Lebanese Foreign Minister Youssef Raggi on Friday urged his visiting Iranian counterpart to find a "new approach" to the thorny issue of disarming the Iran-backed Hezbollah group.
Lebanon is under heavy US pressure to disarm Hezbollah, which was heavily weakened in more than a year of hostilities with Israel that largely ended with a November 2024 ceasefire, but Iran and the group have expressed opposition to the move.
Iran has long wielded substantial influence in Lebanon by funding and arming Hezbollah, but as the balance of power shifted since the recent conflict, officials have been more critical towards Tehran.
"The defense of Lebanon is the sole responsibility of the Lebanese state", which must have a monopoly on weapons, Raggi told Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, a Lebanese foreign ministry statement said.
Raggi called on Iran to engage in talks with Lebanon to find "a new approach to the issue of Hezbollah's weapons, drawing on Iran's relationship with the party, so that these weapons do not become a pretext for weakening Lebanon".
He asked Araghchi "whether Tehran would accept the presence of an illegal armed organization on its own territory".
Last month, Raggi declined an invitation to visit Iran and proposed meeting in a neutral third country.
Lebanon's army said Thursday that it had completed the first phase of disarming Hezbollah, doing so in the south Lebanon area near the border with Israel, which called the efforts "far from sufficient".
Araghchi also met President Joseph Aoun on Friday and was set to hold talks with several other senior officials.
After arriving on Thursday, he visited the mausoleum of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in a massive Israeli air strike on south Beirut in September 2024.
Last August, Lebanese leaders firmly rejected any efforts at foreign interference during a visit by Iran's security chief Ali Larijani, with the prime minister saying Beirut would "tolerate neither tutelage nor diktat" after Tehran voiced opposition to plans to disarm Hezbollah.
