The leader of the Lebanese militia-party Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has announced the end of the «exceptional» military mobilization against Israel after the main Israeli and Lebanese authorities signed on Thursday the agreement that will delimit the maritime borders between the two countries.
«All exceptional and special measures and mobilization carried out by the resistance for several months are now declared over,» Nasrallah explained in a televised speech, calling the agreement a «great victory for Lebanon.»
In this sense, he made it clear that the ratification of the pact, carried out by the Lebanese president, Michel Aoun, and the Israeli prime minister, Yair Lapid, does not mean the «normalization of relations with Israel» and neither is it an «international agreement», according to the Naharnet news portal.
Before the two countries put an end to the conflict over the demarcation of their maritime border, Hezbollah warned Israel in July that if it extracted gas from the Karish field there would be «problems» in the region.
The U.S. mediator, Amos Hochstein, will receive the already signed documents of the agreement on Tuesday at a ceremony at the headquarters of the UN mission in southern Lebanon, where security measures have already been reinforced to avoid possible incidents.
Lebanon and Israel are technically at war, so the agreement, the fruit of two years of indirect negotiations, is in any case of special symbolic importance. It concerns an area of some 860 square kilometers claimed by both sides and in which natural gas deposits have been discovered.
Both Israel and Lebanon agreed to recognize Israel’s buoyed border, allowing Beirut to enjoy the area north of Line 23, including the Qana field, while the Israeli authorities maintain control over the Karish field, the exploitation of which has already begun.
