Barely six weeks after Lebanon and Israel entered their most consequential agreement in decades, the process is already beginning to falter. The latest U.S.-mediated talks in Rome ended without agreement on expanding the “pilot zones” through which Israeli forces are meant to withdraw and the Lebanese Armed Forces assume control. Israel is demanding that Lebanon’s army demonstrate effective control in areas already handed over, alongside progress on Hezbollah’s disarmament, before it relinquishes additional territory. Lebanon’s position is that the army cannot fully deploy into territory that Israeli forces continue to occupy.
This is more than a dispute over sequencing. It is a contradiction that threatens the political logic of the entire agreement.
The framework was supposed to create a gradual transition in southern Lebanon: Israeli forces would withdraw, the Lebanese army would expand its authority, civilians would return, reconstruction would begin and the state would address the continued existence of weapons outside its control. Each part of that process was meant to make the next one more possible.
Instead, Israel is increasingly treating withdrawal as something Lebanon must first earn by demonstrating control over territory it does not yet fully possess. Meanwhile, military operations have continued. Two Israeli soldiers were killed this week in an explosion while operating inside Lebanon, after which Israel launched strikes across the south; the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) recorded 113 Israeli projectiles in a single day, the highest level since June 21.
This is precisely the kind of dynamic the agreement was meant to end.
It is also why President Joseph Aoun’s visit to Washington on July 21 mattered. The visit was not important because of its ceremony, but because it appeared to establish the American political backing required to make an extremely difficult Lebanese transition possible. President Donald Trump promised that the United States would help Lebanon substantially, while Aoun sought continued American support for the Lebanese Armed Forces and pressure towards a complete Israeli withdrawal.
That bargain is now being tested.
Lebanon wants the state to extend its authority across its territory and wants the Lebanese Armed Forces to assume the security responsibilities that have for decades been divided between the state, foreign armies, and armed organizations. It also wants to address Hezbollah’s weapons through a process that ultimately restores the state’s monopoly over force.
But political intent alone cannot deliver that outcome. The Lebanese state cannot credibly ask communities to support disarmament while Israeli forces remain on Lebanese territory and military operations continue around them.
This is where the discussion of decommissioning Hezbollah has to begin.
Decommissioning does not mean simply collecting weapons. In practical political terms, it means ending the protective function those weapons have claimed to perform. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has long justified its arsenal partly through the argument that the state cannot protect Lebanese territory from Israel or compel Israel to withdraw from occupied land.
A serious process for ending Hezbollah’s military role therefore has to address that argument, not merely denounce it.
This does not grant Hezbollah an indefinite right to retain an armed structure outside of state authority. It recognizes something more basic: if the Lebanese state is to replace the logic of armed resistance, it has to demonstrate that state institutions can achieve the security outcomes that resistance claims only weapons in the hands of Hezbollah can provide.
That becomes considerably harder when withdrawal itself is made conditional on prior Lebanese action.
The present sequencing therefore risks creating a self-reinforcing trap. Israel points to Hezbollah’s weapons as a reason to remain. Hezbollah points to Israel’s continued presence as a reason to remain armed. Between them stands a Lebanese state being asked to dismantle one side of that equation without being given the means to remove the other.
If that continues, the agreement will not weaken Hezbollah’s resistance narrative. It will supply it with new evidence.
The State Has to Replace More Than Weapons
No serious assessment of Hezbollah can treat it only as an external military problem fueled by third parties.
Its capabilities were built over decades through Iranian financial, military, and ideological support, particularly from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That relationship connected Lebanese security to a regional deterrence strategy shaped largely outside Lebanon, often with devastating consequences for the country.
But Hezbollah also became embedded within Lebanese society. Over four decades it developed political institutions, social networks, and systems of welfare and protection within communities where the state was often weak or absent. Many Lebanese—particularly within the Shiite community— supported it because of ideology, but also because the party provided forms of security and assistance that public institutions could not. Thus, any serious transition away from Hezbollah’s armed role must provide the party’s supporters in the Shia community confidence that their protection, political standing, and socioeconomic interests will not be diminished once the party’s arms become part of the state.
President Aoun himself has acknowledged this complexity. It is one reason the question cannot credibly be reduced to an order to surrender arms.
Lebanon instead needs a comprehensive process of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. The purpose is not to preserve Hezbollah’s military autonomy under another name. It is to ensure that ending that autonomy strengthens the Republic rather than producing another cycle of instability.
That means creating the conditions under which the institutions of the state can actually replace the functions that parallel structures have performed.
A combatant who leaves an armed organization needs a credible civilian future. Communities that have depended on Hezbollah-linked institutions need functioning public services and local government. Southern towns repeatedly devastated by war need reconstruction, employment, and economic activity. Citizens who are asked to place their security exclusively in the hands of the state need to see that the state can protect them.
