The relief that swept over Lebanon after a 60-day ceasefire deal was agreed in late November was palpable. As the army’s peacekeeping troops drove through Beirut, making their way to Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, people lined the streets to cheer. Relief, however, has dissolved into fear. In what can perhaps now be described as an omen of things to come, both Israel and Hezbollah were firing at each other just minutes before the 2:00am (GMT) ceasefire kick off on 27 November.
In the following days and weeks, numerous Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon were recorded by the Lebanese army and UN’s peacekeeping force. By 2 December, Israeli broadcaster i24News was reporting 52 cease-fire violations by the Israeli army in Lebanon, as alleged by French diplomatic sources. By mid-December, Israeli violations of the ceasefire had risen to 227, resulting in a total of 30 deaths and 31 injuries, according to the Ministry of Health and the Lebanese News Agency. The Israeli military has consistently repeated, over recent weeks of intermittent airstrikes on Lebanon, that it is “operating to remove threats” that constitute a violation of the ceasefire agreement by Hezbollah.
In the week before the truce was agreed, Israeli negotiators demanded the right to attack if Hezbollah violated its obligations. Hezbollah officials rejected the addition, arguing that neither side should reserve a right to attack.
“They are violating all agreements,” Rana Sahili, Hezbollah’s spokesperson, told me in early December. “They must pay attention to the matter and the countries sponsoring this agreement must stop the Israelis in their tracks.”
Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most powerful and heavily armed political party, has criticised the US-led five-country monitoring committee tasked with enforcing the truce. France, which is part of the monitoring group, has said that Israel is bypassing the committee through its strikes on Lebanon, according to i24News.
On 2 December, Hezbollah launched two rockets at Israeli military sites, without casualty, claiming that the attack was an “initial warning [and] defensive response” against Israel’s “repeated violations” of the ceasefire. Israel responded with airstrikes in south Lebanon, killing nine people, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
The resumption of back-and-forth attacks between Israel and Hezbollah has raised fears that the fighting will resume. This summer’s two months of full-blown war, which erupted after near-daily shelling between Hezbollah and Israel since 8 October 2023, have come at a high price, especially for Lebanon, where 4,000 people have been killed by the Israeli military, including almost 1,000 women and children, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. The war has also displaced more than a million people from Hezbollah’s heartland in the Lebanese south, much of which has been devastated by an Israeli aerial campaign that has destroyed or damaged nearly a quarter of all buildings in the region.
Hezbollah, on the other hand, has killed roughly 140 Israelis, most of them soldiers, according to Israeli authorities, while some 60,000 residents have been displaced from their homes in northern Israel.
On 29 November, Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, affirmed the group’s commitment to the ceasefire, emphasising the implementation of the existing UN Resolution 1701, which stipulates the creation of a buffer zone along the Lebanese-Israeli border via the removal of Hezbollah’s forces south of the Litani river. The resolution dates back to the end of the last Israel-Hezbollah war, in 2006. “The [ceasefire] confirms the withdrawal of the Israeli army from all the places it occupied, and the deployment of the Lebanese army… south of the Litani River,” Qassem said in a televised speech – his first since the ceasefire took effect – adding that Hezbollah and the Lebanese army would coordinate at a “high level” to implement the truce.
Thousands of Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers have subsequently been deployed across southern Lebanon, tasked to enforce 1701’s buffer zone. For now, the Israeli military is maintaining many of its positions some six kilometres deep into the country. If the truce doesn’t collapse altogether, all troops will be withdrawn over the coming weeks.
Since the announcement of the ceasefire, thousands of Lebanon’s displaced civilians have returned to their homes in the south, undeterred by Israel’s airstrikes. After months of being internally displaced, often in poor conditions, most families are desperate to get back to their homes – or what is left of them.
Hezbollah and Iran need this respite and ceasefire to hold, says Paul Salem, vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute. “It’s in their interest to buy time to rethink and rebuild, and, if possible, bypass [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s leadership, which has been on a rampage.” Hezbollah’s hope is that Netanyahu – who has long been under his own domestic political pressures – could be replaced in the coming months by a leader less bent on military solutions.
