Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib expressed disappointment with US President Joe Biden's comments on the escalating crisis between Israel and Lebanon on Tuesday, but said he still hoped Washington could step in to help.

“It wasn’t strong,” Bou Habib said of Biden’s UN speech. “It’s not promising and it won’t solve this problem.”

“I am still hopeful,” Bou Habib said in New York during a virtual event hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The United States is the only country that can really make a difference in the Middle East and with regard to Lebanon.”

Bou Habib told his interviewer, Aaron David Miller, vice president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a U.S. negotiator with the Palestinians during the administration of former President Bill Clinton, that estimates indicate that half a million people have been displaced in Lebanon. He said the Lebanese prime minister hopes to meet with U.S. officials in the next two days.

After nearly a year of war on Gaza, Israel is turning its focus to its northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah is firing rockets into Israel in support of its ally Hamas.

Israel says about 70,000 Israelis were forced to flee their homes in northern Israel.

In his speech, Biden sought to calm tensions, saying that all-out war was in no one’s interest. He told the 193-member UN General Assembly that a diplomatic solution was still possible, while Israel said it preferred a diplomatic solution that would keep Hezbollah away from the Israeli-Lebanese border.

Hezbollah says it also wants to avoid a full-scale conflict and that only an end to the war in Gaza will stop the fighting. Efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza have reached a dead end after months of stalled talks mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States.

Bou Habib pointed out that the Israeli government did not seriously seek to end the fighting through negotiations and instead sought to achieve some victory on the battlefield.

Special envoy Amos Hochstein led the American effort to stop the full-scale conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. But these efforts were thwarted by a series of attacks and counterattacks that began on October 8, the day after Hamas launched an attack on Israel, which led to Israel launching its deadly war on the besieged Gaza Strip.

Hochstein and French diplomats have sought to broker a deal under which Hezbollah would withdraw from Israel’s northern border, creating a buffer zone where the Lebanese army would deploy. Hezbollah has rejected the deal until Israel agrees to a ceasefire with Hamas. Israel says the return of Israelis expelled from their homes in northern Israel is a key goal in its fight against Lebanese militants.

For its part, the Washington Post reported in a report on Tuesday that Israel had been preparing for decades for a war against Hezbollah, and now with Hamas's capabilities in Gaza diminishing, Israel has begun to put its war plan into effect.

The newspaper quotes Israeli spokesmen as saying that many in Israel believe that it should have taken firm action against Hezbollah.

“The army has been building and reconstructing the plan for years,” said Miri Eisin, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who was briefed on the security deliberations, according to the newspaper.

She added: "Everything is now ready for the opening phase. The strikes that I have carried out in the past few days are part of detailed war scenarios that have been meticulously planned for years. Hamas did on October 7 what everyone was waiting for Hezbollah to do."

“Israel’s security chiefs pushed for the plans to be put into effect a few days after October 7,” Eisen said, an account confirmed by a “senior” Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, according to the Washington Post.