Elia Ayoub
+972 Magazine / April 23, 2026
Amid U.S.-brokered talks to extend the ‘ceasefire,’ Israel’s ongoing attacks are weakening the Lebanese government — and Hezbollah seeks to capitalize.
Ain Saadeh is a quiet and predominantly Christian town in Mount Lebanon, some 10 kilometers east of Beirut. Despite a complete lack of support for Hezbollah in the town, on April 5, Israel dropped two U.S.-made GBU-39 bombs on a four-story building, located in a social housing project built by the Maronite Church for low-income families. The three victims included Pierre Moawad, the head of a regional office for the Lebanese Forces (LF); the other two victims were women.
This was a highly unusual event, given that the LF is a Christian anti-Hezbollah party whose members were allied with Israel during the 1975-1990 civil war. Lebanese sources quickly confirmed that the targeted apartment was empty, while the Israeli army claimed that it had targeted a Hezbollah operative (without offering any further details) and that it “regrets the harm” caused to civilians.
What was most notable about the incident, however, was that the LF did not blame Israel for the strike — even though it acknowledged that Israel was behind it. Instead, the party described the three dead as “victims of the devastating war that ‘Iran’s party’ dragged the country into once again — in service of its Islamic Republic of Iran, the master to which it openly and repeatedly declares its absolute loyalty, as well as to its ‘Supreme Leader,’ at the expense of Lebanese blood, security, stability, and future generations.”
Such language is sectarian at its core: Hezbollah is stripped of its Lebanese character and reduced to being an arm of the Islamic Republic, while the war is described as a result of Hezbollah’s actions — a popular sentiment among a segment of the Lebanese population that has grown weary of the party’s armed faction. Whereas many locals interviewed expressed fears that Israeli violence will spread to mostly unaffected areas of Mount Lebanon, others were more explicitly sectarian, expressing hateful sentiments toward the entire Lebanese Shia community.
A childhood acquaintance, who happens to live near the targeted building, echoed the now widespread belief that “Israel is seeking to isolate Lebanese Shias” from the rest of the population “in preparation for conquering the south.” It is not a difficult conclusion to reach, given that Israeli officials are explicitly stoking these divisions. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has said that Shias would not be allowed back after Israel completed its occupation of southern Lebanon, where other military officials have warned Christian and Druze citizens not to shelter their Shia neighbours.
It is in this context that the negotiations between Israel and Lebanon ought to be understood: an attempt to further fracture the country.
Strengthening Hezbollah’s hand
On April 14, the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors to the United States, Nada Hamadeh and Yechiel Leiter, met in Washington with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The goal is ostensibly to extend the ceasefire while working “on longer term disarming of Hezbollah, along with a peace deal between the countries.” During the two hours in which the meeting took place, Israel bombed at least 23 towns in southern Lebanon; afterward, Leiter said that both Israel and Lebanon were united in “liberating Lebanon” from Hezbollah.
This came less than a week after one of the most violent days in Lebanese history. On April 8, Israeli warplanes ravaged large parts of the country, killing at least 303 people and wounding 1,150. Israel dubbed the bombing campaign “Operation Eternal Darkness,” a grim reminder of what impunity in the face of the Gaza genocide has brought us: a rogue regime embracing lethal violence for its own sake. In the Bible, eternal darkness is a synonym of hell, and that is what Israel brought down on Lebanon that day.
Two days after the talks in Washington, Israel and Lebanon agreed to a 10-day “ceasefire.” This could have been an opportunity for Israel to demonstrate a willingness to rein in its attacks, but as with the previous “ceasefire” in November 2024, the Israeli army has continued to bomb and demolish Lebanese villages in direct violation of international law. At least tens of thousands of Lebanese, the vast majority of whom are Shia, will have no homes to go back to — a scenario that Hezbollah, which opposes negotiations without a real ceasefire, has been warning about.
