Five days of frantic US diplomacy on Lebanon has yielded little results

President Joe Biden's administration headed into the annual UN General Assembly gathering of world leaders this week with high hopes that he could cement his legacy as an international statesman during escalating conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine.

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Yet five days of frantic diplomacy focused mainly on preventing the Israel-Hezbollah crisis from exploding into a full-scale war has yielded little, if any, results - and prospects for peace have further dimmed.

Despite a proposal from the US, France and other allies for a temporary cease-fire along the border with Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a defiant speech Friday to the General Assembly, vowing to keep up operations against Hezbollah until tens of thousands of Israeli citizens displaced by rocket attacks can return home.

As Netanyahu spoke, Israel launched a massive strike on Hezbollah's main headquarters in Beirut.

He then cut his already-truncated visit to New York short and was poised to head home without plans to meet senior US officials.

Netanyahu's speech and his abbreviated trip – without seeing anyone from Israel's largest and most important backer, the United States – underscored the limits of American influence, which many believe has been waning since Israel's war with Hamas, another Iranian-backed militant group, began nearly a year ago.