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UNIFIL to Be Deployed Soon in South: Lebanese PM
Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss on Friday said the U.N. peacekeeping force will be deployed soon in south Lebanon and Lebanese interior force will be responsible for the security there, Lebanese National News Agency reported.
Meeting a group of parliament members in his office Friday afternoon, Hoss added that Lebanese army will also be temporarily transferred to the south when necessary.
But he did not specify when the deployment was going to happen. A U.N. verification of complete Israeli pullout from south Lebanon is an essential requirement for the U.N. force's filling in the vacuum left by the withdrawal of Israeli troops.
During the meeting, Hoss stressed the importance of reconstruction work in liberated areas. Beirut has been working to provide residents in southern villages with water, fuel oil and cooking gas.
Israel completed its troop withdrawal from south Lebanon on May 24, ending 22 years of occupation there, because of mounting casualties in the war of attrition with Lebanese resistance forces.
Meanwhile, the U.N. team to verify withdrawal line in the Lebanese side suspended its work as Lebanon has disputes with world body in a part of the drawn by U.N. cartographers.
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) spokesman Timur Goksel said although the problem threatened to indefinitely postpone the process of verifying the Israeli withdrawal, the two sides quickly reached a compromise and both U.N. and Lebanese officials agreed to resume its work on Saturday.
The U.N. official did not elaborate on the disputes with Lebanese side, the National News Agency said.
On Thursday, UNIFIL officials accompanied by Israeli and Lebanese officials began working on each side of the border line to verify that Israeli forces had pulled back.
Lebanese officials on Friday objected to a part of the withdrawal line and wanted to discuss it with cartographers, which put on hold the U.N. verification work on the Lebanese side.
Goksel said "Lebanese objection was technical" and insisted that the U.N. is not going to negotiate the map.
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