GENEVA: US special envoy Amos Hochstein met with officials in Beirut on Tuesday to discuss a plan for a truce, claiming that an end to the violence is “now within our grasp.” Unicef has reported that more than 200 children have been killed and 1,100 injured in Lebanon in just two months.
“Despite more than 200 children killed in Lebanon in less than two months, a disconcerting pattern has emerged: their deaths are met with inertia from those able to stop this violence,” Unicef spokesperson James Elder stated during a press briefing in Geneva.
He drew “chilling similarities” between the battles in Gaza and Lebanon, where a sizable percentage of the almost 44,000 people killed are reportedly children, and added, “For the children of Lebanon, it has become a silent normalization of horror.”
However, Israel broadened the scope of its operations beyond Gaza to Lebanon, where troops seized the Jabal Mukaber region, surrounded the decades-old Al-Shiyah mosque, and then demolished it, according to Al Jazeera.
A mosque in Jabal Mukaber is destroyed by Israeli soldiers.
Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the State Department, earlier claimed that the US had sent ceasefire proposals to Israel and Lebanon.
While meeting with authorities to discuss a truce plan that Lebanon has generally approved, US special envoy Amos Hochstein declared that an end to the Israel-Hezbollah war was “now within our grasp” during his visit to Beirut on Tuesday.
Hochstein told reporters he saw “a real opportunity” to put an end to the conflict after meeting with Nabih Berri, the speaker of the parliament and an ally of Hezbollah who has spearheaded mediation on the group’s behalf. “I’m in Beirut to help with that choice, but in the end, it’s the parties’ decision. We can now achieve it,” he continued.
