The truth about this ceasefire deal between Israel and the government of Lebanon is that Lebanon’s leaders could not have signed it had Hezbollah balked. And beyond the relief for the civilian population, who are understandably celebrating, there is a strategic reality beneath this development. What made it possible for France and the United States to succeed as mediators and – if all goes well – end a total of 14 months of war, was a convergence of interests between Israel and Hezbollah.
Recall after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to war, vowing that he would only stop once Hamas had been destroyed. More than a year later, Hamas continues to fight and is far from destroyed, leaving Netanyahu no choice but to persevere. Not only has he staked his (faltering) reputation on achieving that goal, his far-right coalition partners, upon whom he depends to stay in office, believe that Hamas can in fact be obliterated and that anything short of that would be a betrayal of the nation. If they desert Netanyahu, he will likely cease to be prime minister and would be vulnerable to a slew of legal problems stemming from indictments alleging corruption, fraud, and breach of trust.
Netanyahu also realised that it could prove all but impossible to sustain an open-ended war against Hamas while also waging a second against Hezbollah. Hamas is scattered and leaderless, but more than 800 IDF soldiers have been killed in Gaza, and as far back as this June, General Herzi, Chief of the Israeli General Staff, said that he was facing a shortage of troops. Of the two foes, Netanyahu sees Hamas as the more important, and it therefore made sense for him to end the war with Hezbollah so that he would concentrate Israel’s firepower on Gaza – and, as he put it in defending the ceasefire agreement to Israelis, “to focus on the Iranian threat”.
Israel is also fighting a war of sorts in the West Bank. Following the start of its war against Hamas, there has been a surge in violence from Jewish settlers against Palestinian communities in the region. That, along with the continued expansion of Jewish settlements and the unremitting carnage in Gaza, have worked to the advantage of armed Palestinian resistance groups there – Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. The IDF has been conducting raids in towns, especially in the northern parts of the West Bank (such as Jenin and Tulkarm) and has even carried out airstrikes. Since 7 October, nearly 700 West Bank Palestinians have been killed. This is nothing compared to the scale of death in Gaza, but it does mean that Israel is fighting on two fronts in the occupied territories. Continuing military operations in the West Bank and Gaza while also continuing the fight against Hezbollah in Lebanon would have placed unsustainable burdens on the IDF.
Hezbollah had reasons of its own for agreeing to a ceasefire. To support Hamas, it had been firing rockets into northern Israel, forcing the government to evacuate 67,500 people from their homes by the end of September. Netanyahu eventually decided that a tit-for-tat strategy wouldn’t suffice to quell Hezbollah, and ordered the IDF to start intensive airstrikes as prelude to an invasion aimed at expelling Hezbollah fighters. Hezbollah has long history of fighting Israel doggedly and even forcing it to retreat or seek peace. Its fighters are disciplined, savvy, and battle-tested.
What it does not have, however, is the state-of-the art weaponry Israel has been wielding, let alone an air force. It couldn’t match the IDF, and suffered significant losses, which included the death of several senior commanders. On top of that, Israel killed Hezbollah’s long-time spiritual leader, Hasan Nasrallah, and soon thereafter his successor Hashem Safieddine. Hezbollah’s current leader, Naim Qassem, is surely a marked man and might not survive for long. Israel’s war also devastated large parts of southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs, Hezbollah’s political base. Hezbollah could have continued to resist, but that would have required absorbing ever-greater losses. Better to seek a respite to recover and rebuild.
The intersecting interests of Israel and Hezbollah have enabled a ceasefire deal, though the details of the agreement have yet to be revealed. But the gist is that the ceasefire will last for 60 days, allowing Hezbollah to remove its fighters from southern Lebanon (maybe to positions north of the Litani River) and Israeli to pull its troops out. But as part of the agreement, Israel has apparently insisted on the right to resume its airstrikes if it determines that conditions on the ground made that step necessary – a point Netanyahu underscored, noting during an address to Israelis, that he had “the United States’s full understanding” on this point. That provision gives Netanyahu lots of leeway; but if he chooses to resume the bombing, Hezbollah will retaliate and the ceasefire could unravel.
If Hezbollah regroups, infiltrates southern Lebanon, and rebuilds its redoubts there, whether during the 60-day ceasefire or at some later point, Israel could go even further and restart its air and ground campaign. Or Hezbollah may decide that it can’t stand by and watch as Israel begins to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip as a prelude to building settlements in its northern areas, a proposition that has considerable purchase among Israel’s far-right leaders like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The ceasefire will then be unsalvageable. This scenario is not foreordained, but nor can it be ruled out, especially given the uncertainty about how the terms of the agreement will be enforced.
The unenviable task of enforcement has apparently been assigned once again to the Lebanese army and international peacekeepers, the latter acting in the name of the UN. But this experiment has been tried before under the terms of Security Council Resolution 1701, adopted in August 2006. It failed because neither enforcer had the muscle – and the UN peacekeepers the mandate – to use force if necessary to expel the Hezbollah fighters who re-entered southern Lebanon. If Hezbollah or Israel violates this latest ceasefire deal, don’t expect the appointed enforcers to stop them. And though the agreement provides for a group of countries to monitor the two warring parties’ compliance, oversight and enforcement are poles apart.
Stitching together an agreement like this was not easy; criticising it from afar is. There’s no such thing as a perfect ceasefire deal, and even requirements spelled out in detail and in language that is unambiguous cannot prevent hate, mistrust, misperception, and miscalculation from inducing the signatories to violate any agreement. Yet it’s important to be clear-eyed about this particular deal. We must hope that it will endure, while understanding that it could prove ephemeral.
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