On His 3rd Visit to Beirut, Macron Faces 'Thorny Problem' Between Aoun, Hariri

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a news conference at the Pine Residence, the official residence of the French ambassador to Lebanon, in Beirut, Lebanon on September 1, 2020. © Gonzalo Fuentes, REUTERS
French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a news conference at the Pine Residence, the official residence of the French ambassador to Lebanon, in Beirut, Lebanon on September 1, 2020. © Gonzalo Fuentes, REUTERS
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On His 3rd Visit to Beirut, Macron Faces 'Thorny Problem' Between Aoun, Hariri

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a news conference at the Pine Residence, the official residence of the French ambassador to Lebanon, in Beirut, Lebanon on September 1, 2020. © Gonzalo Fuentes, REUTERS
French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a news conference at the Pine Residence, the official residence of the French ambassador to Lebanon, in Beirut, Lebanon on September 1, 2020. © Gonzalo Fuentes, REUTERS

French President Emmanuel Macron’s third visit to Beirut on Dec. 22-23 comes amid a worsening dispute between President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri, which has so far obstructed the birth of a new government.

During his stay, Macron is scheduled to visit the UNIFIL forces in South Lebanon and spend the night before Christmas Eve with the French battalion.

As part of the protocol visit, a meeting with Aoun is currently on the agenda. But the Lebanese political class’ failure to implement the French initiative might push the French president to conduct a series of meetings with other leaders in an attempt to break the deadlock.

In this regard, political sources, who spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat, expect Macron to meet with other Lebanese officials to prevent Aoun from employing his exclusive encounter with the French president as a means to blame the other parties for the failure to form a new government.

Moreover, the sources believe that if Macron only meets with the Lebanese president as part of his protocol visit, some parties would consider that he withdrew his initiative, which would affect his role in the Mediterranean region.

The sources, on the other hand, confirmed that Macron would not get into the trouble of searching for reasons for the failure of his initiative, and would directly go to the essence of the problem and the urgent need to form the government as soon as possible to stop the economic and financial collapse.

The sources also said that the escalating clash between Aoun and Hariri came to confirm that the “political chemistry” between them was still missing and that their mutual trust was “lost”, adding that extraordinary effort should be made to restore matters to their normal course.



US Tracking Nearly 500 Incidents of Civilian Harm During Israel’s Gaza War

 People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)
People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)
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US Tracking Nearly 500 Incidents of Civilian Harm During Israel’s Gaza War

 People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)
People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)

US State Department officials have identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilian harm during Israel's military operations in Gaza involving US-furnished weapons, but have not taken further action on any of them, three sources, including a US official familiar with the matter, said this week.

The incidents - some of which might have violated international humanitarian law, according to the sources - have been recorded since Oct. 7, 2023, when the Gaza war started. They are being collected by the State Department's Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons.

State Department officials gathered the incidents from public and non-public sources, including media reporting, civil society groups and foreign government contacts.

The mechanism, which was established in August 2023 to be applied to all countries that receive US arms, has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment, and coordinated department action, according to a December internal State Department cable reviewed by Reuters.

None of the Gaza cases had yet reached the third stage of action, said a former US official familiar with the matter. Options, the former official said, could range from working with Israel's government to help mitigate harm, to suspending existing arms export licenses or withholding future approvals.

The Washington Post first reported the nearly 500 incidents on Wednesday.

The Biden administration has said it is reasonable to assess that Israel has breached international law in the conflict, but assessing individual incidents was "very difficult work," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday.

"We are conducting those investigations, and we are conducting them thoroughly, and we are conducting them aggressively, but we want to get to the right answer, and it's important that we not jump to a pre-ordained result, and that we not skip any of the work," Miller said, adding that Washington consistently raises concerns over civilian harm with Israel.

The administration of President Joe Biden has long said it is yet to definitively assess an incident in which Israel has violated international humanitarian law during its operation in Gaza.

John Ramming Chappell, advocacy and legal adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, said the Biden administration "has consistently deferred to Israeli authorities and declined to do its own investigations."

"The US government hasn't done nearly enough to investigate how the Israeli military uses weapons made in the United States and paid for by US taxpayers," he said.

The civilian harm process does not only look at potential violations of international law but at any incident where civilians are killed or injured and where US arms are implicated, and looks at whether this could have been avoided or reduced, said one US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A review of an incident can lead to a recommendation that a unit needs more training or different equipment, as well as more severe consequences, the official said.

Israel's military conduct has come under increasing scrutiny as its forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the enclave's health authorities.

The latest episode of bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others, according to Israeli tallies.