Israel Defense Forces did not cross the border with Lebanon before the deadly clash between Israeli and Lebanese forces, a UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) official told Army Radio on Wednesday, adding that the UN force had been dealing with complaints of Lebanese provocations on a daily basis.
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Milos Strugar, UNIFIL’s senior political adviser said that the IDF had “informed UNIFIL that it was going to conduct maintenance works” on the border, adding that while the Israeli unit had been “on the northern side of the border fence,” it was nonetheless “south of the international borderline.”
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“The situation became tense right away, with the Lebanon army also being there,” Strugar said, adding that UNIFIL forces had tried “to calm the situation and allow the IDF to work.”
Asserting the IDF’s claim that it had informed the Lebanese side of the planned border works, Strugar said that UNIFIL had received a message from the IDF “regarding these works, and we had passed that on to the Lebanese army.”
“We deal with complaints on provocations of Lebanese soldiers against IDF units on a daily basis,” Strugar told Army Radio, adding incidents occur “almost every day, there’s a lot of tension round the border, but what happened is the worst incident since 2006.”
Ben Cohen at the HuffPo says:
[T]he strategy of drawing Israel into a war and then blaming it for “aggression” is a depressingly familiar one.
