Bassil on "A Minute with Gebran": We Want Hezbollah to Submit to the State, but the Authorities Are Tying Their Own Hands While Standing By as Crimes Are Committed

Free Patriotic Movement President MP Gebran Bassil said on A Minute with Gebran that it is unusual to experience three different emotions about the country in a single day.
He explained: "The first feeling comes when our people in southern Lebanon refute Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claims and reaffirm their attachment to their land despite everything, declaring: 'We are the children of the homeland of Patriarch Elias Howayek 10,452 square kilometers.'"
He added: "The second feeling is one of pain when Israel deliberately targets civilians who have no connection to the war doctors, engineers, ambulance crews, students, and this time, a school principal and her family."
He continued: "The third feeling is terrifying. It makes us feel a danger greater than the war itself when we witness an incapable authority standing by and watching these crimes unfold after depriving itself of even the right to file a complaint against them."
Bassil noted that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had also objected to such a denial of the victim's rights, yet the authorities remained unmoved.
He continued: "What kind of authority deprives the victim of the right to seek legal recourse, abandons the ceasefire agreement and UN Security Council Resolution 1701, turns its back on its partners in the Quintet Committee, and instead accepts a framework agreement with a state with which it remains at war? In doing so, it ties its own hands, places its army in confrontation with a segment of its own people, and grants Israel despite being a party to the agreement the authority to act as its own arbiter, allowing it to strike, kill, and destroy whenever and however it deems appropriate, while determining the timing and conditions for a possible redeployment following security arrangements that it alone imposes on Lebanon."
Bassil stressed: "We want the state to be the one negotiating. We want the state alone to hold exclusive authority over national decision-making and the use of force, and we want Hezbollah to submit to the authority of the state. But we do not want Netanyahu to keep claiming after every military action that the Lebanese state has given Israel political cover."
He concluded: "If that is the case, then where does Lebanon's decision-making authority lie? It would be in the hands of Israel and Iran not in the hands of Lebanon. That is not how a sovereign nation's decisions should be made."