Shafaq News- Évian-les-Bains
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to exercise greater restraint in Lebanon, suggesting Syria take over the fight against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group operating across the country.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, Trump said the conflict had gone on too long and that civilian casualties had mounted beyond what he considered acceptable. "Israel has been fighting Hezbollah too long, and too many people are being killed," he said. "You don't have to knock down an apartment house every time you're looking for somebody, because there's a lot of people in those apartment houses —and they're not all Hezbollah."
"I've had a great relationship with Bibi, but now Bibi has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon," Trump added, using Netanyahu's common nickname.
On Sunday, the Israeli army struck a building in Beirut's southern suburbs, killing three people and injuring more than a dozen others. Israel said the strike targeted a Hezbollah command center. The Lebanese Health Ministry reported that the cumulative death toll from Israeli strikes since March 2 reached 3,756, with 11,632 people wounded, as of June 13.
Trump said he had proposed that Israel allow Syria to assume responsibility for countering Hezbollah, identifying Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa as capable of taking on the task. "I think they'd do a better job of doing it," he said.
Al-Sharaa, whose government came to power following the fall of Bashar al-Assad's government, publicly rejected that framing days earlier, saying that reports of Syria's entry into Lebanon were "nothing but speculation" and that "Syria's approach aims to end the war in Lebanon, not to expand it or get involved."
Sources in Damascus told Asharq Al-Awsat that Trump's suggestion was "a form of reshuffling the cards" and fell within "the framework of negotiating statements and sending messages to Iran," and that no official US request for Syrian military intervention had been received.
The Lebanon question sits at the center of a broader diplomatic dispute over the terms of a Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran, scheduled for signing on Friday in Geneva. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tuesday that the deal would require Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, calling an end to the fighting there "an inseparable part of the complete end of the war." Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the security zones in southern Lebanon will stay and are "among the army's greatest achievements," and confirmed that he and Netanyahu had conveyed their opposition to withdrawal directly to Trump and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Netanyahu acknowledged Iran's demand but said Israel would remain in the buffer zone "as long as necessary."
Despite his criticism of Israeli tactics, Trump did not indicate any shift in Washington's foundational commitment to Israeli security. "Without the US, there'd be no Israel," he said, adding that Israel would have faced destruction "a long time ago" without American involvement. He linked his concern over Lebanon directly to the larger diplomatic objective: "When that happens, it throws a negative light on the big deal, and that's the deal with Iran."