Macron calls on Iran’s president to back Mideast ‘de-escalation’

Paris — French President Emmanuel Macron called on Iran’s leader Masoud Pezeshkian to support a “general de-escalation” in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in a telephone conversation Sunday, his office said.

Macron stressed “the responsibility of Iran to support a general de-escalation and to use its influence in this direction with the destabilizing actors that enjoy its support.” Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters are fighting Israeli troops in Lebanon.

The Iranian presidential website said that in his conversation with Macron, Pezeshkian had called for an end to “crimes” in Lebanon and Gaza.

They discussed ways to secure a “cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel,” a statement on the website said.

Pezeshkian “asked the French president to work together with other European countries to force the Zionist regime to stop the genocide and crimes in Gaza and Lebanon,” the statement added.

The Israeli army is engaged in close combat with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon this Sunday, where it announced for the first time the capture of an enemy fighter. It is also intensifying its airstrikes against the pro-Iranian formation.

For its part, the Lebanese Islamist movement said it was fighting Israeli soldiers at the end of the afternoon “with automatic weapons” and “rockets” in at least four villages bordering Israel, with the Israeli army doing “face to face combat.”  

After having weakened the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza, Israel moved the front of the war to Lebanon, saying it wanted to allow the return to northern Israel of some 60,000 inhabitants, displaced by the rocket attacks carried out for a year by Hezbollah in support for Hamas.
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