of Arabs. During the Six Day War of 1967, as well as the Fourth Arab-Israeli War in 1973, two-thirds of this strategic territory was captured by Israel. In 1981, the Jewish state unilaterally declared sovereignty over the region, but the UN Security Council did not recognize this decision.
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The situation on the Israeli-Lebanese border worsened after the start of Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip in October 2023. The Israeli army and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters daily fire at each other’s positions in areas along the border. According to the Lebanese Foreign Ministry, about 100 thousand people were forced to leave their homes in southern Lebanon due to Israeli shelling. The Israeli side reported about 80 thousand residents of northern Israel who found themselves in a similar situation.
