Lebanon, Crosetto: 'Italian soldiers risk being accidentally involved in the clashes between the parties'. And criticises the UN mission

The news arriving from the border between Lebanon and Israel traces a situation of uncertainty that inevitably calls into question the more than 1,000 Italian military personnel engaged in the UN mission Unifil and the 200 or so present in Beirut as part of the bilateral mission Mibil. Speaking in the Chamber of Deputies for a briefing on the NATO summit in Washington from 9 to 11 July, Defence Minister Guido Crosetto also spoke about the situation in Lebanon. He admitted that the missile attack on Saturday 27 July against a football pitch in the Druze-Israeli town of Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights, which left dead and wounded, most of them children and teenagers, and behind which Hezbollah was allegedly behind, and Israel's subsequent retaliation, with the elimination of Hezbollah's number two Fuad Shukr in Beirut, and Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, have further raised tensions. A tension that threatens to cause a tragic escalation of events in the Middle East.

'Beyond the obvious links between Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, also made clear by the presence, as a guest, in Tehran of the political leader of Hezbollah, what is on the horizon is an extremely delicate and potentially very dangerous situation, to which a military confrontation near or on the territory of Lebanon cannot be excluded,' stressed Crosetto.

The Head of Defence criticised the UN mission: 'If it is true that this mission did not achieve the objective set by the UN Resolution - and we did not achieve it - why should we take note of it, we should not say that everything that has been done is good, we are very good? no. The mission has not reached the objective, on the contrary, the presence of Hezbollah in that area has increased, and one of the elements that now leads to an increase in clashes and friction is precisely the presence in that area very close to Israel of places from which attacks can start, of weapons depots, a military presence that is a sign of the failure of what Unifil was supposed to do".

Regarding the more general issue of security in the area, 'as of today,' Crosetto confided in the audience, 'I believe that the security of our military is no more at risk than before. They are not a direct target and we have an excellent intelligence apparatus; however, they could be accidentally involved in the clashes between the parties, which have become more frequent and of increasing intensity. In this sense, in the first person, I have advocated, together with Minister Tajani and the Prime Minister, for the role and integrity of UNIFIL and the personnel working there to be respected. I would like to remind you that we are talking about Italian numbers, but UNIFIL exceeds ten thousand units, if we calculate all the contingents that are present'.

In his speech, the minister recalled the efforts he had made since 7 October to initiate "a series of contacts and correspondence with the United Nations - in particular with Secretary General Guterres and Deputy Secretary for Peacekeeping Operations Lacroix - to urge the implementation of all possible measures to ensure full security for UNIFIL personnel and, at the same time, to enable the mission to operate effectively by implementing and enforcing the dictates of Resolution 1701. I also wanted to point out the need for incisive and swift action by the United Nations that would put UNIFIL in a position to exercise real deterrence to the use of force,' Crosetto continued, 'for example by reinforcing the contingent, providing for the availability of an operational reserve that could be deployed in South Lebanon at short notice, and contemplating operating autonomously without units of the Lebanese Armed Forces.