France has requested that the UN Security Council hold an emergency meeting after Israel launched its deadliest wave of airstrikes at the Iran-aligned Hezbollah militia in Lebanon in decades. “Following today’s strikes in Lebanon, which claimed hundreds of victims, I have called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week,” new French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot wrote on social media platform X on Tuesday. As the war in Gaza approaches its first anniversary, the long-feared escalation of the Middle Eastern conflict appeared to have arrived on Monday, with Lebanese autho…