Nearly four months after the Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire went into effect, much of southern Lebanon remains in ruins. Since the two sides signed the US- and France-brokered deal, Israel has carried out 1,200 strikes against Lebanon, killing 100 and injuring 300.
Although the intensity of Israel’s violence inflicted on Lebanon has drastically decreased since 27 November, it is fair to question the extent to which there really is a ceasefire given continued Israeli aggression in Lebanon.
This month, the situation has become all the more tense, with the ceasefire becoming increasingly fragile. On March 22, the Israeli military waged deadly airstrikes in Lebanon against the backdrop of resumed violence in Gaza and Yemen. These airstrikes resulted in at least seven deaths and 40 injuries.
Then came a “second wave” targeting sites in southern and eastern Lebanon “in continuation of the first wave of attacks.” According to the Israeli military, these attacks targeted “Hezbollah command centers, infrastructure sites, terrorists, rocket launchers, and a weapons storage facility.” This marked the deadliest uptick in violence since the ceasefire went into effect in late November.
The Lebanese state’s ability to assert control over southern Lebanon is made very challenging due to the Israeli occupation presence in five strategic hilltop positions in parts of southern Lebanon in violation of last year’s ceasefire deal.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has vowed to not relinquish control of its weapons arsenal to the Lebanese state as long as Israel’s military continues occupying Lebanese land. Tel Aviv has not set forth a timetable for its withdrawal, nor has the Lebanese state announced one for Hezbollah’s disarming despite attempts to raise the issue by some anti-Hezbollah ministers.
Meanwhile, the Trump White House is pushing for the new leadership in Beirut to disarm Hezbollah and settle Lebanon’s longstanding problems with Israel, including border demarcation issues and the release of remaining Lebanese captives held by Israel, via enhanced bilateral diplomatic talks, a taboo in Beirut.
This marks a continuation in policy from Joseph Biden’s presidency, when the US was seeking to bring Lebanon and Israel to delineate their border. Amos Hochstein, as a senior advisor to Biden, raised this topic while visiting the two countries last year.
On 11 March, Israel announced that it agreed to enter into border demarcation talks with Lebanon. Later that day, the Israelis released four Lebanese captives captured in last year’s war, along with one more the following day, as a “gesture to the Lebanese president”.
According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, Tel Aviv has committed to establishing work groups to discuss its border issues with Lebanon under US auspices.
The Trump administration wants “a political resolution, finally, to the border disputes,” explained US Deputy Special Envoy for the Middle East Morgan Ortagus, Hochstein’s successor who is due in Beirut next week.
“I think that there has been, in terms of American thinking in the past year, an idea that if Lebanon and Israel delineate their border that this will remove essentially an excuse for Hezbollah to waive the resistance flag and to retain its weapons. So, I think that certainly there is a desire to sort of neutralise the border issue by coming to an agreement. Now is that what’s going to happen? I don’t know,” Michael Young, a senior editor at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told The New Arab.
“I think it’s a complicated issue, but it sort of feeds into Israeli strategy with neighbouring countries. So, I don’t know, but certainly I think there is a desire—probably at least on the Lebanese side, I can’t speak for the Israeli side, and probably on the American side—to at least finalise the border,” he added.
“By resolving the Israeli-Lebanese border dispute, the Trump administration would be essentially depriving Hezbollah of the rationalisation for maintaining, uniquely in Lebanon after the agreement that ended the Civil War around 1990, a large and potent militia group that has frequently been more powerful than the Lebanese military itself,” noted Dr Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, in a TNA interview.
There is optimism in the US, Israel, and in some Arab countries, including among segments of Lebanon, that last year’s weakening of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance has created new conditions in the region that will put Hezbollah under greater pressure to disarm and become a normal political party (as opposed to a political party that also functions as an armed group that operates outside the Lebanese state’s control).
Perhaps this development could be imaginable if there is a new nuclear accord with Iran, in which the Islamic Republic greatly limits its support to Tehran-aligned groups in the Middle East such as Hezbollah, along with growing domestic pressure from Lebanon and from abroad (the US, Europe, and the wider Arab world), according to Dr Ibish.
