The US State Department building in Washington, DC. Photo: Reuters / Joshua Roberts.

The appointment of David Schenker to serve as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs was confirmed by the US Senate on Wednesday with an 83-11 vote.

A former Pentagon official, Schneker most recently worked at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Affairs think tank, where he was the Aufzien fellow and director of the Program on Arab Politics.

“David Schenker’s career has been dedicated to enhancing the quality of US Middle East policy, and it is only fitting he should now be the one enacting such policies at such a critical time for US interests in the region,” Washington Institute Executive Director Robert Satloff said on Wednesday.

In a September 2017 interview with The Algemeiner, Schenker talked about the threat posed by Hezbollah’s tunnels under the Israel-Lebanon border. Just over a year later, the IDF launched Operation Northern Shield, during which a number of such passageways were located and destroyed.

A future war between Israel and Hezbollah, Schenker told The Algemeiner in 2017, was “not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when.’”