●WikiLeaks cables: Elias Murr advises Israel via the US ambassador

At the start of December 2010 "al-Akhbar" published cables of the American embassy in Beirut obtained from WikiLeaks, among them the record of a meeting in March 2008 in which the defence minister Elias Murr told the ambassador Michele Sison that in any coming war Israel should avoid bombing bridges and infrastructure in the Christian areas, and that the army would stay out of the fighting.

Note: Passing military advice to the enemy, even through a third party, falls under the Lebanese penal code, which criminalises contact with the enemy, and the Israel Boycott Law (1955), if the record is proven; the minister's office denied it. The gravest aspect of the affair is that it shows a foreign embassy as a channel between Lebanese officials and an enemy in a state of war, outside any constitutional oversight.