UN slams Israeli violations against Lebanon

UN reminds Tel Aviv that Israeli spying, flights over Lebanon violate resolution 1701.

UNITED NATIONS - All Israeli military flights over Lebanon break a resolution aimed at ending the 2006 hostilities between the two neighbors, a UN envoy said Tuesday.

"Every single Israeli overflight of Lebanon is a violation, your question gives me a welcome opportunity to repeat that," the UN special envoy for Lebanon, Michael Williams, told reporters.

"To the best of my knowledge, there's probably no other country in the world -- probably, I may be wrong -- which is subject to such an intrusive regime of aerial surveillance."

Williams highlighted "the discovery of listening devices which almost certainly seem to have been left by the Israelis.

"Are these violations? Yes of course, they're violations of 1701," he said referring to the resolution.

Williams has just drawn up a report into the implementation of resolution 1701 which ended hostilities in 2006, but did not seal a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.

The resolution also insists on the strict embargo on providing arms to the Lebanese resistance, as well as their complete disarmament. It also affirms the Lebanese government's sovereignty across the whole country.

All UN reports on the implementation of the resolution say that Hezbollah have not disarmed and continue to get weapons from abroad, and that the Israeli air force continues to overfly the country in violation of the resolution.

Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap.

The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.

Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Security Council also welcomed the formation of a new Lebanese government.

"The members welcomed the progress achieved by the formation of the new unity government of Lebanon and they expressed their continued support for the work of UNIFIL and special coordinator Williams," said Austrian envoy Thomas Mayr-Harting.