Although many in Lebanon believed Hezbollah had no justification for remaining an independent armed group following Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon almost 25 years ago, Israel’s continued occupation of the Shebaa Farms has been Hezbollah’s official reason for maintaining its militia role under the banner of fighting for the liberation of all Lebanese land and defending the country’s sovereignty.
“A border agreement would deprive Hezbollah of the last remaining coherent explanation for why it, alone, [gets] to maintain a large armed force in Lebanon, totally independent of the state and governmental decision-making in Beirut,” Dr Ibish told TNA.
The new leadership in Beirut has its reasons for wanting these border demarcation talks to advance.
Dr Nabeel Khoury, the former deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Yemen, explained in a TNA interview that “the new government in Lebanon‘s highest motivation is to secure internal harmony so that economic development can restart after two decades of stagnation and corruption.” Doing so requires a “secure border with a non-aggression pact [with Israel] backed by the US,” he added.
“I think the Lebanese government wants to neutralise the border issue in the same way that they neutralised the maritime borders under Michel Aoun,” explained Young. “I think Beirut would like to remove any more excuses for Hezbollah to rearm, or to be armed.”
“It’s in the interest of the Lebanese government to really end the possibilities of more wars in the south that destroy so much in Lebanon and cause such immense human pain, hardship, and loss. So, the government has a huge incentive to try to reach some kind of agreement with the Israelis. I think most of the border issues can be resolved, but not all of them,” Dr Rami G. Khouri, a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, told TNA.
“Now the Israelis can resolve all of these issues if they want to, but they don’t want to. They want to keep constant tension. They want to keep the Americans involved. They want to always be able to say there’s a security threat and they need to always be there to do whatever they need to do to protect themselves. They could solve easily most of the border demarcation issues, but I don’t think the Israelis want to. So, we should expect some progress, but not complete progress,” he added.
Israeli intentions and Washington’s role
There is good reason to question Israeli motivations for engaging in border demarcation talks with Lebanon’s government.
“The devil is in the ambiguous language the American-Israeli side is mobilising to publicise these so-called ‘negotiations’. The Israelis say they want to negotiate the location of the border, while the Lebanese side insists that the border is already clearly demarcated internationally, and they want to discuss the Lebanese spots that Israel is currently occupying. There is a quite clear divergence of goals here between the two parties,” explained Dr Marina Calculli, assistant professor in International Relations at Leiden University, in a TNA interview.
“The US-Israeli negotiators are trying to conceal this divergence under an ambiguous language, in the best tradition of their style of negotiating with Arab counterparts. However, it is plausible that Israel is seeking to acquire Lebanese territory through a so-called ‘deal,’ which could easily turn into a diktat under closed doors, given the military and economic asymmetry between the two countries, and the unprecedented level of US support for Israel, and interference within the domestic political life of Lebanon,” she added.
There seems to be no daylight between the Trump administration’s objectives and those of Netanyahu’s government. Therefore, thinking that the US is an honest broker or neutral party in talks between Lebanon’s government and Israel would be naïve.
“Israel appears interested in the permanent acquisition of Lebanese territory, at least part of the territory that Israel would have wanted to acquire by force during the fighting with Hezbollah from September to early December 2024 and was not able to. Israel has already used the so-called ‘ceasefire agreement’, sponsored by the United States, in a treacherous manner: rather than withdrawing from Lebanon as per the terms of the agreement, it has taken the territories it wanted while giving the impression it was withdrawing,” explained Dr Calculli.
“It looks like Israel is now seeking to force the Lebanese government to ‘concede’ these territories through rogue diplomacy, as it might be costly to preserve them through prolonged occupation, as Israel has experienced in its past occupations of South Lebanon,” she commented.
Shebaa Farms
The old and sensitive Shebaa Farms issue will make border demarcation talks between Beirut and Tel Aviv increasingly complicated. Occupied by Israel since 1967, the Lebanese consider the Shebaa Farms as part of their country’s territory. But Israel claims that this patch of land belongs to the Syrian Golan Heights, which the entire international community (minus the US and Israel) recognises as Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel.
