Hezbollah officials drop Gaza truce as condition for Lebanon ceasefire

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Hezbollah officials are no longer demanding a truce in Gaza as a condition for reaching a ceasefire in Lebanon, rowing back from an oft-repeated promise to keep fighting until Israel halts its offensive against Hezbollah's Iran-backed ally Hamas.

Ever since Hezbollah began launching missiles across Lebanon's border a day after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel, Hezbollah officials have consistently said they would not stop until Israel ended the war in Gaza.

But Naim Qassem, the deputy leader of Hezbollah, broke that link in a televised speech on Tuesday, even as he promised to continue to stand with Hamas and Palestinians in their battle with Israel.

Qassem, now Hezbollah's top official after its chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli strike, said he backed efforts by Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri, a Hezbollah ally, to secure a truce - without setting a precondition.

"We support the political activity being led by Berri under the title of a ceasefire," Qassem said. "If the enemy (Israel) continues its war, then the battlefield will decide."

Two days earlier, two lower-ranking Hezbollah officials had also talked about a Lebanon truce without making a linkage with Gaza.

Hezbollah has not explicitly said it was shifting its position. The group did not comment for this story.

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters his group was still "confident in Hezbollah's stance linking any agreement with a halt to the war in Gaza," citing previous Hezbollah statements.

However, a Lebanese government official who declined to be named told Reuters that Hezbollah had amended its position because of a host of pressures, including the mass displacement of people from the main constituencies where supporters of the Muslim Shi'ite group live in south Lebanon and Beirut's southern suburbs.

The official said it was also driven by Israel's intensifying ground campaign and objections to Hezbollah's stance from some Lebanese political actors.

Top lawmakers from other sects in Lebanon's patchwork politics have in recent days called for a resolution to end fighting that does not link the future of Lebanon - a nation that was already crippled by an economic crisis before the latest conflict - to the Gaza war.

"We will not tie our fate to the fate of Gaza," veteran Lebanese Druze figure Walid Jumblatt said on Monday.

Lebanese Christian politician Suleiman Frangieh, a close ally of Hezbollah, told reporters on Monday that the "priority" was a halt to Israel's offensive "and that we come out united from this attack and that Lebanon is victorious."

Preceding these comments, there were indications from two other officials that Hezbollah could be changing its stance.

One of them, Hezbollah official Mahmoud Qmati, told Iraqi state television on Sunday that the group would be "ready to begin examining political solutions after a halt to the aggression on Lebanon", again without mentioning Gaza.

Diplomats who also noted the shift said Hezbollah may have left it too late to generate any diplomatic momentum. Israel intensified its offensive by sending ground troops across more sections of the Lebanese-Israeli border on Tuesday and is continuing airstrikes on Beirut and elsewhere.

Israel's "ruling logic" now was military rather than diplomatic, said one diplomat working on Lebanon.

A senior Western diplomat said there was no sign of any ceasefire on the horizon and that the position being expressed by Lebanese officials "evolved" from its previous stance focusing purely on a Gaza ceasefire when bombs started dropping on Beirut.

Mohanad Hage Ali, an expert at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said Israel had been able to seize the upper hand by ramping up the pressure on Hezbollah militarily.

"Hezbollah is playing politics... But that's not enough for the Israelis. It doesn't work that way," he said.

(Reporting by Maya Gebeily and Timour Azhari; additional reporting by Nidal Al-Mughrabi; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)