Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has said she will visit Lebanon on Friday as she demanded security guarantees from Israel for her country’s troops there just days after UN peacekeeper bases came under attack.
Italy’s government has been a strong supporter of Israel in the year since Hamas’s 7 October attacks but has sharply criticised attacks on the UN mission, known as Unifil, and Israeli calls for the peacekeepers to withdraw.
“We believe that the attitude of the Israeli forces is completely unjustified,” Meloni told the Italian senate on Tuesday, describing it as a “blatant violation” of a UN resolution on ending hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel.
She later told the lower house of parliament: “I believe that a withdrawal on the basis of a unilateral request by Israel would be a big mistake. It would undermine the credibility of the mission itself, the credibility of the United Nations.”
The UN said Unifil positions had come under attack 20 times since the start of Israel’s ground operation in southern Lebanon on 1 October, including by direct fire and an incident on Sunday when two Israeli tanks burst through the gates of a Unifil base.
Italy has 1,000 troops deployed in the UN mission and in a separate mission known as Mibil, which trains local armed forces, making it the second-largest contributor after Indonesia.
Israel has denied deliberately targeting UN peacekeepers, but in what is becoming a test of the lingering authority of the UN institutions to enforce its own resolutions, the UN security council on Monday expressed unanimous concern after several peacekeeping positions came under fire in southern Lebanon. It urged all parties – without naming them – to respect the safety and security of Unifil personnel and premises.
Meloni said Israel’s actions were not acceptable and that she had expressed this position to her Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, in a phone call. Meloni has been regarded as one of Israel’s strongest allies in Europe, alongside Germany, although she has repeatedly called for Israel to comply with humanitarian law.
Germany, France and the UK also issued a joint statement on Monday calling for the role of the UN peacekeepers to be respected. Recalling that any “deliberate attack” against the peacekeepers was contrary to international law, they called on “Israel and all parties to respect their obligation to ensure at all times the safety and security of Unifil personnel and to allow the latter to continue to carry out its mandate”.
The two sectors that comprise the UN mission – sector west and sector east – are led by Italy and Spain respectively. The biggest non-EU contributors are Indonesia, India, Ghana and Malaysia. Ireland contributes 370 troops.
Any contributing country can decide to withdraw troops, but in the absence of reinforcement such a move could lead to a re-evaluation of the mission’s ability to deploy, which would be another blow to the UN’s battered authority. The mission, established in 1978, remained in place through the Israeli invasions in 1982 and 2006, and it is not clear what security guarantees Meloni can extract from the Israelis.
Neytanyahu on Sunday urged the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to remove all its peacekeeping forces from Hezbollah strongholds and from combat areas, a retreat that would require the 10,000-strong UN force to abandon the complex mandate it has been provided by the security council since 2006 in UN resolution 1701. He claimed UN forces were making themselves hostages of Hezbollah and so putting themselves in danger.
On Monday, he said: “Israel is not fighting Unifil. It is not fighting the Lebanese people. It is fighting Hezbollah, a supporter of Iran that is using Lebanese territory to attack Israel.”
Unifil has accused Israeli forces of twice breaking into a UN barracks. There are suspicions that Israel is trying to pressure the UN force out of the area so it can mount a no-holds-barred attack on Hezbollah positions.
Netanyahu ordered a ground operation in Lebanon after an intensified Israeli air campaign after shelling by Hezbollah that has forced 70,000 Israelis to leave their homes in the country’s north. Israel argues it is fulfilling some of the terms of the UN resolution that required the disarmament of Hezbollah and their withdrawal north of the Litani River.
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The speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, has expressed his political support for the Unifil commander, Maj Gen Aroldo Lázaro, praising “his wise and courageous stance” in maintaining his troops in southern Lebanon.
Israel has also revived its complaints about the UN, pointing out that Hezbollah tunnels have been found close to UN barracks in Lebanon.
The UN rules of engagement do not allow international soldiers to search private facilities or seize weapons, partly since it would be seen to be intervening in a civil war against a militia, Hezbollah, that is also a political party and represents a large portion of the Shia population, including in parliament.
The UN force is also not empowered to block the overflights that the IDF performs daily over Lebanon, even though they are prohibited by Resolution 1701. Unifil detected approximately 3,426 such violations between 8 October 2023 and 20 June 2024, alongside 868 air attacks.
Since the 7 October attacks last year the UN said restrictions on the troops freedom of movement had worsened, and seven peacekeepers had been injured up to late June. Since 1978, Unifil has lost 337 peacekeepers, making Lebanon the most costly, in human terms, of all the its peacekeeping operations. A total of 4,200 peacekeepers have died throughout the world, the UN says.
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the UN special coordinator for Lebanon, on Tuesday expressed her concern about the violence in the region. “Amid the firing of missiles and rockets, dropping of bombs, and conduct of raids, the machinery of war fails to address the underlying issues,” she wrote on X. “And thus the risk of dooming another generation to the same fate is very real, yet again.”
The tensions between Israel and the UN reflect a decades-long wider battle over Israel’s refusal to comply with security council resolutions concerning the formation of a Palestinian state, and Israel’s perception that the UN is riddled with antisemitism.
The Israeli foreign minister last month announced that Guterres was not welcome in Israel, while Netanyahu, in his speech to the general assembly, described the UN as a swamp of antisemitic bile.