The ‘Ceasefire’ in Lebanon is a Ticking Bomb
President Biden says the deal is intended to be permanent, but the U.S. gave Israel wide latitude to resume its attacks
When President Joe Biden stepped into the Rose Garden Tuesday afternoon, Israel was in the midst of a massive bombing campaign across parts of Lebanon. Its forces were pummeling Gaza with U.S. weapons and the death toll, which officially topped 44,000 Palestinians this week, was rising for the 416th straight day since Israel launched its genocidal war last October. “Today, I have some good news to report from the Middle East,” Biden said. The governments of Israel and Lebanon, he announced, “have accepted the United States’ proposal to end the devastating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.”
The agreement, which was spearheaded by the U.S. and France, took effect at 4 a.m. Wednesday morning. But it does so against the backdrop of the fires raging in Gaza and the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House. For the past year, Biden and his administration have empowered an Israeli war machine that is now more emboldened than at any point since the creation of Israel and the launch of the Nakba in 1948. While Biden and his advisors are promoting the deal as a monumental agreement “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” the bloody events of the past 14 months in the region will not recede to the pages of history.
“It's a whole new kind of world that we're going into. And we'll also have to wait and see if the ceasefire holds. I think the Israelis will do everything they can to provoke,” said Karim Makdisi, a professor of international politics at the American University in Beirut. “I think that as long as you have Netanyahu, something is going to happen.”
Under the terms of the deal, Israeli troops are to withdraw from south Lebanon over a 60-day period while Hezbollah is to end its armed presence in the area, moving its fighters and weapons to north of the Litani River. Lebanese troops and UN forces are to deploy to the south, which has been largely destroyed by over a year of Israeli attacks. An international committee led by the United States would monitor compliance by all sides, according to the agreement.
“It looks very temporary in nature. It looks very non-binding because it's a cessation of hostilities. It's not a ceasefire,” Amal Saad, a leading expert on Hezbollah, told Drop Site News. “We have a very kind of tenuous ceasefire agreement that looks a lot like a placeholder for a continued battle between the two sides. It's just like it's designed to give breathing space for Israel and obviously Hezbollah will use it to recuperate, rearm, reorganize. Both sides are going to use this agreement for that.”
In the hours after the ceasefire officially went into effect, thousands of displaced Lebanese people began making the journey south in an attempt to return to their homes. But the Israeli military quickly issued a warning to residents not to return to their villages or to approach Israeli forces. Meanwhile, Israeli troops opened fire on a group of journalists covering the return of displaced residents in the southern town of Khiyam, injuring two, one working for The Associated Press and the other for Sputnik.
The text of the deal prevents Hezbollah from carrying out “any operations” against Israel, but it states that Israel will refrain from “any offensive military operations” against Lebanese targets.
“It's kind of a bit insidious where they say ‘offensive,’ meaning somehow there's this little kind of wiggle room for what they will interpret as defensive, which in Israeli logic and discourse and action means anything,” Makdisi said. “Anything can happen. They can say, ‘Well, this is defense.’ Even the genocide in Gaza, as far as they're saying, is defensive.”
Both Netanyahu and Biden emphasized that the ceasefire was conditioned on the principle that Israel would not be bound by the same rules as Lebanon. “Let me be clear: If Hezbollah or anyone else breaks the deal and poses a direct threat to Israel, then Israel retains the right to self-defense consistent with international law, just like any country when facing a terrorist group pledged to that country’s destruction,” Biden said. He offered no comment on the rights of the Lebanese to protect themselves from Israeli violations or direct threats to their security.
While Israel had demanded the right to attack if it deems Hezbollah violated the agreement, that was rejected by Lebanese officials and is not written into the terms of the deal. Instead, the Biden administration agreed to provide Israel with a letter of guarantee, “recognizing Israeli freedom of action on Lebanese soil, in the event of any attempt to strengthen Hezbollah or another hostile entity there,” according to Haaretz. Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the “side letter” also says the U.S. will share intelligence with Israel on potential violations of the agreement, including attempts by Hezbollah to infiltrate the Lebanese Army, and will work with Israel to prevent Iran from delivering arms to Hezbollah. In an email to Drop Site, Vedant Patel, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, refused to directly comment on the contents of the alleged letter or even its existence.
“This situation has existed for decades now, which is the U.S. gives blanket support for any violations and aggression Israel engages in, so it is literally just more of the same, that the U.S. will support them if they choose to attack Lebanon,” Saad said. “In some ways it's a sign of Israeli weakness because they were not able to get that as part of a formal agreement. So even if it's simply a unilateral agreement, it's essentially what has always existed and continues to exist to this day. If today Israel decided to violate the agreement, the Biden administration would give it its full backing. So it's nothing new or unusual. And this just underscores the fragility of this whole agreement to begin with.”
Lebanon’s Defense Minister Marine Sleem on Wednesday said the Lebanese army will increase its deployment of soldiers in southern Lebanon to 10,000 troops as part of the deal. A senior U.S. official said at a background briefing on Tuesday that “the commitments made by the Lebanese government apply to Hezbollah,” adding that “we don’t negotiate with Hezbollah directly. We negotiate with the state of Lebanon. And the government of Lebanon has to take responsibility for what happens in Lebanon.”
