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WASHINGTON/BEIRUT: US President Donald Trump’s administration approved $230 million for Lebanon’s security forces this week as they push to disarm the once powerful armed group Hezbollah, sources in Washington and Beirut said.
A Lebanese source familiar with the decision said the funding included $190 million for the Lebanese Armed Forces and $40 million for the Internal Security Forces.
Democratic US congressional aides said the funds had been released just before Washington’s fiscal year ended on September 30. “For a small country like Lebanon, that’s really, really significant,” one of the aides said on a call with reporters, requesting anonymity in order to speak freely.
The funding was released at a time when the Republican president’s administration has been slashing many foreign assistance programs, saying that its priority in spending taxpayer dollars is America First.
The release of the funds appeared to reflect the priority Trump has put on trying to resolve the conflict in Gaza and the wider region.
Asked for comment, a State Department spokesperson said in an emailed statement that US assistance supports Lebanese forces “as they work to assert Lebanese sovereignty across the country and fully implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the only viable framework for a durable security arrangement for both Lebanese and Israelis.”
The resolution, adopted in August 2006, ended the last round of deadly conflict between Hezbollah and Israel.
A conflict between Israel and Lebanon that began a year ago has battered Hezbollah and left swathes of Lebanon in ruins.
President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam asked the US-backed army on August 5 to devise a plan to ensure that all arms across the country would be in the hands of security forces by the end of the year.
Hezbollah has rejected calls to disarm since the devastating war with Israel. But the Iran-backed group is under pressure to give up its weapons from its rivals in Lebanon and from Washington.
The Lebanese source said the funding would allow the Internal Security Forces to take over internal security in Lebanon so the LAF can focus on other critical missions.

GENEVA: The United Nations insisted on Friday there was no safe place for Palestinians ordered to leave Gaza City,and that Israeli-designated zones in the southern Gaza Strip were “places of death.”
Since launching its air assault on Gaza City in August ahead of its ground offensive there, the Israeli military has repeatedly told Palestinians to head south.
“The notion of a safe zone in the south is farcical,” James Elder, a spokesman for the UN children’s agency UNICEF, told journalists in Geneva.
Speaking from Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, Elder pointed to how “bombs are dropped from the sky with chilling predictability; schools, which had been designated as temporary shelters are regularly reduced to rubble, (and) tents... are regularly engulfed in fire from air attacks.”
The Israeli military has urged Palestinians to relocate to a “humanitarian area” in Al-Mawasi on the coast, where it says aid, medical care and humanitarian infrastructure will be provided.
Israel first declared the area a safe zone early in the two-year war but has carried out repeated strikes on it since, saying it is targeting Hamas.

Nutrition, shelter, sanitation

Elder insisted that “the issuance of a general or a blanket evacuation order to civilians does not mean that those who remain behind lose their protection as civilians.”
At the same time, he warned, the “so-called safe zones ... are also places of death.”
Al-Mawasi, he pointed out, “is now one of the most densely populated places on Earth.
“It’s grotesquely overcrowded and has been stripped of the most basic essentials of survival.”
The UN had begun in late 2023 “debunking this concept of a unilaterally-declared safe zone,” Elder said.
“The law is very clear,” he stressed.
“It is the responsibility of the occupying power — Israel — to ensure that a safe zone has all the essentials for survival: that is nutrition, shelter and sanitation.
“None of those are present in a level that is fitting of a population,” Elder said, adding that the UN at the start had “at least assumed that these places would not be bombed.”
But over the past 18 months, the Israeli-designated safe-zones had been hit “dozens of time,” and “people in tents have suffered from airstrikes.”

Makeshift crutches

Humanitarian agencies regularly warn that the amount of urgent supplies being allowed into the Gaza Strip are grossly insufficient to meet the immense needs of the population in the Israeli-besieged Palestinian territory.
“To cope with that situation, our colleagues, particularly in our hospital in Rafah, have decided to build our own materials,” such as “home-made, wooden crutches,” said Christian Cardon, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The ICRC announced on Wednesday that had been “forced” to suspend its activities in Gaza City due to Israel’s intensified military operations.
“There are no longer any international staff in Gaza City. We had between two and five expatriates before,” Cardon told AFP, adding that the ICRC has 350 staff, including 50 international staff, throughout the Gaza Strip.
The World Health Organization is calling for humanitarian corridors to allow access to hospitals, its representative in the Palestinian territories, Rik Peeperkorn, told reporters.