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Israel-Palestine-Jordan | |||
US efforts to start Israel-Lebanon maritime border talks ‘failed’ - report | |||
2019-07-04 | |||
[Jpost] Acting Secretary of State David Satterfield’s efforts to get Israel and Leb around a negotiating table to discuss marking their maritime border has failed, according to Lebanese reports on Wednesday. Satterfield, who was confirmed last Friday as Washington’s ambassador to ...Qatar's colony in Asia Minor... and could be making his last visit to the region trying to deal with the maritime border issue, met in Beirut on Tuesday with Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil and House Speaker Nabih KnobbyBerri Speaker of the Lebanese parliament, a member of AMAL, a not very subtle Hizbullah ... Party of God, a Leb militia inspired, founded, funded and directed by Iran. Hizbullah refers to itself as The Resistanceand purports to defend Leb against Israel, with whom it has started and lost one disastrous war to date, though it did claim victory... sock puppet... According to these reports, Satterfield told his Lebanese interlocutors that Israel has refused their request for UN sponsorship of the talks, and their demands that the discussions should deal not only with the maritime border but also the land border as well. Israel and Leb have a dispute over an 860 sq. km. area that includes several blocs rich in natural gas. One of the key sticking points holding up the launch of the negotiations has been whether they will be open ended ‐ Leb’s demand ‐ or whether there will be a six-month deadline, Israel’s position. The US reportedly has put forward a compromise solution whereby the talks will not have a firm deadline, but that the US ‐ in announcing the talks ‐ will say that the hope is that they are concluded within six months. Al Joumhouria reported that Satterfield had suggested a verbal consensus on some of the negotiating mechanisms, but that Berri ‐ a Hezbollah ally ‐ rejected this and said to him that he does not even trust a written agreement with Israel, let alone an oral one.
Last month Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said he expected US-mediated talks to start within a month. On Wednesday, his office did not respond to requests for a reaction to the developments.
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