The future role of the Lebanese army, a far more meager fighting force than Hezbollah, is one that Washington and Tel Aviv hope to shape, according to analysts.
“It’s been very clear that since 2006, their objective was to try to convert the Lebanese army into a kind of anti-terrorist unit that was a Special Forces type thing that would basically be an internal force to deal with Hezbollah, deal with perhaps small Palestinian groups maybe operating in the [refugee] camps, things like that, rather than an army that could actually defend itself against external threats, meaning the Israelis,” Makdisi said. “I think now the U.S. is going to double down on this because it's clear that they will not give the Lebanese army any form of proper equipment, proper mechanisms to be able to defend themselves,” he added. “The plan is to try and make Lebanon’s army purely in opposition to Hezbollah.”
The White House kept Trump’s incoming administration closely informed about the negotiations as they unfolded in the final days and Trump’s nominee for national security adviser Rep. Mike Waltz went so far as to claim credit for the deal in a post on X: “Everyone is coming to the table because of President Trump. His resounding victory sent a clear message to the rest of the world that chaos won’t be tolerated. I’m glad to see concrete steps towards deescalation in the Middle East.” The initial 60-day ceasefire implementation period covers the transition period between the end of Biden’s term in office and Trump’s inauguration.
In a televised speech on Tuesday, Netanyahu outlined three primary reasons for his backing of the deal: to replenish depleted arms supplies, to focus on confronting Iran, and to "to separate the fronts and isolate Hamas. From day two of the war, Hamas was counting on Hezbollah to fight by its side. With Hezbollah out of the picture, Hamas is left on its own," he said.
This week, the Biden administration informed Congress that it intends to sell $680 million worth of new U.S. weapons to Israel on top of an existing $20 billion sale that some lawmakers, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, tried and failed to block last week. On Tuesday, Netanyahu said the additional U.S. munitions would “give us more strike force to complete our mission.” The White House has denied the additional weapons transfers were related to Israel’s acceptance of the Lebanon agreement.
Hezbollah began firing rockets and artillery at Israeli forces on October 8, 2023, one day after Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza. Israel launched airstrikes on southern Lebanon, with cross border attacks continuing for months. In September, Israel escalated, detonating thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands. Israel then launched a wave of heavy airstrikes on Lebanon and a series of assassinations of top Hezbollah commanders, culminating in the killing of the group’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, followed by a ground invasion on October 1st.
Large swathes of southern and eastern Lebanon were destroyed in the Israeli attacks, with entire villages being demolished. The Israeli military struck hospitals, emergency workers, journalists, dense residential neighborhoods and civilian infrastructure, leaving over 3,800 people killed and more than 1.2 million forcibly displaced. Meanwhile, Hezbollah inflicted losses on the Israeli military, with scores of soldiers killed, hundreds wounded, and attacked Israeli towns and military installations, forcing tens of thousands of Israeli settlers to evacuate their homes in northern Israel.
Hezbollah is not a direct party to the agreement, which was negotiated by the Lebanese government, and it has indicated it is prepared to resume armed resistance against Israel.
In its first statement since the ceasefire deal was announced, Hezbollah said it had achieved “victory” over Israel “in defense of its land and people, and in support of the oppressed in Palestine.” The group said its fighters "will remain at utmost readiness to confront the Israeli enemy's greed and violations. Their eyes will remain wide open, monitoring the enemy's movements and the withdrawal of its forces beyond the border. Their hands will rest on their guns' triggers, in defense of Lebanon's sovereignty, and for the sake of their people's dignity."
While both Hezbollah and Israel have sought to cast this week’s agreement as a triumph, the reality, experts say, is more complicated. “Hezbollah was able to not only survive, but to emerge intact and very fierce and prevented an Israeli occupation and prevented even a temporary holding of territory, so repelling an invasion in that context is formidable, I would say, but it's a paradox because it is weaker,” Saad said. “There is no doubt that Hezbollah has been weakened. Nobody can dispute this in qualitative and quantitative terms, but paradoxically, it's stronger because it was able to absorb all these blows and because it was able to prevent Israel from achieving its aim of, firstly, causing its collapse and, secondly, invading Lebanon. So in that sense, I would say Hezbollah thwarted Israel's aims, but in the sense of Hezbollah's own strategic objectives, which was to end the war in Gaza by means of its support front, Hezbollah failed in that, it did not succeed and it has to now temporarily abandon its support front. And that is something that Israel can actually hail as a tactical victory.”
The deal does not address Israel’s war on Gaza despite the fact that Hezbollah entered the conflict in the context of the October 7 attacks and Israel’s launch of a military onslaught against the Palestinians of Gaza. Israel and the U.S. had long sought to separate Hezbollah from the Palestinian front. Once Israel conducted the pager bomb attacks, the assassination of Nasrallah and much of the group’s upper political and military echelons, and invaded parts of southern Lebanon, the nature of Hezbollah’s position had expanded beyond a solidarity front with Gaza.
