Can Lebanon Finally Replace Hezbollah on Israel’s Northern Border?

After two decades of failed diplomacy, Israel believes the strategic equation in southern Lebanon may finally be changing.

WHY THIS MOMENT IS DIFFERENT

For years, the international community has used bandaids to patch up a fundamentally broken Lebanon with unenforceable “agreements,” seeking to curb Hezbollah’s (and thus the Islamic Republic’s) influence. Today, however, thanks to the IDF, the latest U.S.-brokered agreement has the potential to substantially change the situation on the ground — and could even pave a path to Lebanon-Israel normalization Israel enters these talks after inflicting the most severe losses in Hezbollah’s history. Much of the organization’s senior leadership has been eliminated, significant military infrastructure has been destroyed and its ability to project power has been sharply reduced. The broader regional network built by the Islamic Republic has also been weakened, leaving Tehran with fewer options than at any point in recent memory.

That has created something Israel hasn’t seen for decades: a realistic opportunity for the Lebanese state to reassert control over territory long dominated by an Iranian-backed militia. Whether Lebanon is willing, or able, to seize that opportunity, however, is another question entirely.

WHAT BOTH COUNTRIES STAND TO GAIN

For Israel, success would mean the possibility of restoring genuine security to communities along the northern border after years of terrorism, and most importantly the potential for peace with Lebanon as a state.

For Lebanon, the opportunity is even greater. Replacing Hezbollah with the Lebanese Armed Forces would mark the first meaningful step toward restoring full national sovereignty and beginning the long process of rebuilding a country whose decline has been driven in large part by Hezbollah’s domination of the state.

Failure would leave both countries exactly where they have been before: another internationally celebrated agreement that exists only on paper while Hezbollah quietly rebuilds for the next war endangering Lebanese and Israelis alike.

HOW WE GOT HERE

Israel and Lebanon remain formally at war, yet American diplomats have quietly spent months bringing both sides to the negotiating table. Under the emerging framework, Israel would continue a phased withdrawal from parts of southern Lebanon while the Lebanese Armed Forces gradually assume responsibility for areas previously controlled by Hezbollah. The first pilot zone has already been transferred, with additional negotiations expected to determine whether the model can be expanded.

Why now? Because Israeli officials believe Hezbollah’s battlefield losses have fundamentally changed the conversation. Years of Israeli military operations have dismantled large portions of the organisation’s command structure and significantly degraded the military capabilities it spent decades building with support from the Islamic regime.

THE TWO RESOLUTIONS THAT NEVER WORKED

The goal here isn’t new, in fact it’s been international policy for more than twenty years. UN Security Council Resolution 1559 called for every Lebanese and non-Lebanese militia to disarm while restoring full Lebanese government sovereignty throughout the country. Two years later, following the Second Lebanon War, Resolution 1701 reaffirmed those demands, expanded UNIFIL, and declared that only the Lebanese Armed Forces and UN peacekeepers should operate south of the Litani River. But Hezbollah ignored both resolutions, and Lebanon was too weak to enforce it.

Over the following eighteen years, Hezbollah transformed southern Lebanon into one of the most heavily militarized territories in the world. Before the current war, Israeli intelligence assessed that Hezbollah possessed roughly 150,000 rockets and missiles, extensive tunnel networks, underground command centres and military infrastructure embedded throughout civilian villages, all inside territory Resolution 1701 was specifically designed to demilitarize.

Hezbollah occupies Beirut, Dec. 2005 / Photo by: Mary Madigan / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

WHY ISRAELIS REMAIN SKEPTICAL

While Israelis would love nothing more than normalization with Lebanon, history gives us good reason to be skeptical, because we have heard these promises before. When resolution 1559 was supposed to disarm Hezbollah and resolution 1701 was supposed to prevent its return to southern Lebanon, neither of those things happened.

Instead, Hezbollah expanded and received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Islamic regime in Iran. Israeli negotiators have therefore been extremely cautious and the idea of withdrawing from Lebanon. The success is this agreement will not be measured by whether it’s signed, but rather whether or not Hezbollah actually disappears from Israel’s northern border and is disarmed.

