Timeline of the 2006 Lebanon War (September-October)
This is a timeline of the 2006 Lebanon War during September.
September 2
United Nations
- Kofi Annan held talks about the Lebanon truce and the nuclear standoff with senior Iranian officials, including Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister. After the talks, in reference to UN resolution 1701, UN spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said: "He [Mottaki] concluded by saying that we can count on his full co-operation." Resolution 1701 drew up the terms for the ceasefire, including expanding an existing UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon and calling for an arms embargo on Hezbollah.[1]
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Iran
- Iran funded and armed Hezbollah in the 1980s although it now says its support is primarily moral and political. But Iran is still widely believed to be the main arms supplier for the Lebanese group. Annan raised the arms embargo issue with Mottaki during his talks, Fawzi said, but did not give further details. Fawzi said Ahmadinejad had told Annan in telephone talks prior to the visit that Iran had reservations about some articles of the resolution but had also said Iran would co-operate in its implementation. Hamid Reza Asefi, spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry, did not say if Iran had offered to co-operate over the Lebanon resolution when he was asked about the issue at a news conference. "We told Mr Annan about our stance. We said that it is a Lebanese resolution which needs a Lebanese solution and the Lebanese groups should reach unanimity on that," he said. Asked if Annan had raised the arms embargo issue, he said: "Mr Annan never said that we sent any weapons. The weapons are being sent by America to Israel and that should be stopped."[1]
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September 3
Hezbollah
- Hezbollah is not a headache for Israel alone. The Shiite extremist group poses an equally daunting challenge to the Sunni Arab regimes in the Middle East. For behind Hezbollah's perceived heroics in the Lebanon war sits Shiite Iran, with its claim to great-power status. If unchallenged, the Iran-Hezbollah axis of power will end the millenniums-old Sunni Arab domination of the Middle East. No surprise then that Sunni rulers and radical clerics reacted viscerally to Hezbollah's perceived victory in the Lebanon war. But Riyadh's and Amman's denunciations of Shiite rulers and extremist groups, coupled with a flurry of anti-Hezbollah fatwas by radical Sunni clerics, have not diverted the admiring gaze of Arabs everywhere toward Hezbollah. Reversing this situation will not be easy, especially when Hezbollah's yellow flag and pictures of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, are ubiquitous on the Arab street. But the Lebanon war has turned Hezbollah and Iran into regional power brokers and custodians of the Palestinian cause. U.S. allies in the region — Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — now count for far less than its enemies. Anger on the Arab street threatens them, and where Sunni regimes rule over Shiite populations — Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates — rising sectarian tensions could be destabilizing.[2]
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| United Nations
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September 4
United States
- U.S. civil rights leader Jesse Jackson on September 4, 2006 met with Hezbollah officials in Lebanon and called on them to show proof that two captured Israel soldiers are still alive. He said such a move could jump-start negotiations that might lead to the soldiers' release. Jackson said there were indications the two soldiers captured July 12, 2006 were alive, and said their continued detention is "becoming a magnet to attract a second round" of war.[3]
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September 6
Germany
- German airport security experts had arrived at Beirut International Airport and were to supervise all incoming cargo using special equipment, Mire Eisin said. A German naval force is projected to enforce the arms embargo from the sea in about two weeks. Until then, Italian, French, British and Greek naval ships are to patrol the Lebanese waters.[4]
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September 7
Israel
- Israel said that even though it is lifting its air and sea blockade on Lebanon, it reserves the "right of self-defence" to stop the militant Shiite Hezbollah from rearming via the border with Syria. "We don't see the end of the aerial and naval blockade as the end of our right to implement the embargo on the land border," a senior aide to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said. Israel is demanding the deployment of international forces at the nine border crossings along Lebanon's 330-kilometre-long border with Syria, which constitutes the main weapons supply line to Hezbollah from Syria and Iran, Mire Eisin told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. "This is something that hasn't yet been resolved," she said. Eisin said that by agreeing to lift the sea and air blockade on Lebanon at 6 p.m. (1500 GMT), Israel was implementing its side of United Nations Security Council resolution 1701, "with the full expectation that the Lebanese government and the international forces will fully implement the arms embargo (against Hezbollah) both by the sea and by the air."[4]
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September 9
September 13
September 18
Israel
- Azmi Bishara, head of the Balad party, asked if he had inquired after the fate of the kidnapped IDF soldiers while he was in Syria, said that he not. His explanation: "Official contacts are already underway, and we had no way of reaching the relevant authorities."[7]
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October 22
October 23
Lebanon
- Women in southern Lebanon wept at the graves of loved ones killed in the Israel-Hezbollah war, at the start of a major holiday marking the end of Ramadan. In the bombed-out villages of southern Lebanon, the mood was morbid and the festivities subdued. There is only sadness and desperation and fear for the future. Many Lebanese gathered in cemeteries to pay their respects to the more than 855 Lebanese who were killed during the 34-day war, most of them civilians. In Beirut, many Lebanese left mosques after morning prayers and went to the grave of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was killed in a February 2005 car bombing that continues to haunt the country as U.N. investigators pursue the perpetrators. Celebrations in the southern village of Halta were replaced with the funeral of a 12-year-old boy who was killed October 22, 2006 by an Israeli cluster bomb. U.N. demining experts say about 1 million cluster bombs failed to explode when Israel dropped them during the war summer 2006. As if to underscore the tensions, Lebanese security officials said Israeli warplanes conducted overflights October 23, 2006 as far north as the outskirts of Beirut a rare occurrence since a U.N.-brokered cease-fire halted the fighting August 14 2006. Shiite and Muslim clergymen across Lebanon said they would not be receiving celebratory greetings at their homes or offices this year because of the Israeli-Hezbollah war and the violence in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Lebanon's most senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, warned worshippers in his sermon of the perils facing the Arab world as a result of the "rising international campaign against Islam.". The spiritual leader of Lebanon's Sunnis, the Grand Mufti Sheik Mohammed Rashid Kabbani, urged national unity and an end to the divisions that have plagued Lebanon.[8]
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| United Nations
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October 24
References