Caretaker Lebanon PM says maritime deal with Israel safe even if Netanyahu wins

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati on Wednesday said that U.S. guarantees would protect a maritime border deal with Israel should Israel’s conservative former premier Benjamin Netanyahu win a majority in elections.
Netanyahu had threatened to “neutralise” the agreement, which came into force last week after years of indirect U.S.-brokered talks that finally set out the sea boundary between the two enemy states after decades of hostility.
The United States pledged to remain a guarantor of the hard-won agreement. The mediator for the talks, U.S. energy envoy Amos Hochstein, told reporters in Lebanon that he expected the deal to withstand both contentious Israel elections and a transition to a new president in Lebanon.
Mikati appeared confident, too, telling Reuters in a phone interview from the Arab League Summit in Algiers that he was “not afraid” for the fate of the deal.