One Year After U.S.-French Ceasefire, Lebanon Caught Between War and Collapse

–Analysis–

BEIRUT — Just a few days separate us from the anniversary of the ceasefire agreement signed on November 27, 2024, under U.S.–French mediation — an agreement that Israel violated within hours of its implementation.

Its validity expired on February 18, 2025, after a brief 18-day extension. In theory, the agreement succeeded in halting Israel’s invasion of Lebanese territory, but in practice, it failed disastrously to ensure security for the southern population, to stop the daily aggression, or to prevent Israel from occupying five border points. While the Lebanese Army abided strictly by the letter of the agreement — deploying its units in the areas of UNIFIL operations and presenting concrete plans to confine weapons south of the Litani River — Israel complied with nothing.

In this atmosphere, Israeli threats against Lebanon are escalating, and daily strikes are expanding, as everyone waits for the outbreak of another full-scale war. On Sunday, Israel killed Hezbollah’s top military official in an airstrike on a southern Beirut. The strike was the first in months on the outskirts of the Lebanese capital, targeted Iran-backed Hezbollah’s acting chief of staff, Ali Tabtabai, the Israeli military said in a statement.

In this context, the real question by now is: Are we really waiting for war, or are we already living through a prolonged war of attrition that could stretch on for years to come? Other questions surface as well: Does Hezbollah still possess the capacity to fight after withdrawing its positions and handing over its weapons in areas south of the Litani? Who protects the people of the South from the daily bombardments and targeted strikes? Hezbollah is neither able — nor willing — to respond, while the Lebanese Army, despite the competence of its troops, lacks the military capacity to confront Israeli threats. So what, then, is the solution?

Political deadlock

Both President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam are exerting visible efforts to pull the country out of the current impasse and prevent a further deterioration in security, even if their positions occasionally diverge. Prime Minister Salam insists that the decision of war and peace belongs solely to the state, while President Aoun repeatedly reaffirms his readiness to negotiate toward a solution that would preserve lives and stop the daily killings. Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, for his part, tries to align himself with Aoun and Salam without creating a rift with Hezbollah. He has shown some flexibility on the question of negotiations, provided that they remain indirect, conducted through the so-called “Mechanism Committee.” In all three cases, there is a deliberate effort to institutionalize any potential negotiation process within the framework of the Lebanese state.

However, this official Lebanese will collides head-on with the Israeli wall of intransigence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to impose harsh conditions through direct negotiations. At the same time, the United States is intensifying its political and security pressure on Lebanon, deepening the erosion of state legitimacy and weakening its position vis-à-vis Hezbollah and the party’s popular base, instead of strengthening the Lebanese Army and providing it with the support it needs to carry out its plan: to complete its deployment, contain the spread of arms, and ensure security in South Lebanon.

In the midst of all this, Hezbollah’s role emerges as an additional destabilizing factor, especially after its open letter to the three presidents, despite the fact that it has already complied with a large portion of the conditions imposed on it (and on Lebanon) with its consent. The party nonetheless refuses to fully adhere to the Lebanese Army’s plan and to the resolutions of the Cabinet.

Rather than cooperating with the state, engaging with President Aoun’s initiative to avert the worst-case scenario, and supporting the Army Command — whose soldiers, nearly unarmed, risk their lives daily to mitigate harsh security conditions and prevent a slide into total war — Hezbollah has chosen a path of political obstruction. In doing so, it paradoxically converges with U.S. pressure on the Lebanese state. Its speeches, statements, and political maneuvers do not reflect the actual balance of power on the ground as much as they pour fuel on Israel’s fire of escalation, placing Lebanon before a grim equation: sliding toward a devastating war that ends in humiliating surrender, acceptance of impossible conditions, and long-term paralysis — rather than a fair, or even semi-fair, settlement.

Israeli escalation

Israeli intelligence reports — both official and published through the media (which itself operates under security censorship and coordination) — have increasingly claimed that Hezbollah has rearmed, bringing in weapons through the Lebanese-Syrian border and the Port of Beirut, along with substantial sums of money.

Yet these claims contradict the reality of Israel’s comprehensive blockade on Lebanon, enforced through unmanned aerial surveillance that saturates Lebanese skies, through signals interception and the penetration of digital infrastructure and communications systems, and through spy networks composed of groups and individuals both within Hezbollah and in state institutions.

