Special envoy to Deir Kifa (Lebanon)
There are more than six hundred of them, in fatigues, gathered under a marquee erected in the middle of the UN base in Deir Kifa. As much surrounded by the green hills as the surrounding instability, the French peacekeepers mobilized to try to maintain calm in southern Lebanon are authorized for a moment to release the pressure. “Hand on the bucket… The bucket two fingers from the hatches… prepare for the dust… send!”, rings a soldier, while everyone at the table raises their glasses of wine. Sébastien Lecornu included.
A few moments earlier, the Minister of the Armed Forces visiting the Land of Cedar this Monday to celebrate the New Year with the troops, the day after a detour through Egypt aboard the helicopter carrier Dixmude, warned them that the he coming year did not promise to be easy. “We are in a great form of uncertainty in which we do not know very well how the different actors in the region will behave… We are not very far from Tehran, the situation is obviously getting tougher in Gaza…” observes -he said in a non-exhaustive manner while the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 reactivated the centers of tension in the region. As far as the Red Sea, where the Houthis target international trade, linked to Israel and the United States. “All of this still plunges us into a form of abyss,” admits the minister 15 km from the Israeli border. This is his second visit there since November.
“This war will celebrate its three months next Sunday,” remarks Colonel Matthieu Leroy, commander of the UNIFIL reserve force, from the podium. With 10,000 men, including 700 French soldiers, this interposition force has been in the breach since Lebanese Hezbollah and the IDF clashed again. Seventeen years after the Lebanese War, “the risk of regional escalation” worries Sébastien Lecornu. “Our time here will be strewn with uncertainty in the weeks and days to come. I would be a bad minister if I did not warn you that the mission will continue to be, if not uncomfortable, potentially very dangerous.”
The soldiers of Deir Kifa report an increase in altercations. “What happened in three or four years happens in a week,” says an officer as Israeli drones are heard flying over the area. Shells, rockets… Hezbollah fire and Israeli responses are daily occurrences, at the risk of weakening UN Resolution 1701, which has provided a precarious framework for South Lebanon since 2006.
According to a recent AFP tally, clashes between Israel and Hezbollah have left nearly 160 dead on the Lebanese side, including more than 110 Hezbollah fighters; 13 Israelis, including 9 soldiers, have been killed since October 7.
“If we weren’t there, what would it be like…” sighs a senior officer. To intervene, patrols of light armored vehicles painted white, headlights on, UN flags in evidence, are multiplying between the roads of Lebanese villages lined with propaganda posters of Hezbollah and its allies. “The strength of UNIFIL is its visibility,” notes the soldier. “War is avoidable, and both parties have no interest in war,” insists Sébastien Lecornu alongside General Joseph Aoun, the chief of staff of the Lebanese armies, whom he invited to the base of Deir Kifa. The opportunity to announce the transfer by France to Lebanon of armed armored vehicles (VAB). The minister reiterates his wish to see a second “truce” and a “lasting ceasefire” come to fruition between Israel and its enemies. “We have to work tirelessly on it,” says Sébastien Lecornu, who judges that it will allow the release of the hostages still held by Hamas. Contrary to the declarations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who shows his determination to use force a little more every day.
While waiting for diplomatic efforts to one day silence the guns, the troops and the minister sing with one voice the song of the 2nd Armored Division, where the prospect of “radiant peace by the fireside” is recounted. .
