UN Security Council says UNIFIL must be protected after Israeli attacks

Security Council urges all parties to respect ‘safety, security of UNIFIL personnel and premises’ in southern Lebanon.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has expressed support for UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon following a series of Israeli attacks on the UN peacekeeping force.

In a statement on Monday that did not specifically mention Israel, the 15-member council urged “all parties to respect the safety and security of UNIFIL personnel and premises”.

“They recalled that UN peacekeepers and UN premises must never be the target of an attack,” the statement reads. “They reiterated their support to UNIFIL, underscoring its role in supporting regional instability.”

The statement comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu escalated his rhetoric against the UN peacekeepers, calling on them to “heed Israel’s request and to temporarily get out of harm’s way”.

The Israeli government has demanded that UNIFIL leave its positions in Lebanon, where Israel has stepped up ground operations and a campaign of heavy bombing that has killed hundreds of people and displaced a quarter of the country’s population.

“This meeting was about the Security Council coming together to give a statement with one voice of support to UNIFIL,” Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo reported from UN headquarters in New York.

The UN peacekeepers say Israeli forces have attacked their positions several times over the last week, with two injured after Israel targeted UNIFIL headquarters twice in a 48-hour period.

Israeli tanks also smashed through the gates of a UNIFIL position over the weekend.

Those attacks have been widely condemned, including by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said in a social media post on Sunday that attacks against UN peacekeepers were a violation of international law and “may constitute a war crime”.

The UN force has said that it would remain in place, despite pressure from Israel to leave its positions.

“We are staying. We are in the south of Lebanon under a Security Council mandate, so it’s important to keep an international presence and to keep the UN flag in the area,” a spokesman for the group said on Monday.

UNIFIL consists of some 10,000 peacekeepers from more than 50 countries, including Indonesia, India and Ireland.

On Sunday, the UN said it had observed 1,557 incidents across the Blue Line, a demarcation point between Lebanese and Israeli-held territory, with 93 percent of that fire coming from Israel into Lebanon.

“There are some countries with quite a few peacekeepers there. Some in the hundreds, a couple with over a thousand,” Al Jazeera’s Elizondo said of UNIFIL.

“So they’re watching this very closely, because there are many countries that have some of their citizens as part of this deployment that are now at risk, and the risks are high.”

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Al Jazeera and news agencies