Lebanon President Won’t Rule Out Peace with Israel

Lebanese President Michel Aoun raised eyebrows on Sunday with some surprising remarks made during an interview with the French BFM TV channel. Asked for his response to the normalization agreement signed by Israel and the United Arab Emirates last week, Aoun, a close ally of the Lebanese terror organization Hizbullah, explained that the UAE was a sovereign state and added that Lebanon itself was not ruling out a future peace accord with its southern neighbor. “It depends,” Aoun said. “We have a lot of problems with Israel and we first need to solve them.” Hizbullah, a proxy of the Iranian regime and, as the dominant political party in Lebanon, owner of its own armed militia, has called for the annihilation of Israel on numerous occasions. After the August 4 explosion in Beirut that killed at least 177 people and injured more than 6,000, the group’s political clout was significantly diminished, as it was seen by some as responsible for the rampant corruption that led to the negligent storage of volatile ammonium nitrate at the city’s port. Cries for the downfall of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah could be heard throughout the capital in recent mass anti-government protests.