Seen this way, full Israeli withdrawal is not a separate diplomatic demand sitting alongside decommissioning. It is one of the conditions that makes decommissioning politically credible.
Washington’s Commitment Now Has to Become Policy
This is also why the commitments made during President Aoun’s Washington visit now matter more than the visit itself.
Lebanon has indicated where it wants to go. It wants the Lebanese Armed Forces to extend state authority. It wants weapons brought under legitimate institutions. What it lacks are some of the material and political conditions required to complete that transition.
The United States can influence both.
Trump’s promise to support Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) should now translate into sustained military assistance, training, and institutional support commensurate with what the army is being asked to do. The LAF is expected to deploy across contested territory, enforce a new security order, facilitate civilian return, and eventually assume responsibilities previously exercised by Hezbollah. That cannot be achieved simply by declaring the army to be the legitimate security actor and expecting capacity to follow.
Nor can the military question be separated from reconstruction.
Years of conflict have damaged homes, roads, businesses, and public infrastructure, particularly in southern Lebanon. Municipalities are trying to serve returning populations while operating within an economy still suffering the consequences of years of financial collapse. If the state is expected to become the primary source of authority in these communities, then the institutions through which citizens encounter that state have to function.
That requires reconstruction funding, capable municipalities, economic reform, and public institutions able to deliver services without forcing citizens back into systems of partisan dependency. These are not ancillary development questions attached to a security agreement. They determine whether the transfer of authority away from an armed movement can endure.
American support for the LAF is therefore only one component of the commitment Washington made in July. The second is political.
Israel cannot be allowed to turn withdrawal into an indefinitely postponed reward for Lebanese performance. The Lebanese army needs access to the territory it is being asked to control, and the Lebanese government needs to demonstrate to its own population that choosing state authority produces actual sovereignty.
Washington helped construct the agreement precisely because neither side could resolve this sequencing problem alone. Its role cannot end once the framework has been signed.
An Agreement Cannot Survive Without Reciprocity
The present stalemate is especially dangerous because Lebanon is attempting this transition within a wider confrontation involving Israel, Iran, and the United States that remains deeply unstable.
Lebanese politics has repeatedly been overwhelmed by regional conflicts over which the country has little control. The current negotiation process between Lebanon and Israel mediated by the US was valuable precisely because it offered a possible way to insulate Lebanese security from that pattern by returning decisions of war, peace, and territorial defense to the state.
A prolonged Israeli presence would move Lebanon in the opposite direction.
Critics of the agreement would be able to argue that Beirut accepted substantial obligations while Israel retained territorial control and freedom of military action. Hezbollah would argue that negotiation had failed to achieve Israeli withdrawal, and that its armed presence therefore remains critical to Lebanese security. Iran would have every incentive to encourage that conclusion.
Washington would then confront an outcome almost perfectly opposed to its stated objectives: an agreement intended to strengthen the Lebanese state and reduce Hezbollah’s military role would instead reproduce the conditions from which Hezbollah’s claim to armed resistance draws political strength.
Avoiding that result requires reciprocity in practice, not simply on paper.
Lebanon needs stronger institutions, a capable army, economic reform, and a serious nationally-owned process through which weapons outside of state authority can finally be addressed. The United States needs to sustain its support for those institutions and use its leverage to keep Israeli withdrawal moving. Israel needs to relinquish Lebanese territory rather than use its continued occupation as leverage to compel domestic political outcomes inside Lebanon.
These are not competing demands. They are the conditions under which the agreement can function.
A Path Towards Peace Already Exists
The demand for complete Israeli withdrawal should also not be confused with rejection of peace.
Lebanon remains part of an Arab position that has long offered a negotiated route towards a broader settlement. The Arab Peace Initiative, adopted in Beirut in 2002, established the principle of normalizing relations with Israel in the context of withdrawal from occupied Arab territories and a just settlement of the Palestinian question.
Its relevance today is not nostalgia for a diplomatic document written almost a quarter-century ago. It is that lasting peace still requires addressing occupation rather than managing it indefinitely.
Lebanon’s own peace and security cannot be detached entirely from that wider settlement. Nor can a sovereign Lebanon be built around a permanent cycle in which Israeli military action is invoked to justify the use of weapons outside the state, and those weapons are then invoked to justify continued Israeli military action.
The agreement signed this summer offered a rare chance to begin dismantling that cycle. That opportunity has not disappeared, but for that transition to succeed, Lebanese citizens must see that the state can recover territory through diplomacy, defend them through national institutions, and offer something more durable than the narrative of never-ending conflict that Hezbollah wants to rebuild.
