Day 4 at ICJ hearing: Jordan says Israeli occupation ‘unlawful, inhumane and must end’

KFAR KILA, Lebanon: Lebanese leaders said Beirut was in contact with Washington and Paris to press Israel to fully withdraw from south Lebanon, branding its presence in five points an “occupation” after a ceasefire deadline expired on Tuesday.
The UN called the incomplete pull-out a violation of a Security Council resolution, though it has allowed many displaced residents to return to border villages, many largely destroyed in more than a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said Beirut was in contact with truce brokers the United States and France to press Israel to complete its withdrawal, after an initial late January deadline set under the deal was already extended.
Decision-makers are “unified in adopting the diplomatic option, because nobody wants war,” Aoun said, according to a statement.
Earlier Tuesday, Lebanon said any Israeli presence on its soil constituted an “occupation.”
In a statement, Aoun, along with Lebanon’s prime minister and parliament speaker, warned the government would ask the UN Security Council to push Israel to leave, and said that Lebanese armed forces were ready to assume duties on the border, adding Beirut had “the right to adopt all means” to make Israel withdraw.
In the south, many returned to destroyed or heavily damaged homes, farms and businesses after more than a year of fighting between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah that included two months of all-out war, which halted with the November 27 ceasefire.
“The entire village has been reduced to rubble. It’s a disaster zone,” said Alaa Al-Zein, back in Kfar Kila.
Israel had announced just before the pullout deadline that it would keep troops in “five strategic points” near the border, and on Tuesday its Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said they would withdraw “once Lebanon implements its side of the deal.”
Israel’s army had said it would remain on the five hilltops, overlooking swathes of both sides of the border, “temporarily” to “make sure there’s no immediate threat.”
Lebanon’s army announced it had deployed, starting Monday, in 11 southern border villages and other areas from which Israeli troops have pulled out.
The official National News Agency said two people were found alive in Kfar Kila, three months after contact was lost. One was a Hezbollah fighter thought to have been killed.
The agency also said that “enemy forces” set off a powerful explosion outside the village of Kfarshuba.
In a joint statement, UN envoy Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert and the UNIFIL peacekeeping force said that at “the end of the period set” for Israel’s withdrawal and the Lebanese army’s deployment, any further “delay in this process is not what we hoped would happen.”
They said it was a violation of a Security Council resolution that ended a 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.
In Lebanon, the cost of reconstruction is expected to reach more than $10 billion, while more than 100,000 people remain displaced, according to the United Nations.
Despite the devastation, returning resident Zein said his fellow villagers were adamant about going home.
“The whole village is returning, we will set up tents and sit on the ground” if need be, he said.
Others were going south to look for the bodies of their relatives under the rubble.
Among them was Samira Jumaa, who arrived in the early hours to look for her brother, a Hezbollah fighter killed in Kfar Kila with others five months ago.
“We have not heard of them until now. We are certain they were martyred,” she said.
“I’ve come to see my brother and embrace the land where my brother and his comrades fought,” she added.
Hezbollah strongholds in south and east Lebanon, as well as in south Beirut, suffered heavy destruction during the hostilities, initiated by Hezbollah in support of ally Hamas during the Gaza war.
Under the ceasefire, Lebanon’s military was to deploy alongside United Nations peacekeepers as the Israeli army withdrew from the south over an initial 60-day period that was later extended to February 18.
Hezbollah was to pull back north of the Litani River, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the border, and dismantle remaining military infrastructure there.
Since the cross-border hostilities began in October 2023, more than 4,000 people have been killed in Lebanon, according to the health ministry.
On the Israeli side of the border, 78 people including soldiers have been killed, according to an AFP tally based on official figures, with an additional 56 troops killed in southern Lebanon during the ground offensive.
Around 60 people have reportedly been killed in Lebanon since the truce began, two dozen of them on January 26 as residents tried to return to border towns on the initial withdrawal deadline.

PORT SUDAN: Sudanese paramilitaries have killed more than 200 people, including women and children, in a three-day assault on villages in the country’s south, a lawyer group monitoring the war said Tuesday.
The Emergency Lawyers group, which documents rights abuses, said the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces attacked unarmed civilians in the villages of Al-Kadaris and Al-Khelwat, in White Nile state.
The RSF carried out “executions, kidnappings, enforced disappearances and property looting” during the assault since Saturday, which also left hundreds wounded or missing, it said.
The lawyer group said some residents were shot at while attempting to flee across the Nile River. Some drowned in the process, with the lawyers calling the attack an act of “genocide.”
Sudan’s army-aligned foreign ministry said the death toll from the RSF attacks so far was 433 civilians, including babies. It called the assault a “horrible massacre.”
Both the army and the RSF have been accused of war crimes, but the paramilitaries have been specifically notorious for committing ethnic cleansing and systematic sexual violence.
The war has killed tens of thousands, displaced over 12 million and created what the International Rescue Committee has called the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded.”
White Nile state is currently divided by the warring parties.
The army controls southern parts, including the state capital, Rabak, as well as two major cities and a key military base.
The RSF meanwhile holds northern parts of the state, bordering the capital Khartoum, which include several villages and towns and where the latest attacks took place.
Witnesses from the two villages, about 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of Khartoum, said thousands of residents fled their homes, crossing to the western bank of the Nile following RSF shelling.
A medical source speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity for their safety on Monday said some bodies were lying in the streets while others were killed inside their homes with no one able to reach them.
Fighting has intensified in recent weeks as the army advances in its bid to reclaim full control of the capital from paramilitaries.
The UN’s children agency, UNICEF, said on Sunday that those trapped in areas and around the fighting in Khartoum had reported indiscriminate shooting, looting, and forced displacement, as well as alarming accounts of families being separated, children missing, detained or abducted and sexual violence.
Many children, it added, showed signs of distress having witnessed the events around them.
“This is a living nightmare for children, and it must end,” said Sheldon Yett, UNICEF representative for Sudan.
Elsewhere, RSF shelling and gunfire shook the streets this week in a famine-hit camp near North Darfur’s besieged capital El-Fasher in the country’s west.
Hundreds of families fled the violence to neighboring towns with civilians saying that they were robbed and attacked on the roads.
The Zamzam camp, home to between 500,000 and a million people according to aid groups, was the first place famine was declared in Sudan last August under a UN-backed assessment.