US leads effort to cool tensions over Lebanon

Global leaders were engaged in intensive diplomacy last night to dissuade Israel from increasing attacks on Lebanon, amid fears that a wider regional war could erupt in response to a rocket strike that killed 12 children playing football in the occupied Golan Heights.

- Ruth Michaelson

As the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, convened a meeting of his national security cabinet, the White House backed Israeli statements that blamed Saturday's attack on the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, saying: "It was their rocket, and launched from an area they control. It should be universally condemned."

But the US was "also working on a diplomatic solution... that will end all attacks once and for all", a statement from the White House's National Security Council added. Speaking in Tokyo, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was clear: "We also don't want to see the conflict escalate. We don't want to see it spread."

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, had spoken with Netanyahu, telling him that France remained committed to doing "everything to avoid a new escalation in the region by passing messages to all parties involved in the conflict," according to a statement from the Élysée.

The UN's special coordinator for Lebanon, as well as the UN peacekeeping force deployed along the line that demarcates Israeli from Lebanese territory, urged "maximum restraint".

Both sides, they said, must "put a stop to the ongoing intensified exchanges of fire". "It could ignite a wider conflagration that would engulf the entire region in a catastrophe beyond belief," they added.