“We are fed up and we want to live in peace,” Aoun said, adding “(Lebanese people) deserve to live in peace and in dignity, they deserve not seeing their homes being destroyed every five to 10 years.”
Since its founding in the 1980s, Hezbollah has gone to war with Israel multiple times. This year, the group fired rockets at Israel in retaliation for a joint US-Israeli assault on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of his senior military command. Israel’s aggressive response has killed more than 3,500 Lebanese and displaced nearly a fifth of the population.
The Lebanese president, in accordance with Lebanon’s gerrymandered constitution, is a Maronite Christian. The Maronites have had a long history of colluding with the Israelis to fuck with the Muslims and Druze in Lebanon, in order to hold power, despite demographic shifts that mean the Maronites are a relatively much smaller community than they were when they were allocated 1/3 of the political power when Lebanon became independent. This included involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres during a previous Israeli invasion of south Lebanon. Aoun’s father was implicated in that act of mass murder and betrayal of Lebanese sovereignty.
So: CNN blaming it all on Hezbollah is only a very small fraction of the story. The real story is that elements of the Lebanese ruling class would rather allow the Israelis to murder their own countrymen than to resist. And, last I checked, it wasn’t the Iranians who were murdering people and destroying their homes in south Lebanon.