FOLLOW THE MONEY…AND THE RESULTS

The international community has invested enormous political and financial capital in the idea that international peacekeeping could prevent another war on Israel’s northern border. All those efforts have proven vain.

Since UNIFIL was established in 1978, the mission has cost the UN well over $11 billion. American taxpayers alone have contributed more than $2.7 billion. What do they have to show for it?

Resolution 1701 envisioned an area south of the Litani River free of terror groups other than the Lebanese Armed Forces and UNIFIL. Instead, under the nose of UNIFIL, Hezbollah expanded its military infrastructure across the territory with constructed fortified positions, observation posts overlooking Israeli communities, underground tunnel networks and one of the largest missile arsenals ever assembled by a non-state actor. UNIFIL documented violations, just never actually stopped them.

UNIFIL has also faced persistent criticism over its inability (or refusal) to patrol parts of southern Lebanon occupied by Hezbollah. Peacekeepers were repeatedly blocked by local Hezbollah supporters while attempting to inspect sites. Even more concerning, UNIFIL has been accused multiple times now of cooperating with Hezbollah or even passing them information. Most recently, patrol information collected by UNIFIL peacekeepers somehow reached Hezbollah. Of course, UNIFIL denied collaboration.

THE BIGGEST VICTIM MAY BE LEBANON

Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic present themselves as Lebanon’s defenders, but no country has paid a higher price for Hezbollah’s decisions than Lebanon itself.

Since its inception, Hezbollah’s purpose has been to drive Lebanon into conflict with Israel. It is not a Lebanese nationalist movement, but rather a colonial terrorist proxy of the Islamic Republic. Over the decades, it has exploited Lebanon’s weak institutions while embedding itself alongside other armed Palestinian factions operating inside the country, steadily undermining Lebanese sovereignty.

In 2006, Hezbollah unilaterally crossed the border, killed Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others without the approval of the Lebanese government, triggering a war that devastated large parts of Lebanon. Years later, Hezbollah again subordinated Lebanese interests to those of the Islamic Republic by sending thousands of fighters into Syria to assist Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Lebanese citizens died fighting a war that had never been authorized by their own government.

Hezbollah has also paralyzed Lebanese governance by maintaining an armed state within a state, one capable of overruling elected governments whenever its interests are threatened. In 2008, Hezbollah even seized parts of West Beirut after the Lebanese government challenged its independent telecommunications network. They have also carried out assassinations of Lebanese political figures, including former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Its corruption and domination of state institutions have contributed to Lebanon’s economic collapse, and many Lebanese hold Hezbollah responsible for the conditions that led to the catastrophic Beirut blast.

The Lebanese people are increasingly fed up. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam recently declared that “no party in Lebanon is authorised to bear arms outside the framework of the Lebanese state,” while Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea has long argued that no sovereign country can function while an independent army answers to a foreign power instead of the state.

But Lebanon is far from Hezbollah’s only victim. Hezbollah is responsible for some of the deadliest terrorist attacks against Americans in modern history, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks that killed 241 American service members, the kidnapping and murder of CIA Station Chief William Buckley, and the kidnapping, torture and murder of U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins.

THE NEXT TEST

The coming months will determine whether this diplomatic effort represents a genuine turning point or simply another chapter in a familiar cycle.

Israeli withdrawals will almost certainly remain tied to measurable Lebanese deployments rather than diplomatic promises alone. Jerusalem is unlikely to repeat the mistakes that followed Resolution 1701, when international guarantees were accepted while Hezbollah quietly rebuilt its military machine.

THE REAL LESSON

Israel should welcome any serious effort that restores Lebanese sovereignty and opens the door to normalization between two neighbours that have spent generations at war. But agreements do not enforce themselves.

The opportunity now emerging did not come from another UN resolution or another peacekeeping mission, it came as a result of decisive IDF action against Hezbollah which altered the balance of power. If Lebanon finally reclaims its sovereignty and chooses a future of normalization rather than permanent war, it will mark one of the most significant strategic shifts in the Middle East in decades.