PARIS, France — Lebanon will need some sort of international force after the withdrawal of the United Nations’s UNIFIL mission scheduled for the end of 2026, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam argued during a visit to Paris Saturday.

Some 10,800 UN officials have manned a buffer zone between Israel and Lebanon since March 1978, but they will have one year to leave Lebanon starting 31 December, under a resolution passed last August under pressure from the United States and Israel.

UNIFIL’s mandate was expanded in 2006, following a month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah, to allow peacekeepers to help the Lebanese army keep parts of the south free of weapons or armed personnel other than those of the Lebanese state.

Israel has long argued that the force had failed in its mission, doing little to block Hezbollah from building up its forces near the Israeli border over decades. In October 2023, Israel has said the terror group’s forces had been very close to launching a mass........

© The Times of Israel