Nasser Elamine
New Left Review–Sidecar / June 25, 2026
Over the course of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Lebanon has proved the most intractable obstacle to a durable settlement. Throughout, it has been the primary front on which Israel and Iran have competed to determine their standing in the regional order. After Hezbollah entered the war on 2 March, Israel initiated a brutal aerial and ground incursion into southern Lebanon which has killed over 4,000 people and displaced over a million, nearly a fifth of the population. Israel’s campaign has focused on the destruction of civilian infrastructure and the expansion of its occupation – the so-called ‘security zone’, now estimated at around 608 square kilometres.
Netanyahu sees victory in Lebanon as necessary to deny Iran the ability to rebuild Hezbollah and, with it, a key pillar of its deterrence capability. Tehran, meanwhile, has insisted that the cessation of the assault on Lebanon be a condition to ending the regional war. This appeared to be ratified with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding on 14 June, officially ending fighting on all fronts. Israeli strikes nonetheless continued until a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was agreed on 19 June, overseen by Tehran, Washington and Doha, that still holds at the time of writing.
Netanyahu, who has spent decades lobbying US administrations to join Israel in an attack on Iran, must have known he had only a narrow window to land a decisive blow before conflicts of interest arose. Trump has come under mounting domestic pressure to end a war that has shaken global markets, driven up fuel prices and eroded his approval ratings. Tensions within Lebanon itself further complicated the situation. Nawaf Salam’s coalition, which took office in February 2025, has made disarming Hezbollah the centrepiece of its programme. Under instruction of President Joseph Aoun it entered direct talks with Israel in an attempt to sidestep Iranian influence and secure US backing. Hezbollah, for its part, joined the war in pursuit of an Israeli withdrawal from the south and the restoration of its domestic and regional standing; disarmament was not a concession it was willing to entertain.
The MOU agreed in Islamabad has been widely viewed within Israel as a historic failure. This is not only because it has placed significant constraints on its military operations in Lebanon and exposed the growing rift between Washington and Tel Aviv. It also symbolizes Israel’s failure to consolidate its gains over the last three years, and translate military dominance into political advantage. Prior to February, Israel had been making headway in refashioning the Middle East as its own sphere of influence – the strategic core of the concept of ‘Greater Israel’ – and projecting power undeterred, its reach extending well beyond the Levant as it attacked Ansarullah in Yemen, bombed Qatar and opened hostilities against Iran in June 2025, culminating with a US strike on Iranian nuclear sites. The Islamic Republic forced Israel to absorb serious hits and lean on US and European missile defences during the Twelve-Day War, yet it emerged from the conflict seemingly more fragile than ever. The region appeared to be entering an age of Israeli hegemony that would entail region-wide freedom of action, normalization with the Arab states, and eventually reduced financial and military dependence on the US.
In Lebanon, meanwhile, Hezbollah had been forced into retreat after suffering a devastating defeat at the hands of Israel in late 2024 which took out the majority of the party’s senior military leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah and his second-in-command Hashem Safieddine. Weakened, it agreed to a ceasefire in November that allowed Israel to maintain a military presence north of the Blue Line, pending a phased withdrawal; over the next fifteen months the IDF proceeded to carry out a series of attacks which left at least 500 Lebanese dead. The Salam government meanwhile instructed the Lebanese army to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure south of the Litani river. Working under the assumption that the fall of Assad in Syria represented the end of Iran’s regional influence, the government aligned itself with the US; American envoys became regulars in Beirut. Salam’s cabinet (with the exception of the Shi’a ministers), along with the majority of the Lebanese political class, proceeded to politically isolate Hezbollah, held to be wholly responsible for Israel’s destruction and occupation of southern Lebanon.
Yet Hezbollah has spent the past year rebuilding its military capacities, reorganizing its leadership structure and shifting its battlefield strategy back towards guerilla tactics. It would no longer aim to hold ground against a technically superior adversary but rather to make it difficult for Israel to establish bases. Fibre optic cable-guided drones – inspired by developments in Ukraine – provided a means of evading Israeli forces’ multi-billion-dollar electronic warfare and jamming devices.
Israel ramped up its offensive as the US-Iran talks progressed. Dismayed by the news of a ceasefire on 8 April, and conscious that it was running out of time, Israel conducted a brutal onslaught that targeted 150 locations across Lebanon, killing 303 people and wounding 1,105 others. On 14 April, Washington hosted the first direct talks between Israel and Lebanon, with the aim of delinking the Iranian and Lebanese fronts. A ceasefire took effect a couple of days later but was limited in practice to excluding Beirut from attacks, which Israel then exploited to impose a new equation on the battlefield: any attack on its northern settlements would provoke an attack on Lebanon’s capital; Iran promised to attack northern Israel in response. Despite the nominal ceasefire, in late May Israel bombed infrastructure across southern Lebanon and carried out ground assaults north of the ‘security zone’. Frustrated by Hezbollah drone strikes which had killed at least 11 Israeli soldiers, on 7 June Israel sought to call Tehran’s bluff by striking a building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing two people. Iran retaliated immediately, undermining the already tenuous Lebanon-Israel talks and reinforcing the unity of fronts.
