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A French soldier was killed and three others were wounded in an ambush on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon on Saturday, which French President Emmanuel Macron blamed on Hezbollah, a charge the group denies.The attack follows an agreement between Israel and Lebanon on Thursday for a 10-day ceasefire to end six weeks of fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed group.“Everything points to Hezbollah being responsible for this attack,” Macron said on Twitter. He urged Lebanese authorities to arrest the perpetrators.UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the attack in a statement and said an initial assessment by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) found it was carried out by an Iranian-backed group.But Hezbollah \u2013 which strongly opposes planned talks with Israel \u2013 denied involvement in the attack that killed the French peacekeeper, identified as Staff Sergeant Florian Montorio.“Hezbollah denies any connection to the incident that occurred with UNIFIL forces in the Ghandouriyeh-bint Jbeil area,” it said in a statement.The group urged “caution in making decisions and delegating responsibilities” pending the results of the Lebanese Army’s investigation into the incident.The fighting in Lebanon \u2013 one of the fronts of the Middle East war \u2013 has seen UNIFIL deployed there repeatedly targeted by both Israeli and Hezbollah forces.Montorio was caught in an “ambush” as his unit headed towards a UNIFIL outpost that had been cut off by fighting and died from a “direct gunshot”, France’s Armed Forces Minister Catherine Vautrin said on Friday.He is the second French soldier to die since the start of the war in the Middle East, after Arnaud Frion was killed by an Iranian-designed drone in Iraq’s Kurdistan region last month. -Potential ‘war crime’ –His commanding officer, Colonel Jeremy Akil, paid tribute to “an extraordinary soldier” who had served in a variety of conflict zones since enlisting in 2007. The 40-year-old father of two daughters was “at the end of his military career” and was due to return to civilian life within a few months, Akil said.His death came as Lebanon eyes the first direct talks with Israel in decades, with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun insisting in an apparent rebuke of Hezbollah’s criticism that it is not a “concession.”But senior Hezbollah official Mahmoud Qamati said on Saturday that his group was “not concerned with the negotiations being conducted by the state”, adding that they were “failed, weak, defeated… and submissive negotiations”.Aoun condemned the attack and promised to bring those responsible to justice, while Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said he had ordered an investigation.UNIFIL said in an online statement that the peacekeepers “came under small-arms fire from non-state-actors” while they were “clearing explosive ordnance along a road in the village of Ghanduriyyah” on their way to the checkpoint.“Tragically, one peacekeeper was killed and three others were injured, two of them seriously,” it said. He also said he had begun his own investigation into what could amount to “war crimes”.The force patrols southern Lebanon near the Israeli border, where Israel and Hezbollah have been fighting since last month, after the Iran-backed militant group fired rockets at Israel in support of its ally Iran, pushing Lebanon into the Middle East war.Three Indonesian peacekeepers were killed last month, with a preliminary UN investigation finding that one was killed by Israeli tank fire, while two others were killed by an improvised explosive device, possibly planted by Hezbollah.The peacekeeping force said other UNIFIL peacekeepers have also been injured since the war began and in April, Israeli troops destroyed surveillance cameras at UNIFIL’s headquarters.Last week, an Israeli tank twice hit peacekeeping vehicles, causing damage but no injuries, according to UNIFIL.UN peacekeepers have served as a buffer between Lebanon and Israel for decades, but their tenure ends at the end of this year.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A French soldier was killed and three others were wounded in an ambush on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon on Saturday, which French President Emmanuel Macron blamed on Hezbollah, a charge the group denies.The attack follows an agreement between Israel and Lebanon on Thursday for a 10-day ceasefire to end six weeks of fighting between Israel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":77652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[2207,1726,1108,1577,609,608,12440],"class_list":{"0":"post-77651","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bible-news","8":"tag-blames","9":"tag-death","10":"tag-france","11":"tag-french","12":"tag-hezbollah","13":"tag-lebanon","14":"tag-peacekeeper"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77653,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77651\/revisions\/77653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}