Five days of frantic US diplomacy on Lebanon has yielded little

NEW YORK (AP) — President Joe Biden’s administration headed into the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders this week with high hopes that he could cement his legacy as an international statesman during escalating conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Yet five days of frantic diplomacy focused mainly on preventing the Israel-Hezbollah crisis from exploding into a full-scale war has yielded little, if any, results — and prospects for peace have further dimmed.

Despite a proposal from the U.S., France and other allies for a temporary cease-fire along the border with Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a defiant speech Friday to the General Assembly, vowing to keep up operations against Hezbollah until tens of thousands of Israeli citizens displaced by rocket attacks can return home.

As Netanyahu spoke, Israel launched a massive strike on Hezbollah’s main headquarters in Beirut that targeted the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. Netanyahu then cut short his already-truncated visit to New York and headed home without meeting U.S. officials.

“Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism. The way it does so matters,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Friday, declining to outright criticize Israel for its latest strike. The Pentagon and the White House National Security Council said the U.S. did not get advance warning.

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