The Israeli military says it has intercepted rockets fired from Yemen

JERUSALEM: Israel’s security cannot be guaranteed through military force alone and requires a diplomatic solution, France’s foreign minister said on Monday, adding Paris will continue its efforts for a ceasefire in Lebanon.
Speaking at the end of a four-day tour of the Middle East, Jean-Noël Barrot was in Israel on Monday to mark one year since Hamas militants entered Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking around 250 back to Gaza as hostages .
The attack triggered an Israeli military operation in Gaza that killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to the enclave’s health ministry. The war has sparked conflict across the region as Israel steps up military operations against Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, on its northern border in Lebanon.
“Violence alone cannot guarantee Israel’s security, your security. “Military success cannot be a substitute for a political perspective,” Barrot said at a news conference in Jerusalem.
“In order to bring the hostages home to their loved ones, to enable the displaced people to return to their homes in the north (of Israel), after a year of war, the time for diplomacy has come.”
Barrot’s arrival in Israel, home to about 180,000 French citizens, came at a difficult time in French-Israeli relations after President Emmanuel Macron received a sharp rebuff from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the weekend.
Macron had called for a de facto arms embargo on Israel and, in a veiled attack on the US, said countries that supplied weapons and called for a ceasefire when they were used in conflicts were incoherent. French arms supplies to Israel are minimal.
Barrot reiterated that it was strange to call for a ceasefire while providing offensive weapons. He said that France, as a staunch defender of Israel’s security, considered it important to speak openly about the ongoing suffering of the civilian population in Gaza, but also about the military operation in southern Lebanon.
France worked with the United States to reach a ceasefire in Lebanon in late September. Diplomatic sources said at the time that this had secured a temporary ceasefire, a day before Israel heavily bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing longtime Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
“We have a responsibility to act today to prevent Lebanon from finding itself in a situation as dramatic as that in Syria a few years ago,” Barrot said.
Ceasefire proposals put forward jointly with Washington remain on the table, he said.