Israel, meanwhile, is less in need of the ceasefire and more dissatisfied with it, making its actions harder to predict, according to Salem. He points to the Knesset’s far-right politicians that were angered by the deal in the first place. Many in Israel are frustrated that country’s key objective remains unachieved: guaranteeing security for Israel’s displaced population from the north. “This [feeling of an unfinished job] is dangerous for the deal,” says Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanese political analyst and a fellow at Chatham House. “In Lebanon the conflict is [currently] frozen and unresolved. Meanwhile, [the war in] Gaza goes on and there is the never-ending question of Iran.”
Rami Khouri, founding director of the American University of Beirut’s Issam Fares Institute, describes the ceasefire as a “big concession by Israel, who have only partially degraded Hezbollah, albeit enough to allow their population to return to the north, as the Israeli PM is claiming”.
Netanyahu has also tried selling the deal to the Israeli public by arguing that it gives his government a chance to focus on the country’s greatest threat: Iran. This has worried many. “If Israel turns its military focus on Iran and [escalates], then it’s only inevitable that [Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy,] will be dragged into further war,” says Adnan Nasser, an independent foreign policy analyst. On the other hand, the ceasefire coincides exactly with the inauguration of Donald Trump, who has made it very clear to Netanyahu that he does not want a spiraling war on his watch, especially as he is taking office.
The ceasefire’s success also very much depends on the ability of the Lebanese national army – known as the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) – to work with the UN peacekeeping troops and enforce Hezbollah’s military withdrawal from south of the Litani, something that has not been achieved since Hezbollah first emerge in the 1980s during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon between 1985 to 2000. Yet the LAF is in “an impossible situation,” according to Nadim. On the one hand, Hezbollah can easily accuse it of being Israel’s collaborator; on the other, it is expected to satisfy Israeli and Western expectations around 1701, more specifically, overseeing the removal of Hezbollah’s military south of the Litani. In other words, in just two months, Lebanon and the LAF must achieve an agreement that has evaded success for nearly 20 years.
“After decades of being on the sidelines and doing, frankly, very little, the LAF suddenly finds itself being forced to really involve itself,” says Nadim. This is a “historic and [unprecedented] test” for the army, which has always stayed out of the country’s miasma of sectarian and geopolitical conflicts and acted, instead, as a neutral and unifying buffer between Lebanon’s numerous political parties and militias.
The army’s Involvement, however, comes with news risks, such as Hezbollah and the LAF – as well as Israel and the LAF – being drawn into conflict for the first time ever. Either way, both eventualities would end poorly for the Lebanese army, which is, by far, the weakest, militarily speaking. “The LAF is incapable of controlling Hezbollah’s arms and cannot disarm it. Full stop. Meanwhile, the UN troops only have an observer mandate, not an implementation mandate,” says Nadim. “Sooner or later, Hezbollah will start arming itself north of the Litani river, which it will claim is not in breach of 1701. In short: the situation down south is not resolved. The current ceasefire, however, long it lasts, is just a temporary solution.”
In the meantime, Hezbollah’s decision making over the coming weeks will very much depend on another key risk factor: whether it can maintain its base of support and credibility. Following the ceasefire agreement, Hezbollah has repeatedly claimed victory over Israel, arguing that, against all the odds, it fought back a vastly superior army backed by the West. Nonetheless, it has suffered significant military and civilian losses, as well as the decapitation of much of its leadership, namely Hassan Nasrallah, who led the party for 32 years.
All of this could lead Hezbollah in one of two directions, according to Nasser. The group may, for the first time, turn towards the Lebanese state rather than taking on its own foreign policy decisions. This shift would be revolutionary for Lebanon, cooling tensions between Hezbollah and its Lebanese opposition, which see the group’s dominant military strength – funded by Iran – as having created a state-within-a-state.
“The other direction is probably more likely: Hezbollah feeling it needs to lash out, politically or militarily, at its opponents, some of whom may think the group is weak and then look to take advantage,” adds Nasser. “We might see Hezbollah [display] a show of force, as seen [in the months and years after the 2006 war], which culminated in two-weeks of fierce gunfighting across parts of Beirut in 2008.”
For many in Lebanon, these internal risks are as worrying and dangerous as Israel’s volatile threat. Rather than peaceful, the coming weeks remain extremely tense.
[See also: Sleepwalking into the storm]
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