The Bashar al-Assad regime never signed a map to demarcate its border with Lebanon confirming Lebanese sovereignty over the Shebaa Farms, but it did orally state that this land was Lebanese. Because the former Syrian government never took concrete action to demarcate the Syrian-Lebanese border, the Shebaa Farms are, at least according to international law, Syrian land under Israeli occupation.
Since the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-led offensive toppled Assad, Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa explained, “It is still too early to talk about [the Shebaa Farms issue], knowing that we are in a transition phase.” He has also said more than once that post-Assad Syria will cease to have “negative interference in Lebanon” whose sovereignty, territorial dignity, and independence Syria will respect.
That said, Young doubts that Damascus will formally recognise the Shebaa Farms as Lebanese land any time soon. Seeing this one issue as the “main sticking point” in the Lebanese-Israeli border demarcation negotiations, he noted that “for there to be agreement on the farms we need some sort of a Syrian acknowledgment that this is Lebanese territory, and I don’t think we’re going to get that.”
Lebanese-Israeli normalisation?
It is necessary to see the US role within the context of the Trump administration’s efforts to push Lebanon into the Israeli normalisation camp. On 22 March, US Special Envoy to the Middle East expressed his optimism about Lebanon and Israel formalising full-fledged diplomatic relations. “I think Lebanon could normalise with Israel, literally normalise, meaning a peace treaty with the two countries. That’s really possible,” the American diplomat told Tucker Carlson.
But most experts on Lebanon do not share this belief that there is any serious chance of the country entering the Abraham Accords in the foreseeable future.
There is “virtually no chance of Lebanese-Israeli normalisation under current circumstances” and Lebanon is “one of the Arab states that is furthest from normalisation, not closest,” according to Dr Ibish.
“Not only would opposition from Hezbollah and many other constituencies and groups be overwhelming, it’s hard to overstate the legacy of mistrust and even hatred in Lebanon towards the Israelis given the history of Israel’s policies and conduct towards Lebanon (and, Israelis would undoubtedly claim, vice versa) to make this plausible from the Lebanese perspective,” he noted.
There is a large Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon. Issues pertaining to the rights of these refugees, including the right of return, as well as reparations from Israel for its massive damage to Lebanon over many decades make it extremely difficult to imagine Beirut deciding to normalise with Tel Aviv without drastic changes in the region.
“Normalisation is not in the cards as long as Palestinians remain deprived of their basic human rights and suffer refuge after refuge. A substantial part of the Lebanese population cannot abide that, and the Palestinian tragedy will never cease spilling over into other countries as long as their situation remains as it has been for decades,” Dr Khoury told TNA.
As many analysts agree, the high levels of opposition to normalisation among different Lebanese groups (not just Hezbollah) and the country’s internal divisions make the idea of Lebanon normalising with Israel next to impossible to take seriously at this period.
“I don’t really see normalisation…because there’s no consensus within the country on normalisation. In other words, if there are some who want to normalise in line with the other Arab countries, I think there are still groups very much resisting such an outcome, or communities even,” explained Young.
Yet this is not to overlook how much Washington would like such an outcome. “The US will give Lebanon’s government huge incentives—lots of money to do a full normalisation. But Lebanon is too divided internally to possibly accept that. It’s not Bahrain or Morocco,” Dr Khouri told TNA.
Nonetheless, despite all these factors, many articles have been published in the Israeli and American media which argue, as Witkoff recently did, that Lebanese-Israeli normalisation is on the table. This is rather similar to all the buzz about normalisation between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which the Biden and Trump administrations have sought to push.
“People talking like this are indulging themselves in wild eyed daydreams, or they just don’t know anything about Lebanon, which is more likely, because many people in the United States, and even Israel, are perversely given to preposterously pontificating about Arab countries without knowing a thing about them,” said Dr Ibish.
“A significant part of the Lebanese population, well beyond the constituency of Hezbollah and Amal, would abhor and fiercely resist the dystopian ‘peace’ that the US and Israel would like to impose on Lebanon. So even if rhetorically the US and Israel are pushing for ‘normalisation,’ there are no conditions for imposing such scenario, unless through further violence and destabilisation,” concluded Dr Calculli.
Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics.
Follow him on X: @GiorgioCafiero
