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BEIRUT: Lebanese President Joseph Aoun on Friday accused Israel of responding to its offer to negotiate by intensifying its air strikes, the latest of which killed a man riding a motorbike in southern Lebanon.
Despite a November 2024 ceasefire with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Israel maintains troops in five areas in southern Lebanon and has kept up regular air strikes.
Aoun had called for negotiations with Israel in mid-October, after US President Donald Trump brokered a ceasefire in Gaza.
“Lebanon is ready for negotiations to end the Israeli occupation, but any negotiation... requires mutual willingness, which is not the case,” Aoun said on Friday.
Israel “is responding to this option by carrying out more attacks against Lebanon... and intensifying tensions,” he added during a meeting with German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) said an Israeli drone targeted a man on a motorbike in the village of Kunin on Friday. The health ministry reported one death and one person wounded.
The Israeli military said it had “eliminated... a Hezbollah maintenance officer” who was working to reestablish the Iran-backed group’s infrastructure sites in southern Lebanon.
The strike came a day after the Israeli military killed a municipal worker in a raid in the Lebanese border village of Blida.
Aoun ordered the army on Thursday to confront such incursions.
Hezbollah first began launching cross-border fire at Israel following the outbreak of the war in Gaza in October 2023, kicking off a more than year-long conflict that culminated in two months of open war before last year’s ceasefire was agreed.
Israel, however, has never stopped carrying out air strikes on Lebanon — usually saying it is targeting Hezbollah positions — and has stepped up the attacks in recent days.
Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed at least 25 people in October, including one Syrian, according to an AFP toll based on figures from the Lebanese health ministry.
On Tuesday, the spokesman for the UN rights commission, Jeremy Laurence, said Israeli forces had killed 111 civilians in Lebanon since the ceasefire went into effect.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Youssef Raggi asked his visiting German counterpart on Friday to “help put pressure on Israel to stop its attacks.”
“Only a diplomatic solution, not a military one, can ensure stability and guarantee calm in the south,” Raggi was quoted by the NNA as saying.
He added that “the Lebanese government is continuing to gradually implement its decision to place all weapons under its control.”
Hezbollah was badly weakened during the war, and the United States has intensified pressure on Lebanese authorities to disarm the group.
Hezbollah and its allies oppose the plan.

MANAMA: Humanitarian workers are being increasingly targeted in Gaza and in Sudan, where five Red Crescent volunteers were killed this week, the International Committee of the Red Cross’s director-general Pierre Krahenbuhl told AFP Friday.
Israel has repeatedly launched deadly strikes on Gaza despite a ceasefire agreed earlier in October and reports have emerged of atrocities by paramilitaries during Sudan’s brutal civil war.
“It is now becoming a pattern of violence against humanitarian workers in Sudan, in Gaza, and others, that we find very dramatic,” Krahenbuhl said in an interview before the Manama Dialogue conference in Bahrain.
“There is a wider erosion of respect for international humanitarian law,” which had “clearly not” been respected in either conflict, he added.
On Tuesday, the ICRC said five Sudanese Red Crescent volunteers were killed in North Kordofan state, a major battleground of the war that has raged since April 2023.
There were also reports of 460 people killed at a hospital in El-Fasher, which recently fell to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries.
The capture of El-Fasher, following an RSF siege of more than 18 months, raised fears of a return to Sudan’s ethnically targeted atrocities of 20 years ago.
The western city has been cut off from all communications since its fall, but survivors who reached the nearby town of Tawila told AFP of mass killings, children shot in front of their parents and civilians beaten and robbed as they fled.
“We are dealing with probably one of the most dramatic conflicts of our time,” Krahenbuhl said, pointing to attacks against civilians, “the extensive use of sexual violence” and the targeting of medical facilities.

- ‘Tip of the iceberg’ -

Krahenbuhl said Gaza’s destruction was beyond anything he had seen before, and warned that aid supplies remained woefully short.
“In the 25 or 30 years that I’ve been working in the humanitarian field, I have not seen that level of destruction,” he said.
“Not enough (aid) is coming into the Gaza Strip yet,” the ICRC official added. “What people need is, of course, far bigger than what we currently are able to deliver.”
The basic needs of Gazans are so immense “that what we are starting to do with improved humanitarian access is only the tip of the iceberg.”
The United Nations also warned this week that although aid had increased since the truce, humanitarian groups faced funding shortfalls and problems coordinating with Israeli authorities.
Separately, Krahenbuhl hit out at Israel’s order this week banning the ICRC from visiting Palestinians held under a law that allows for their indefinite detention.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said resuming the visits, which were suspended during the Gaza war, would “seriously harm the state’s security.”
But there was “no way in which our visits can pose a security threat or a national security threat,” Krahenbuhl said, urging Israel to lift the ban.