Lebanese President Joseph Aoun met with US President Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday, where he declared that his country will permanently end hostilities with Israel and asked for backing in his efforts to disarm Hezbollah. At the meeting, Trump said he would be open to speaking directly with the Iran-backed terror group if Beirut asked.

Aoun’s visit came just hours after Lebanese troops deployed to an area in southern Lebanon that Israeli troops had withdrawn from, in the first test of the US-backed “pilot zone” plan for the eventual full withdrawal of the IDF from the south, pending the disarmament of Hezbollah in the area. The handover was not without incident, however, as the Lebanese army reported Israeli fire toward their troops, which the IDF said were “warning shots” at Lebanese soldier who encroached on the Israeli-held buffer zone.

Meeting Aoun at the White House, Trump said Lebanon had been “a very mistreated country” that had been “hit hard” for decades.

“We’re going to help it. We’re going to help it a lot,” he told reporters while sitting next to Aoun. “We are going to solve a lot of problems. We’ve already solved some of them for Lebanon. There’s a Hezbollah problem, but we’ve done some things that I think the world will take notice.”

“I would speak to Hezbollah. I speak to everybody. I’ll speak to people that a lot of people think I shouldn’t be speaking to, and things work out,” Trump said, adding that he would only talk to the Iran-backed terror group if Aoun asked him to do so. “If the president wanted me to speak to Hezbollah, I would.”

Asked whether the US would provide assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces tasked with disarming Hezbollah, Trump was noncommittal, saying that he would be discussing the matter with Aoun privately.

“We have some very concrete plans already in store for that. Others [may be] going in and helping, but [Lebanon is] also becoming much more self-sufficient,” Trump said.

Aoun, the first Lebanese president invited to Washington since 2009, asked Trump for political support and continued backing for the Lebanese army, which has begun deploying in southern areas under a US-backed framework agreement with Israel.

That framework, signed on June 26 after several rounds of direct negotiations,........

© The Times of Israel