US President Donald Trump announced this Thursday that Israel and Lebanon have agreed to extend the ceasefire for three weeks after meeting with representatives of both countries at the White House, in the second direct bilateral meeting in decades. The first, on April 16 and also mediated by Washington, led to the declaration on the ground. Just a few hours before today’s meeting, Israeli attacks killed three people while, in the middle of the meeting, Hezbollah, which is not participating in the negotiations as it is not a state actor, launched a wave of attacks against northern Israel.
“The Meeting went very well! The United States will work with Lebanon in order to help it protect itself from Hezbollah. The Ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon will extend THREE WEEKS. I look forward to receiving Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi in the near future [Benjamín] Netanyahu, and the president of Lebanon, Joseph Aoun,” the US president announced on the Truth Social platform with his usual capital letters.
Trump received the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors in Washington at the White House in a meeting also attended by Vice President JD Vance; the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio; and the US ambassador to Israel, as well as his counterpart in Lebanon, Michel Issa. “It was a Great Honor to be a participant in this very Historic Meeting!” concludes President Trump’s publication.
The meeting, surprisingly expeditious, was held at the White House and not at the State Department, where the previous one took place. The announcement hours before by a senior official of the Republican Administration that the stage would be moved to the official residence, with Trump’s participation, raised hopes about a possible agreement, which seems like a new patch rather than a definitive solution. , which came into effect last Friday, was due to expire next Monday.
“The people of Lebanon and the people of Israel are neighbors and they want to get along,” said Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, who is by no means neutral about the Palestinian territory he always refers to, as the Israeli government does, by its biblical names of Judea and Samaria. “They can get along, but it’s like those neighbors who have a problematic child in the neighborhood who won’t stop throwing stones at everyone’s windows. And if the child stopped throwing stones, the neighbors could get along and start, in fact, working together,” said Huckabee, in clear reference to Hezbollah, Iran’s satellite Shiite party-militia and whose military muscle has traditionally overshadowed the regular Lebanese Army.
For this reason, after announcing the extension of the ceasefire, Trump has reiterated that the United States continues to demand as an “indispensable condition” that Iran end its support for proxysor proxy groups, in the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, as part of any agreement between Washington and Tehran to end a precarious truce on February 28.
In terms similar to those used by Huckabee, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, stated that Israel and Lebanon “have never been closer to each other than today.” Leiter welcomed the outcome of a meeting that, he said, has been decades in the making. “We are going to move forward, working for peace. We hope to achieve it as soon as possible,” he stressed. Lebanon’s ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, also thanked Trump for facilitating “this historic moment.” “I believe that, with your help and support, we can make Lebanon great again,” the diplomat said.
The UN had shown its confidence that this Thursday’s dialogue in Washington would bear fruit, when the death toll from the Israeli attacks in Lebanon rises to nearly 2,500 people, mostly civilians. The temporary armistice will not, however, meet the expectations of Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who warned on the eve of the meeting that his delegation was traveling to Washington with the clear objective of achieving the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon. The repeated attacks by Israel – who died under the rubble after a bombing – as well as Hezbollah’s response do not allow for much optimism.
