Lebanese Hezbollah MP Hussein Hajj Hassan speaks during an interview with AFP in his office at the Lebanese Parliament building in downtown Beirut. AFP
“Direct negotiations with the enemy are a grave sin and a grave error,” he told AFP from his parliamentary office.
He said the government was moving toward talks without securing a ceasefire, warning this would weaken Lebanon’s position. “If they are unable to uphold a single condition called a ceasefire, how will they negotiate with the Zionist entity (Israel) under American auspices?” he said.
Hajj Hassan said direct talks serve “no interest for the country or its citizens... so how can there be contact at the level Trump mentioned?”
Israel and Lebanon agreed on Tuesday to begin direct talks following a meeting between their ambassadors to the United States, weeks after Israel intensified its war in Lebanon.
US President Donald Trump said Lebanese and Israeli “leaders” would speak on Thursday, but President Joseph Aoun’s office has not confirmed the call and stressed the importance of a ceasefire before any direct negotiations.
An official source told AFP that Aoun had rejected a US request for a direct phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hajj Hassan said the Lebanese government “insists on reaching a ceasefire through the Israelis and the Americans... and not through Iran,” accusing officials of sidelining regional allies and rejecting Lebanon’s inclusion in broader regional arrangements due to “unjustified blind hatred of Iran”.
Hours after Tehran and Washington announced a two-week ceasefire on 8 April, which Iran and mediator Pakistan say Lebanon is included in the deal, but Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said no one should negotiate a ceasefire on behalf of the Lebanese state, despite Israel's ongoing mass killing.
Shortly after, Israel launched more than 100 strikes across Lebanon, including in densely populated residential and commercial areas of central Beirut, killing at least 357 people in a single day, including 33 children and wounding over 1,200, according to Lebanese health authorities.
Israel has killed more than 2,000 people have been killed, including at least 172 children and 91 healthcare workers, and 7,000 wounded in the space of just six weeks. Israel’s airstrikes have killed and wounded civilians in their homes, at work, and even while sheltering at makeshift displacement camps.
About 1,000 Israeli airstrikes have hit Lebanon since early March, according to the Institute for the Study of War, displacing nearly a fifth of the population, the UN said.
In US-Iran talks in Pakistan over the weekend, aimed at reaching a permanent settlement and ending the war, Iran reiterated that Lebanon must be included in any ceasefire arrangement with Washington, while the United States and Israel insisted it would not be part of such a deal, according to officials familiar with the discussions.
Although the talks ended without agreement, a Hezbollah official said Iran had informed the group it “was able to obtain a cessation of attacks” in the Beirut administrative region, including the capital’s southern suburbs known as Dahiyeh.
On Thursday, Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf told his Lebanese counterpart Nabih Berri that “for us, a ceasefire in Lebanon is just as important as a ceasefire in Iran”.
Israeli strikes on Beirut and its southern suburbs have halted since Wednesday, but fighting has continued in southern Lebanon.
Hajj Hassan urged Lebanese authorities to halt “this series of useless concessions... to a treacherous and cunning enemy, and to a hypocritical, deceitful, evasive and lying America”.
*This story was edited by Ahram Online.
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