Lebanese Presidency: Consultations on Monday to Designate New PM

FILE PHOTO: Lebanon's President Michel Aoun is pictured as he addresses the nation at the Baabda palace, Lebanon October 24, 2019. Dalati Nohra/Handout via REUTERS
FILE PHOTO: Lebanon's President Michel Aoun is pictured as he addresses the nation at the Baabda palace, Lebanon October 24, 2019. Dalati Nohra/Handout via REUTERS
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Lebanese Presidency: Consultations on Monday to Designate New PM

FILE PHOTO: Lebanon's President Michel Aoun is pictured as he addresses the nation at the Baabda palace, Lebanon October 24, 2019. Dalati Nohra/Handout via REUTERS
FILE PHOTO: Lebanon's President Michel Aoun is pictured as he addresses the nation at the Baabda palace, Lebanon October 24, 2019. Dalati Nohra/Handout via REUTERS

Lebanese President Michel Aoun will convene binding consultations with parliamentary blocs on Monday to designate a new prime minister, Baabda Palace said, after the government of PM Hassan Diab quit earlier this month following the catastrophic explosion at Beirut port.

The president is required to designate the candidate with the greatest level of support among MPs.

Ex-Premier Saad Hariri said earlier this week he was not a candidate after several major parties said they did not support his return to the job.

Diab's cabinet resigned after the Aug. 4 blast, which was blamed on a store of ammonium nitrate left for years in a port warehouse despite warnings.

The explosion, one of the largest such blasts in recent history, killed more than 180 people, injured more than 6,000 and destroyed property within a radius of several miles.

The catastrophic blast comes on top of an unprecedented economic and financial crisis, a currency crash and hyperinflation — the culmination of decades of endemic corruption and mismanagement by a ruling class that has refused to reform or step down.

Western nations have been demanding major reforms in the country in return for help, and some countries have been sending aid directly to the people rather than state institutions notorious for corruption.



Israeli Likud Party Ministers Urge Netanyahu to Annex West Bank

Israeli soldiers in Tubas in the north of the occupied West Bank on September 11, 2024. (AFP)
Israeli soldiers in Tubas in the north of the occupied West Bank on September 11, 2024. (AFP)
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Israeli Likud Party Ministers Urge Netanyahu to Annex West Bank

Israeli soldiers in Tubas in the north of the occupied West Bank on September 11, 2024. (AFP)
Israeli soldiers in Tubas in the north of the occupied West Bank on September 11, 2024. (AFP)

Cabinet ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party called on Wednesday for Israel to annex the Israeli-occupied West Bank before the Knesset recesses at the end of the month.

They issued a petition ahead of Netanyahu's meeting next week with US President Donald Trump, where discussions are expected to center on a potential 60-day Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal with Hamas.

The petition was signed by 15 cabinet ministers and Amir Ohana, speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

There was no immediate response from the prime minister's office. Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, long a confidant of Netanyahu, did not sign the petition. He has been in Washington since Monday for talks on Iran and Gaza.

"We ministers and members of Knesset call for applying Israeli sovereignty and law immediately on Judea and Samaria," they wrote, using the biblical names for the West Bank captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

Their petition cited Israel's recent achievements against both Iran and Iran's allies and the opportunity afforded by the strategic partnership with the US and support of Trump.

It said the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel demonstrated that the concept of Jewish settlement blocs alongside the establishment of a Palestinian state poses an existential threat to Israel.

"The task must be completed, the existential threat removed from within, and another massacre in the heart of the country must be prevented," the petition stated.

Most countries regard Jewish settlements in the West Bank, many of which cut off Palestinian communities from one another, as a violation of international law.

With each advance of Israeli settlements and roads, the West Bank becomes more fractured, further undermining prospects for a contiguous land on which Palestinians could build a sovereign state long envisaged in Middle East peacemaking.

Israel's pro-settler politicians have been emboldened by the return to the White House of Trump, who has proposed Palestinians leave Gaza, a suggestion widely condemned across the Middle East and beyond.