“Hezbollah fought valiantly after the setbacks they had because of the elimination of its leaders,” said Sami Al-Arian, the Director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Zaim University. “So what we have today is not a ceasefire. What we have today is a truce. In other words, Hezbollah went from a support front into an actual front. And when you have an actual front, then the rules of engagement change. They're different,” Al-Arian told Drop Site. “So Hezbollah stopped, but they are still mobilized. They could resume at any moment. And indeed, they need to regroup. They need to bring more arms. And of course, that is going to be faced with Israeli aggression, which could ignite at any time.”
The deputy leader of Hezbollah’s political council Mahmoud Qmati told a news conference on Wednesday the group is preparing an official public funeral for Nasrallah in Beirut's southern suburbs.
Throughout the past year, Nasrallah maintained that his movement would not engage in a ceasefire with Israel in the absence of an end to the war against Gaza. Nasrallah also said that Hezbollah would defer to the Palestinian resistance in negotiations to end the war. On Monday, the night before the agreement was announced, Hamas spokesperson Osama Hamdan told the Lebanese TV channel Al Mayadeen that Hamas would support a Lebanon ceasefire. "Any announcement of a ceasefire in Lebanon is welcomed, as Hezbollah has stood by our people and made great sacrifices,” he said.
On Wednesday, Hamas officially welcomed the deal and commended Hezbollah’s role in armed resistance against Israel in support of Palestinians in Gaza. “[Israel’s] acceptance of the agreement with Lebanon without fulfilling the conditions it set, is an important milestone in shattering Netanyahu's illusions of changing the map of the Middle East by force, and his illusions of defeating the resistance forces or disarming them,” Hamas said in a statement provided to Drop Site. “We affirm that this agreement would not have been possible without the steadfastness of the resistance, and the popular support around it, and we are confident that the Axis of Resistance will continue to support our people and their battle by all possible means.” Hamas added that it was still looking to negotiate a ceasefire deal of its own to end Israel’s brutal assault. “We are interested in stopping the aggression against our people, within the parameters of stopping the aggression on Gaza that we have agreed upon; namely, a ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the return of the displaced, and the achievement of a real and complete prisoner exchange deal,” the statement said.
On Tuesday, President Biden said his administration would “make another push” for a Gaza ceasefire with Turkey, Egypt and Qatar. An Egyptian delegation is scheduled to visit Tel Aviv this week for discussions with Israeli negotiators. Hamas maintains that in early July it had accepted a ceasefire proposal endorsed by President Biden. Later that month, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader and top ceasefire negotiator, in Tehran.
The Litani River...this takes me back to the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 1982. The area south of the Litani was, Israel hoped, to be a buffer zone that would be controlled by a pliable Lebanese force. The opposite happened in that Hezbollah came into being, a far stronger force than the Lebanese army, true right up until now. It is said that proof of insanity is trying the same thing again and expecting different results, but perhaps the mighty US can overcome logic.
History records that the entry of Zionism into the area has been a disastrous loss for the natives, many times the number of Israeli dead are the number of Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese plus the relatively few Iranians who have died through Israeli espionage/assassination runs into Iran, all of it contrary to international law, law that the US allows Israel to ignore.
But Israel tells the world that it is the innocent victim and defender, the image that is burned into Israeli minds by holocaust education, the holocaust an event that none of Israel's victims conducted. Self righteousness and the desire for revenge is so strongly inculcated that the end of Nazism with WW2 required a replacement target - the Palestinians, this so easily seen in the behavior of the IDF eagerly destroying with a will and Netanyahu spouting nonsense about facing Amalek/the forces of darkness. The man and his troops are stone blind.
As Cornel West has said, one either believes all human lives are equally valuable or one doesn't. One is either moral or one isn't. It could not be more clear that Israel is dedicated to destroying all who oppose its ethnic supremacist rule, even Americans have been killed for this. A monster is on the loose and the US makes it possible for that monster to kill and destroy without limit.
The only thing that restrains power is opposing power. Without any meaningful opposing power, Israel is free to do as it has been doing, slaughtering Palestinians and openly talking about taking over the land it has devastated with US weapons and unlimited/unquestioning US support.
As a result the US and Israel have sunk to the bottom before the rest of the world that has witnessed this atrocity of conquest, of blatant and proud might making right and the extinction of the liberty and justice for all the US once claimed to stand for. The American Pledge of Allegiance is now and empty chant as Zionist wealth has moved to control a Congress openly corrupted by the Supreme Court rulings that money is speech and that unlimited private money may be spent on election campaigns.
Lebanon has been bombed into submission by US/Israel. Fighting on the ground can't compete with cowardly massive bombs dropped on civilians, infrastructure, homes etc. So far more than 3000 killed in Lebanon, at least 185 children. 13,492 injured. Biden is just a vile duplicit mouthpiece for Netanyahu and his obsessive pursuit of Iran. Gaza and the West Bank are now more vulnerable.
While ever Israel, with a complicit US, pursues its agenda of expansion this killing won't stop.