Israeli Knesset member Avigdor Lieberman has called on the Israeli government to “reoccupy southern Lebanon,” stating, “Lebanon must bear the consequences of Hezbollah’s attacks on northern Israel.”
The former Israeli Defense Minister said the Israeli army should “close off” a vast area of southern Lebanon and push Hezbollah north of the Litani River, “even if it entails 50 years of occupation,” al-Markazia News Agency reported.
“Whoever takes the initiative and loses must pay with the land—as is the case in all wars—and if Lebanon does not pay with the land, it means that we have done nothing,” Lieberman reportedly said during the weekly meeting of his right-wing party Yisrael Beiteinu.
He argued that “everything between the Litani River and Israel should be under the control of the Israeli army, and it should be stricter than before,” adding, “We have a bad experience with the security zone.” He was referring to the buffer zone that Israel occupied in southern Lebanon following its 1982 invasion, which ended with the withdrawal of Israeli forces in 2000.
Lieberman stressed, “We won’t annex anything, and we won’t build settlements, but we won’t leave the (Lebanese) territory until there is a government in Beirut that knows how to exercise its sovereignty.”
He also criticized the way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been handling the war against Hamas, describing his government as one that “does not know how to end the war in the South—or how to act in the North.”