How, then, can Israel claim to detect and intercept ordinary Hezbollah members on an almost daily basis — yet never move to strike these alleged shipments of weapons or funds?

Does Israel really need elaborate pretexts to target what it already defines as “legitimate” resistance infrastructure, while it justifies the assassination of unarmed individuals who are not even engaged in combat?

Or, perhaps more cynically, are these fabricated reports designed to manufacture a justification for a war that Israel itself appears eager to ignite?

Israel’s fabrications are mirrored by claims promoted by Hezbollah, driven primarily by domestic political motives, about having rearmed and rebuilt its military capabilities. Yet both Israeli reports and Hezbollah’s own statements limit their focus to areas north of the Litani River — which, in turn, confirms that the Lebanese Army has successfully completed the majority of its mission south of the Litani, and that the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons has now become a domestic political matter, no longer a purely regional one, especially since the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.

The reality is that Hezbollah no longer poses a threat to Israel, but rather to the Lebanese state itself.

If we assume, therefore, that Hezbollah’s current orientation revolves around rebuilding its capabilities in the north of the Litani, despite Israel’s deep security penetrations, the loss of the majority of its offensive missile power, the severing of logistical supply chains, and the transformation of the Lebanese government into a political and security adversary seeking to reaffirm the legitimacy of the Lebanese state and its institutions across all Lebanese territory — reclaiming the decision of war and peace after years of Hezbollah’s control — then where, exactly, is the threat that Hezbollah poses to Israel, one grave enough to justify a new Israeli war?

The reality is that Hezbollah no longer poses a threat to Israel, but rather to the Lebanese state itself; whereas Israel represents an existential threat to the state, to Hezbollah, and to Lebanese society as a whole.

Lebanon’s worsening domestic political crisis has opened the door wide to Israeli blackmail tactics. Parallel to this fragmentation, the more flexibility Lebanon shows in responding to Israeli conditions, the harsher those conditions become. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement before the Knesset — “We are determined to impose ceasefire agreements wherever they exist, with an iron hand, against those who seek to destroy us; you can see what is happening daily in Lebanon” — reads as confirmation that we are facing a long-term war of attrition.

Demands harden

In such a war, Israeli demands will only accumulate and harden over time, potentially culminating in the revival of the “security buffer zone” project in South Lebanon, with a depth of between five and ten kilometers, effectively resulting in the permanent displacement of residents from those areas.

Lebanon’s current position is not worse than Gaza’s previous one, which managed to thwart the plan for mass forced displacement despite losing all internal sources of strength under the weight of genocide, starvation, and systematic destruction. But that plan did not fail on its own — behind its failure stood a regional and Arab weight that cannot be ignored. This bloc emerged as a final line of defense, not only to protect Gaza’s population, but also out of fear that the displacement schemes would expand into the West Bank, southern Syria, and south Lebanon — a scenario that would mark the beginning of a new Israeli era with unpredictable consequences.

However, the most crucial difference between Gaza and Lebanon lies in Hamas’s eventual recognition of the futility of continued fighting once the imbalance of power reached an irreversible stage. This lesson, unfortunately, does not apply to Hezbollah, which continues to raise the stakes, and therein lies the disaster.

Hezbollah’s escalation reflects a psychology of revenge gambling; a desire to compensate for past losses without considering the magnitude of the new and catastrophic losses accumulating day by day.

Meanwhile, President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam have pinned their hopes on what they perceive as American goodwill. Yet the real solution lies in diplomatic action capable of strengthening Lebanon’s standing within its regional environment — extending from the Arab Gulf states to Egypt and Turkey. Such a course, however, requires unity of the Lebanese position, beginning with genuine coordination among the three presidencies, and leading to a realistic internal settlement between the Lebanese state and Hezbollah, as well as a parallel external understanding between Lebanon and Iran.

As for suspending the implementation of the Lebanese Army’s plan to contain all weapons in response to Israeli attacks, it represents a dangerous slide into Israel’s strategic game, orchestrated by Netanyahu, whose objective is to drag Lebanese “legitimacy” into the slaughterhouse, thereby eliminating Lebanon’s last chance to reinforce its regional position and rebuild its internal strength through the state and its institutions.