The more Israel reinforces Hezbollah’s political worldview, the less the Lebanese government will be able to convince Lebanese Shias and southerners that the state can protect them. The legitimacy of the Lebanese government rests on its ability to do so, and ongoing Israeli destruction and occupation will thus strengthen Hezbollah’s hand against the Lebanese state, potentially leading to an armed confrontation. This, in turn, could lend legitimacy to groups like the LF, which have long argued that Hezbollah’s weapons pose an existential threat to Lebanon.
With Lebanon unable to confront Israel militarily, what remains is merely the hope that Washington will be willing to force Israel to respect Lebanese sovereignty. Although Trump’s unpredictability has at times been a headache for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the president’s recent decision, for instance, to post that Israel was “prohibited” from bombing Lebanon — as of now there is no indication that Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is being given much consideration. Without it, the Lebanese government’s position vis-a-vis Hezbollah would be even weaker than it was before the most recent escalation.
At the time of writing, the Lebanese president is requesting a one-month extension of the “ceasefire” as Israeli and Lebanese envoys meet in Washington for a second round of talks. Yet Israel’s targeting of journalists Zeinab Faraj and Amal Khalil, while they reported from South Lebanon on Wednesday, should dispel any illusions that an extended ceasefire agreement will guarantee Lebanese security.
Whatever comes next, these past weeks’ events have revealed an Israel more willing to enact mass destruction than engage in genuine diplomacy, and the mass violence it has unleashed against one of Lebanon’s religious groups risks plunging the country into a civil war. Some Israeli commentators, such as Raviv Drucker and Alon Ben David, have even suggested that such a scenario would be beneficial to Israel. Yet these statements reveal a deep antipathy to learning from one’s past: It was precisely the previous civil war in Lebanon that created the conditions for Hezbollah to emerge.
A sovereignty vacuum
Lebanon’s request on March 9 to negotiate directly with Israel was a historic offer (which Israel initially rejected four days later). Lebanon is also a signatory of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in which most of the Arab League offered to formally recognize Israel in return for its withdrawal from the occupied territories and the creation of a Palestinian state — the so-called “land for peace” framework, which Israel has repeatedly declined. Lebanon was also among those to re-endorse the Arab Peace Initiative in 2007 and 2017.
Not letting reality get in his way, Netanyahu — standing in front of a map of Israel that included the Palestinian West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights — claimed that Lebanon offered to talk only “as a result of the power we demonstrated.”
Despite Israel’s initial rejection, the Lebanese government made further efforts throughout March that were ostensibly aimed at placating Israel and laying the groundwork for negotiations. It announced a “total ban on any military activity” by Hezbollah early in the month, and even barred the media from using the word “resistance” when describing the armed group. At the same time, the government started pursuing members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for deportation and later declared Iran’s ambassador persona non grata, while agreeing to a French proposal that would include recognizing Israel.
Israel has claimed that Lebanon’s moves to disarm Hezbollah are meaningless because it failed to do so last year. What this ignores, however, is the fact that Israel never respected the ceasefire it committed itself to at the end of 2024, violating it more than 10,000 times in 13 months and killing at least 370 people. In other words, Lebanon was expected to disarm Hezbollah while Israel continued to bomb the south — further shrinking the possibility that the armed group would agree to give up its weapons.
For its part, Hezbollah did not respond to these violations, as even the BBC acknowledged last month, only launching “largely symbolic” rockets toward Israel in response to its assassination of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28. This did not stop the Israeli government from using the rockets as the pretext it was looking for to renew the large-scale war on Lebanon.
The irony here is that both Iran and Israel agree on the Lebanese state’s irrelevance, and this has always been a source of strength for Hezbollah. Israeli politicians have repeatedly denied the Lebanese state’s sovereignty over Lebanese territory even as they demanded that it disarms Hezbollah.
For large parts of southern and eastern Lebanon as well as Beirut’s southern suburbs, citizens perceive the Lebanese state as abandoning them to the Israeli war machine. The resulting vacuum is one that has benefitted Iran since the 1980s, when southern Lebanon came under Israeli occupation for 18 years. As if to confirm this thesis, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has repeatedly claimed that Israel’s new border should be the Litani River, which would mean Israel annexing all of southern Lebanon — “just like the ‘Yellow Line’ in Gaza and like the buffer zone and peak of the Hermon in Syria.”
