Peace is closer than ever in Lebanon – which is why we’ve seen more bloodshed this week.
As this is published, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is expected to announce his government has accepted a ceasefire with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, on terms negotiated by US officials. That explains the surge in violence over the past week. Israel has been rushing to maximise its gains, destroying as much Hezbollah infrastructure as possible; Hezbollah has been desperately trying to increase its leverage while the final details of the truce are settled.
On Sunday, Hezbollah sent some 250 rockets into Israel. It was one of the largest attacks since the group started firing missiles in support of Hamas in Gaza more than a year ago. One local council in northern Israel announced that children would now be taught only in classrooms that were less than 30 seconds from a bomb shelter. On Saturday, Israel dropped a massive ‘bunker-buster’ to bring down a tower block in the heart of Beirut, reportedly targeting a senior Hezbollah commander. As many as 29 people were killed, and 65 injured, most if not all civilians – it seems the Hezbollah commander was not at home.
A ceasefire in Lebanon may be one of President Biden’s final achievements in office. In Gaza, he had a bad record of announcing ceasefires, only to see the bloodshed continue and even intensify. He was perhaps trying to bounce the parties – Hamas and Israel – into making an agreement they were close to but had not quite achieved. Or maybe Netanyahu was playing him for a fool, daring the US to cut off military aid if he didn’t stop the bombing. Either way, it was the opposite of ‘talk softly but carry a big stick’ – a personal humiliation for Biden and an embarrassment for the United States.
In Lebanon, there was no premature Presidential announcement, just a briefing by US officials to Friday’s New York Times. The terms of the deal are said to be as follows: The Israeli military withdraws from southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah moves its heavy weapons north of the Litani River, about 10km from the border. Hezbollah undertakes not to smuggle more weapons into Lebanon. There is a 60-day transition period, during which the Lebanese army would move back to areas close to the border (they fled when Israeli tanks started rolling in). Monitoring of the ceasefire is led by the American military.
Several problems are immediately obvious with these arrangements. Are Hezbollah really going to accept the word of an American general as the arbiter of whether the truce has been breached? And as they try to rebuild, it will be difficult for them to resist the temptation of bringing in more weapons from Syria and Iran. It also seems unlikely, from past performance, that either the Lebanese army or the UN force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, will be able to stop Hezbollah from sneaking back into the border area. UNIFIL’s mission is to keep the border demilitarised – under the terms of the UN resolution that ended the 2006 war – but Hezbollah were able to build their tunnels without much trouble: the mouth of one emerged just a few yards from a UN base.
There’s another problem for the deal as leaked. Lebanon wants France to be part of the committee to monitor the ceasefire. But Netanyahu was apparently furious when France announced that it would act on the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for him. Biden rang the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to smooth things over. He apparently told him Netanyahu was right to be angry: it was not possible, he said, to oversee the implementation of a deal while also trying to arrest one of the signatories.
We’re told the ceasefire comes with a get-out clause for the Israelis, contained in a side letter. This letter is said to give Israel assurances that the US would support military action if Hezbollah moved back into the border area, if weapons smuggling resumed, or if there was any kind of ‘imminent threat’ from Lebanese territory. Israel could take action if the Lebanese military failed to deal with the threat and after consultations with the US. The Israeli media put a different spin on this. One newspaper said the outgoing defence minister, Yoav Gallant, had made clear that any violation of the ceasefire would prompt Israel to ‘immediately’ take down three buildings in Dahiyeh, Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut.
The effort to get a ceasefire in Lebanon was led by a US special envoy, Amos Hochstein. He has worked at it for more than a year and, according to some reports, threatened to resign if Netanyahu did not accept the latest proposals. At one stage, CNN quoted ‘a source familiar with matter’ as saying Netanyahu had finally agreed the deal ‘in principle’ but still had ‘some reservations’. This sounded much like what happened many times in Gaza – talk of progress, hints of a breakthrough from the Israeli prime minister, then a last minute collapse. In Lebanon, as in Gaza, Netanyahu has been influenced two things: whether Israel has achieved its war aims; and domestic politics.
Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah has been, from its point of view, a spectacular success. Despite Sunday’s barrage, Hezbollah’s missiles are no longer the threat they once were – many have been destroyed, along with the tunnels that housed them. Israel cut a swathe through Hezbollah’s most loyal and effective cadres with its innovative pager bombs. It also killed ten of the 12 members of the group’s Jihad Council; and it assassinated the group’s charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah. One report says his replacement is hiding in Iran, afraid that setting foot in Lebanon will bring down another bunker buster.
Stopping this campaign is politically difficult for Netanyahu. His governing coalition could fall apart without the backing of ultra-nationalists, who have been waiting a long time to hit Hezbollah. They include the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who posted on X that any agreement would be ‘a big mistake – a historic missed opportunity to eradicate Hezbollah’. He wrote: ‘Precisely now, when Hezbollah is beaten and longs for a ceasefire, we cannot stop…We must continue until the absolute victory!’
Whether there’s a ceasefire and whether it lasts also depends on Iran. Hezbollah was always Iran’s militia in Lebanon. With Hezbollah in such disarray, Tehran must be presumed to have put the group even more tightly under its control. You might think that Iran would want a ceasefire as quickly as possible, and for it to last as long as possible, as more of Hezbollah is destroyed with every day that Israeli jets fly over Lebanon. A ceasefire would give Iran a chance to preserve something of what used to be called their ‘strategic deterrent’. But Tehran has more than just Hezbollah’s position to consider.
Iranian officials say Iran is preparing to ‘respond’ to Israel’s attack on it last month. That strike, which destroyed a large part of Iran’s air defences, is part of a steady escalation. If it continues, Iran will need to use Hezbollah. And – in a separate, astonishing development – Iran has been accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump during the presidential election campaign. If true, that was rash of the mullahs: Trump holds grudges. Will it push him to join Israel in an attack on Iran’s nuclear programme, its oil facilities, or the leadership itself? If so, any ceasefire in Lebanon could be a fleeting achievement, a prelude to the wider war in the Middle East threatened ever since Hamas attacked Israel a year ago.
Comments