On the evening of April 23, newscasts reported that, following talks at the White House, US President Donald Trump had announced that the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, due to end on the 27th, would be extended by three weeks. Discussions would continue. The same bulletins carried news of a heavy rocket strike by Hezbollah into northern Israel.
No one could deny that face-to-face Israel-Lebanon negotiations are long overdue – most would say by many decades.
The two countries have been technically at war for 78 years. Lebanon’s participation in the attack by the joint Arab armies in 1948 on the newborn State of Israel has never been formally resolved, as it was with Egypt and Jordan.
For the same reason, no mutually agreed international border exists between Lebanon and Israel. The old British Mandate-era lines were never re-demarcated after 1948. The current provisional land boundary is the UN’s Blue Line, endorsed in UN Security Council resolutions. A joint agreement on an internationally recognized border is long overdue.
Both these matters are certainly in need of resolution. But the current negotiations are presented by Trump and much of the media as talks leading to a deal that would require Israel to cease military operations within Lebanon, and Hezbollah to cease launching rockets, missiles, and drones into northern Israel.
Not many voices are raised to point out that this agenda is a fiction. The Lebanese delegation is not in a position to negotiate on behalf of Hezbollah.
In fact, Lebanon is at the table precisely because the government is unable to control Hezbollah, which retains enough power within Lebanon to continue acting as a “state within a state.” What Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and his government want – without being able to acknowledge it openly – is Israel’s support, and perhaps help, in eliminating Hezbollah’s ability to act unilaterally in support of Iran’s revolutionary regime.
The Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire agreement
According to the terms of the November 2024 Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire agreement, negotiated via US mediators, Hezbollah forces were to have moved out of the region between the Litani River and the Blue Line by January 26, 2025, and been replaced by the Lebanese army.
Achieving this desirable state of affairs – an objective first set out in UN Resolution 1701 back in 2006 – has been frustrated for 20 years by a combination of Hezbollah’s dominance within Lebanon and the weakness of successive Lebanese governments in countering it.
The 2024 deal proved equally ineffective in curbing Hezbollah, but it did produce one positive result. Ever since Lebanese President Michel Aoun’s term ended in November 2022, parliament had repeatedly failed to elect a successor, largely because Hezbollah and its allies blocked agreement. After the ceasefire Hezbollah allowed Joseph Aoun to be elected president and the new government to be installed.
The new government immediately began conducting negotiations with US Special Envoy Tom Barrack aimed at disarming Hezbollah, establishing the state’s monopoly on weapons, and asserting government control in Lebanon.
On August 5, 2025, the Lebanese cabinet instructed the army to develop a comprehensive plan to bring all weapons in the country under the control of state security forces, thereby ending Hezbollah’s autonomy.
One month later Lebanon’s army chief, Gen. Rodolphe Haykal, presented the government with a scheme designed to ensure that, by the end of 2025, Hezbollah would be fully disarmed and military hardware would be held exclusively by Lebanon’s state forces. The cabinet authorized the army to begin implementing it at once. Hezbollah leaders immediately made it clear that they opposed being disarmed.
The army made some progress in dislodging Hezbollah from areas of southern Lebanon, but it soon became clear that the government simply lacked the power to implement the plan.
Lebanon and the struggle against Hezbollah
So from March 2026 onward, Aoun began pushing the idea of face-to-face talks with Israel as part of a broader strategy that would ultimately bring Hezbollah’s weapons, and therefore Hezbollah itself, under state control.
For presentational purposes, the opening steps would be about ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal. Hezbollah’s disarmament would be presented as the logical next stage. The obvious fact that the government was in no position to offer a Hezbollah ceasefire was conveniently sidelined.
The reality is that the government will be able to undertake Hezbollah disarmament only once it has brought the organization fully under state control, and this will only be possible with Israel’s help and support. How else is Hezbollah to be brought to its knees? Aoun implicitly recognized this when, on March 9, he issued his four-point proposal calling for “direct discussions with Israel under international auspices.”
In a national televised address, Aoun defended direct talks with Israel, an enemy state, as “not weakness,” stressing they are aimed at protecting Lebanese civilians and preventing a Gaza-style devastation in the south.
In fact, preventing further devastation within Lebanon is dependent not on offering an unenforceable ceasefire, but on Hezbollah’s actions. If it continues to support Iran with missile strikes into Israel, then Israel has reserved the right to strike back.
As Aoun frames the situation for public consumption, he steers completely clear of any suggestion of a Lebanon-Israel collaboration in disempowering Hezbollah. Hezbollah still enjoys the support of much of the Shi’ite population, and he is fearful of civil conflict.
The diplomatic track with Israel is designed to create the conditions in which the argument for Hezbollah’s independent arsenal erodes, and full state control becomes politically feasible.
A more realistic assessment, perhaps, was made by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter. Standing outside the State Department after the first session of direct Israel-Lebanon talks, he told reporters: “We discovered today that we’re on the same side of the equation.... We are both united in liberating Lebanon from an occupation power dominated by Iran called Hezbollah.” He also said that “the Lebanese government made it clear... that they no longer want to be ‘occupied’ by Hezbollah.”
Trashing Leiter’s portrayal as propaganda, Hezbollah refuted the suggestion that Lebanon is “united” with Israel against it. As for the Lebanese government, it has neither endorsed nor repudiated Leiter’s impression of the situation.
The question is: regardless of whether it is totally accurate, is it “true” in the sense of reflecting where Lebanon and Israel actually stand?
The writer, a former senior civil servant, is the Middle East correspondent for Eurasia Review. Follow him at: www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com