Peace Talks Canceled After Israel-Hezbollah Fighting. Israelis Call for War Crimes Against Lebanese Civilians

After renewed fighting between Israel and Hezbollah derailed this weekend’s U.S.-Iran peace talks, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir announced that Lebanon must be destroyed.

The two sides are apparently observing a ceasefire for now. But in a deranged X post after the death of four Israeli soldiers in the fighting, the bloodthirsty Ben Gvir twice wrote that “all of Lebanon must burn.”

Defense Minister Israel Katz boasted about destroying homes in southern Lebanon and displacing 200,000 residents.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotritch also wants to raze Lebanon. “Time to speak with fire,” he wrote.

Upshot: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers are openly advocating and bragging about war crimes.

Peace Talks Stopped

Yesterday, Vice President JD Vance, who will lead the U.S. delegation, canceled his trip to Switzerland, where peace talks were scheduled to begin today.

“The White House said the reason for the change of plans was ‘logistics,’”Axios reported:

But there were some indications that the background for the decision is connected to the shaky ceasefire in Lebanon.

Those indicators were the fighting in Lebanon.

Israel “struck Hezbollah targets across southern and eastern Lebanon in response to the killing of four Israeli soldiers, including a battalion commander in an attack on a tank in the Lebanese village of Kfar Tebnit,” The Washington Post reported.

Israel retaliated after Hezbollah ambushed a tank and killed four Israeli soldiers.

President Trump told NBC News that he told Israel to abide by a ceasefire.

“It’s a positive,” he told the network:

“It’s a little icing on the cake.” He declined to specify whether he had talked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly.

An official Hezbollah source tells NBC News that the group will abide by the ceasefire but that the Israelis are still firing and trying to move deeper into Lebanese territory. Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, said Israel was “firmly committed to an immediate ceasefire” and has halted offensive operations.

The fighting came after Trump signed the memorandum of understanding that ended the war with Iran.

“The United States is committed to PEACE, and we encourage everyone in the Middle East Region to maintain their commitment to allowing our negotiations to beautifully unfold,” he wrote on Truth Social:

The Markets are loving what is happening with Oil Prices way down, and Stocks way up. We expect a complete Ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Israel.

Netanyahu’s Bloodthirsty Cabinet

While Netanyahu announced that Israel would not leave the territory in Gaza and Lebanon it has captured as part of its Greater Israel Project, he didn’t rave like a lunatic.

Not so with Ben Gvir and Smotritch.

“For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!” Ben Gvir wrote:

With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF, and this commitment takes precedence over every other consideration.

I told the Prime Minister, even in our private meetings: For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep.

Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint — you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.

Two days earlier, Ben Gvir vowed to commit war crimes.

“We cannot stop demolishing houses in southern Lebanon,” he said on the Knesset television channel on June 17 after the U.S.-Iran peace pact was announced:

We cannot stop. We cannot allow the residents of southern Lebanon to return.

And what President Trump says doesn’t matter, he said.

Katz said much the same thing on Israeli television:

We have flattened the entire first line of villages in southern Lebanon, all the houses have been destroyed. The residents will never see them standing ever again.

Katz bragged that Israel had displaced 200,000 residents.

Smotrich didn’t go on at length and merely suggested a holocaust: “Time to speak with fire,” he wrote on X:

To open the gates of hell.

International Law and War Crimes

Multiple codicils of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court classify Israel’s military occupation of southern Lebanon as a war crime.

• Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health; 

• Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military

necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly;

• Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against

individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;

• Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are

not military objectives; and,

• Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or

buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives.

Because of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza after the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023, on November 21, 2024, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu “or the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.”