Iran open to cease-fire efforts in Lebanon — if Israel stops bombing Gaza

TEL AVIV — Iran has offered to support efforts to reach a cease-fire in Lebanon but on the highly unlikely condition that Israel halts its military campaign in Gaza.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made the remarks on Friday in Beirut, on the first visit by a top Iranian official to the Lebanese capital since an Israeli airstrike killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah last week.

Araghchi emphasized “the importance of using all the diplomatic capacities to support Lebanon and the region against the Zionist occupation regime.”

As the Iranian minister met with Lebanese and Hezbollah officials in Beirut, Israel continued to pick off top Hezbollah commanders with airstrikes.

Hashem Safieddine, seen as Nasrallah’s most likely successor, was possibly among the dead in a series punishing Israeli attacks on the southern suburbs of Beirut this week. Israeli officials say they are still trying to confirm whether Safieddine was in a Hezbollah intelligence headquarters near Beirut’s airport when it was struck.

Along with Hezbollah leaders, Israel has also been targeting Hamas commanders based in Lebanon. On Saturday, Hamas-affiliated media reported that Saeed Atallah, one of the leaders of al-Qassam brigades, a military wing of Hamas, was killed in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon.

The defiant remarks by Araghchi were in keeping with those made just hours earlier by Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in a fiery sermon at Friday prayers in Tehran justified Iran’s ballistic missile strike against Israel, saying it was “totally legal and legitimate” and a “minimum punishment for Zionist crimes.”

Occasionally grasping the barrel of a rifle propped by his side, Khamenei promised Israel will “never defeat Hamas and Hezbollah,” adding that the Iran-backed groups “will not back down.” The last time Khamenei conducted Friday prayers was nearly five years ago after the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite paramilitary forces, in a U.S. drone strike.

Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the Isaeli military on Saturday struck Hezbollah operatives at a command center inside a mosque in southern Lebanon’s Bint Jbeil, within the Martyr Salah Ghandour Hospital compound. The IDF said the drone strike was “precise” and based on intelligence.

Before carrying out the strike, the IDF sent text messages to the residents and called up officials in nearby villages, “demanding that all acts of terror carried out at the hospital cease immediately,” it said.