One of the two conditions laid down by Mohamed Bager Qalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament and head of the Iranian delegation in Islamabad for talks with the U.S., in a April 10 X posting before negotiations could proceed was that there must be ceasefire in Lebanon.
There has been no announcement of a ceasefire as of this writing though according to Axios the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors in Washington are supposed to meet on Tuesday (April 14), mediated by the U.S. State Department. However, the US, Lebanese and Israeli officials are all trying to freeze Hezbollah out of the talks, supposedly because they don’t want to allow Iran to dictate any moves in Lebanon that would benefit Hezbollah.
On Friday, the ambassadors held a preparatory trilateral phone call with one of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s advisers, Axios reported further. After the phone call, the Lebanese side said the parties agreed to meet on Tuesday in order to “discuss announcing a ceasefire.”
Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter said in a statement that Israel had agreed “to promote a peace agreement with Lebanon, but it did not agree to discuss a ceasefire with the terrorist organization Hezbollah.”
According to two sources, the Lebanese government asked Israel, through the U.S. mediators, to agree to make a “gesture” ahead of the meeting on Tuesday and “pause” its air strikes in the country. The Lebanese suggested that the Israelis go back to the understandings of the Nov. 2024 ceasefire and conduct strikes only against imminent threats from Hezbollah.
The sources said the U.S. supports the Lebanese request and is urging Israel to accept it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reviewing the request and still hasn’t made a decision. An Israeli official said: “There is no ceasefire.”
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam is expected to visit Washington next week and meet Rubio. It will be the first bilateral visit by a senior Lebanese government official to Washington since the Trump administration assumed office.
Reuters reported that Israeli strikes continued across southern Lebanon on Friday, with more than a dozen reported killed in various towns. One strike on a government building in the city of Nabatieh killed 13 members of Lebanon’s state security forces, the country’s President Joseph Aoun said in a statement. Hezbollah said in a statement on its Telegram channel that it fired rocket salvos at northern Israeli towns in response.