A U.N. official Friday accused the Israel Defense Forces of repeatedly targeting U.N. peacekeepers along the blue line, the U.N.-drawn provisional border between Israel and Lebanon.
“We have been targeted several times and deliberately attacked once inside the borders in Naqoura, injuring two peacekeepers,” Andrea Tenenti, spokesperson for UNIFIL, the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, told journalists in Geneva from Beirut.
“They hit the communication system very close to the bunkers where peacekeepers were sheltering. And there was an instance when IDF troops entered a UNIFIL position and remained there for 45 minutes.
“So, all these elements are clear, and we have been very vocal that these are deliberate attacks against the mission,” he said.
Israel has rejected accusations that it is going after the peacekeepers. Thursday, French news agency AFP quoted an Israeli army statement as saying, “UNIFIL infrastructure sites and forces are not a target.”
Israeli forces are operating in southern Lebanon in an attempt to eliminate strongholds of the Hezbollah militant group.
Hezbollah blamed
The IDF acknowledged injuring two UNIFIL peacekeepers on October 11 when forces fired on what an IDF statement on X called “an immediate threat.” The IDF has stated that Hezbollah militants in Lebanon deliberately operate near UNIFIL posts and bases, “thereby endangering UNIFIL personnel.”
Despite demands by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the U.N. mission to move its positions away from the blue line, Tenenti said “there was a unanimous decision from everyone to stay.”
“We need to be here. We need to try to bring back stability and peace to this region,” he said, acknowledging that this was far from easy as exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel in the past month have “turned the hostilities into a deadlier, more lethal conflict.”
He said that incursions into Lebanese territory by the IDF in the proximity of the blue line in both UNIFIL sectors, east and west, “constitute a violation of Lebanese sovereignty, and also a violation of Security Council Resolution 1701.”
The UNIFIL spokesperson described the destruction of many villages along the blue line and said that given the dangers and attacks against UNIFIL, most patrols in the past few weeks have been suspended “until things improve.”
Though U.N. peacekeepers have the right of self-defense, he said that “we have to be very pragmatic on when to use it and how to use it because we do not want to become part of the conflict and use force that could trigger more violence.”
On Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sent a message to beleaguered UNIFIL troops, expressing his admiration of and gratitude for the work they are doing under such challenging circumstances. He said all parties have an obligation to ensure “the safety of our personnel” and that “the inviolability of U.N. premises must be respected at all times.”
“Attacks against U.N. peacekeepers are completely unacceptable. They are in breach of international humanitarian law and may constitute a war crime,” he said.
According to Lebanese authorities, more than 2,300 people have been killed and over 11,000 injured since hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel began in October 2023, while more than 1.2 million people have been displaced.
West Bank fighting
In reviewing the past year, Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), noted everyone warned when the Israeli-Gaza war started that the “region was a powder keg.” Since then, he said, the region has descended into “some sort of hell with no end in sight and no guarantee that it will not get worse — and part of that is the West Bank.”
OCHA’s latest weekly update on the situation in the occupied West Bank showed that conditions there continue to deteriorate. It said Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians, including a child, and injured 104 people, including nine children, in the period October 8-14.
“Israeli forces accused most of those fatalities of being involved in attacking Israelis,” Laerke said.
“Yesterday, a Palestinian woman was reportedly killed while she was harvesting olives in Jenin. That follows 32 attacks by Israeli settlers this month on Palestinians engaged in the olive harvest,” he said.
“Hundreds of olive trees and saplings have been vandalized, sawed off or stolen. The olive harvest is an economic lifeline for tens of thousands of Palestinian families.”
Meanwhile, James Elder, a UNICEF spokesperson who recently returned from another mission to Gaza, called the Palestinian enclave “the real-world embodiment of hell on Earth for its 1 million children.”
“And it is getting worse, day by day, as we see the horrific impact of the daily airstrikes and military operations on Palestinian children,” he said.
“A year ago, the cruel choice for civilians was endure deprivation or flee into displacement. Today, deprivation grips all of Gaza. Being displaced, again, only leads to more suffering and ever worse conditions for children,” he said.
Elder noted that last December, UNICEF stated: “The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.” Since then, day after day, for more than a year, he said, “that brutal, evidence-based reality is reinforced.”
