New Lebanese Government Bans Hezbollah Weapons

Lebanese Hezbollah, defeated politically and militarily in Lebanon and the region due to the heavy blows inflicted by Israel, today announced that it wants to cooperate with the new Lebanese government led by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. During the parliamentary debate for the confidence in the government program, the leader of Hezbollah in parliament said that the armed Shiite movement "considers everything that has been said about the formation of the government as outdated and is cooperating with the Council of Ministers".

In the new executive, Hezbollah has obtained only two ministries and, together with its ally Nabih Berri, speaker of the parliament, has lost after 18 years the ability to control the council of ministers through a complex mechanism to block sensitive decisions. In Salam's government program, for the first time in decades, there is also no reference to Hezbollah's "resistance", or to the legitimacy of the Shiite movement's arsenal to confront Israel. Salam has instead reiterated that the State will now be the sole holder of the monopoly on weapons in the country.

While Israel has not withdrawn from southern Lebanon and does not appear to intend to do so in the short term, Raad then called on the Lebanese authorities to express "a firm position" in the face of the (Israeli) occupier's "refusal to withdraw completely" from the regions it continues to occupy in southern Lebanon.