Meanwhile, the Israeli army has now declared the formation of a “forward defense zone” in southern Lebanon that encompasses around 70 Lebanese villages, the vast majority of which are Shia, with at least three Christian villages and one Sunni town. The zone would also include Lebanon’s Qana gas field, as researcher Ahmad Baydoun notes, “whose exploration rights were explicitly guaranteed under the 2022 U.S.-brokered maritime border agreement between the two countries.”
Closer to the Israeli border, Israel has been razing entire villages and towns to the ground — part of a nearly five-decade effort to destroy civilian infrastructure on the Lebanese side to create a so-called buffer zone. This is a textbook example of the “wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity” that is punishable under international law, all too familiar from the army’s conduct in Gaza.
Indeed, army commanders have recently admitted that southern Lebanon is being demolished “like Gaza” to prevent residents from returning, while Israeli soldiers are helping themselves to whatever they find in the homes of residents who were forced to flee.
Eroded credibility
Since its founding, Israel has viewed conquest through war and the occupation of Arab territories as a core part of its politics. That southern Lebanon would be next in line after the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan has long been Hezbollah’s claim — and the group’s armed resistance to Israeli occupation, which led to the liberation of southern Lebanon in 2000, remains to date the only example of a force successfully taking back Arab territory from Israeli control.
Yet while Israeli violations of international law previously strengthened Hezbollah’s hand, this may no longer be the case. The group is severely weakened by this war, and its domestic reputation is at an all-time low. Whatever credibility it gained after the 2000 liberation has been eroded over the past 26 years by its own actions both in Lebanon and Syria.
In 2008, following the Lebanese state’s attempt to dismantle Hezbollah’s telecommunications network, the group took up arms against other Lebanese groups. Between 2012 and the fall of the Assad regime in 2024, its fighters also intervened on behalf of the dictator in Syria and the group was blamed, predictably, for bringing the Syrian civil war to Lebanese territory.
In 2019, Hezbollah sent its supporters, sometimes armed, to crush the largest anti-government uprising in recent memory. And this is not to mention the more than a dozen Lebanese citizens who have been killed since 2005 for their outspoken opposition to either Hezbollah or the Assad regime, most recently political activist and journalist Lokman Slim in 2021.
Now, while Israeli attacks continue to devastate the country, Hezbollah is ramping up its intimidation and censorship — likely due to the group’s heightened fear of infiltration since the Israeli pager attacks in September 2024. Journalist friends have informed me that in media coverage of Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah is active, the group has been trying to exert control over the narrative.
This was evident in a recent TV interview: Standing in front of what used to be his apartment, a man describes to a journalist that he has nothing left after Israeli strikes destroyed his home. Then he suddenly stops talking, visibly shaken after seeing someone off-camera. The journalist, having clearly understood what was happening, thanks the man, turns to the camera, and tells her audience that they have to stop filming.
There have been a number of similar incidents during the “ceasefire,” reflecting Hezbollah’s increased paranoia — particularly in Dahiyeh, where Israel first developed its notorious doctrine of destroying civilian infrastructure to try to turn Lebanese citizens against Hezbollah.
It may well be that the Israeli war machine, combined with Hezbollah’s own unpopularity, ultimately proves too much for the group to sustain. This will likely depend on many factors, including how far Iran is willing to go to protect Hezbollah, given that the country has successfully withstood U.S.-Israeli aggression thus far. It will also depend on whether Hezbollah is given an off-ramp within Lebanese politics, given the group’s status as a political party that is integral to the Lebanese sectarian system; the Lebanese government has repeatedly said that only Hezbollah’s armed wing needs to be dismantled, not Hezbollah itself.
But more fundamental changes, such as the dismantling of the group’s civilian wing, could bring with it the very real risk of a civil war in Lebanon. This may be the outcome that some Israeli figures would prefer, but it would prove an even more existential threat to the country’s future than the last one.
Elia Ayoub is a post-doctoral researcher and writer; he is the founder of The Fire These Times podcast and co-founder of From the Periphery media collective