Israel’s regional aspirations have been effectively halted for the time being. Its gamble on the Iranian regime and Hezbollah folding under the pressure of the conflict and rising internal opposition has not paid off. Iran has instead emerged in a stronger strategic position, which it is now attempting to cash out in the negotiations in Switzerland. The inclusion of Lebanon in the MOU – under which signatories must ‘ensure’ the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity – is an index of Tehran’s leverage. But the wording falls short of an explicit demand for an Israeli retreat. Netanyahu has made it clear that Israel has no intention of withdrawing from its ‘security zone’ before it has ‘ensured the safety’ of its northern settlements. The IDF continued to carry out attacks after the Islamabad agreement, displacing southerners who had begun making their way back to their villages and killing scores of civilians. Iran, acutely aware of Israel’s capacity to undermine diplomacy, responded first by postponing talks with the US scheduled for 19 June and then closing the Strait of Hormuz when Israel violated another ceasefire agreed on 20 June. A few hours later, Tel Aviv finally agreed to another ceasefire.
Israel now plans on taking advantage of its ongoing talks with the Lebanese government to legitimize its presence in the south. They have agreed to establish ‘pilot zones’ where the Lebanese army, under US supervision, is charged with dismantling Hezbollah’s military infrastructure – though the under-armed and underprepared Lebanese military will be unable to do so without at least an implicit agreement from the party. But Israel’s plans may be complicated by a deconfliction mechanism agreed upon between Iran and the US this past weekend, said to include the participation of Qatar and Pakistan but not Israel. The details of how such a mechanism would work on the ground have yet to be revealed but it is expected that Israel would have to inform the monitoring group of any potential military activity. It will likely reject this framework and lobby the US against moving forward with it, while potentially seeking alternative arrangements with the Lebanese government.
Over the next few months, Israel will be seeking any opportunity to undermine the US-Iran negotiations process and recommence operations. Netanyahu is haemorrhaging popularity among Israeli voters, the majority of whom reportedly believe he should not run in the coming general elections. Israeli society views any retreat from Lebanon as a defeat; 92 per cent believe that Iran won the war while 72 per cent do not believe the Prime Minister’s claims that Israel achieved significant gains and removed an existential threat. As a US intelligence report indicates, such pressure may well drive Netanyahu to reactivate the Lebanese front.
If this happens, Israel’s next target will likely be Ali al-Taher, a ridge extending into the western foothills of Jabal Amel in southern Lebanon where violent clashes took place in the days leading up to the ceasefire. (The IDF recently issued a map placing the area just within its security zone.) Control of these strategic hills would give the Israeli army a vantage over the city of Nabatieh and the uplands of Iqlim al-Tuffah, where Israel claims Hezbollah maintains a major operational base and deep military infrastructure. Its destruction, according to Israeli sources, would deny the party the capacity to resist Israeli ground forces. Netanyahu and others in his cabinet may calculate that securing Ali al-Taher would allow them to present Trump with a sufficiently convincing plan to decisively defeat Hezbollah. Such an outcome would substantially weaken Iran’s negotiating position, and possibly force it into painful concessions that Trump could then tout as an absolute victory.
Hezbollah, for its part, understands that a durable end to the war hinges on America’s perception that the party remains undefeated militarily, and on Iran retaining maximum leverage throughout the negotiations. This is why it has been responding to all Israeli ceasefire violations while simultaneously expressing an openness to a mutual security agreement, one that shows a willingness to retreat to north of the Litani river. The Lebanese government has in turn adopted a more conciliatory tone toward Hezbollah. It has likely come to terms with the fact – potentially under Arab direction – that the fate of the Lebanon front will be decided in the Iran-US negotiations in Switzerland and not in their parallel talks with the Israelis.
The Lebanese government has been widely criticized for entering talks with Israel without a clear strategy. But this initiative was never about what Beirut could offer or exact from its neighbour. It represented an act of political alignment with the US, based on the calculation that Iran would be comprehensively defeated, or at least that its capacity to influence regional developments would be sharply curtailed. Nevertheless, the talks could still be beneficial to Lebanon in the limited sense of allowing Israel to make concessions that are potentially marketable as the outcome of negotiations between two ‘sovereign states’, rather than orders passed down from Trump to Netanyahu or the consequences of a failed war. In turn, Lebanese negotiators might attempt to capitalize on the state’s centrality to the Iran-US settlement to insist on an end to Israel’s occupation of the south, while restoring diplomatic relations with Tehran within the framework of a broader regional recalibration.
As things stand, the unity of fronts holds and with it a fragile mutual deterrence between Israel on one side and Iran and Hezbollah on the other. This no basis for long-term equilibrium, however. The result of the conflict in Lebanon may only be gleaned once the contours of a new regional security order begin to take shape. In the interim, any lull in the fighting may prove brief.
Nasser Elamine – senior editor on the foreign desk at Al-Quds al-Arabi, a London-based Arabic daily newspaper
