Less than six weeks after Lebanon and Israel entered into their most significant agreement in decades, the process has already begun to falter. The latest round of U.S.-mediated talks in Rome ended without an agreement on expanding the “pilot zones,” from which Israeli forces are supposed to withdraw and where the Lebanese Armed Forces are expected to assume control.
Israel is demanding that the Lebanese Army demonstrate effective control over the areas that have already been handed over, while also making progress on disarming Hezbollah, before it relinquishes additional territory.
Lebanon’s position, however, is that the Army cannot fully deploy in territory that remains occupied by Israeli forces.
But Israel is increasingly treating withdrawal as something Lebanon must first “earn” by proving that it can control territory it does not yet fully possess. At the same time, military operations have continued. Two Israeli soldiers were killed this week in an explosion while inside Lebanon, after which Israel carried out strikes on areas in 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 supposed to bring to an end.
This is also why President Joseph Aoun’s visit to Washington on July 21 was important. The significance of the visit did not stem from its ceremonial nature, but from the fact that it appeared to establish the U.S. political backing needed to make an extremely difficult Lebanese transition possible. President Donald Trump pledged that the United States would provide substantial assistance to Lebanon, while Aoun sought continued U.S. support for the Lebanese Armed Forces and pressure toward a full Israeli withdrawal. That bargain is now being put to the test.
Lebanon wants the state to extend its authority over its entire territory and for the Lebanese Armed Forces to assume security responsibilities that, for decades, have been divided among the state, foreign armies, and armed organizations. It also wants to address the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons through a process that ultimately restores the state’s monopoly over the use of force.
But political intentions alone cannot achieve this outcome. The Lebanese state cannot ask communities to support disarmament while Israeli forces remain on Lebanese territory and military operations continue around them. This is where the discussion over dismantling Hezbollah’s military capabilities must begin.
Dismantlement does not simply mean collecting weapons. In practical political terms, it means ending the protective function that Hezbollah has claimed those weapons serve. Hezbollah has long justified maintaining its arsenal, in part, by arguing that the state is incapable of protecting Lebanese territory from Israel or compelling Israel to withdraw from occupied land. Any serious process aimed at ending Hezbollah’s military role must therefore address that argument rather than merely condemn it.
This does not grant Hezbollah an open-ended right to maintain an armed structure outside state authority. Rather, it recognizes a more fundamental reality: if the Lebanese state wants to replace the logic of armed resistance, it must demonstrate that state institutions can deliver the security outcomes that the resistance narrative claims only Hezbollah’s weapons can provide. Achieving this becomes considerably more difficult when withdrawal is made conditional on prior Lebanese actions.
The current sequencing therefore risks creating a self-reinforcing trap. Israel points to Hezbollah’s weapons as a reason to remain. Hezbollah points to the continuing Israeli presence as a reason to remain armed. Caught between them is a Lebanese state being asked to dismantle one side of this equation without being given the means to remove the other.
If this situation continues, the agreement will not weaken Hezbollah’s resistance narrative. It will provide it with new evidence.
The State Must Replace More Than Weapons
No serious assessment of Hezbollah can treat it solely 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. This relationship tied Lebanese security to a regional deterrence strategy largely formulated outside Lebanon and often with devastating consequences for the country.
But Hezbollah has also become deeply rooted 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 the party for ideological reasons, but also because it provided forms of security and assistance that public institutions were unable to deliver.
Any serious transition away from Hezbollah’s armed role must therefore provide the party’s supporters within the Shiite community with confidence that their security, political standing, and socioeconomic interests will not deteriorate once the party’s weapons are brought under state authority.
President Aoun himself has acknowledged this complexity. This is one reason the issue cannot credibly be reduced to a simple order to surrender weapons.
Lebanon instead needs a comprehensive process of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. The goal is not to preserve Hezbollah’s military autonomy under another name, but to ensure that ending that autonomy strengthens the republic rather than producing another cycle of instability.
This means creating the conditions in which state institutions can genuinely replace the functions previously performed by parallel structures.
A fighter leaving an armed organization needs a credible civilian future. Communities that have relied on Hezbollah-linked institutions need effective public services and capable local government. Southern towns repeatedly devastated by war need reconstruction, employment opportunities, and economic activity. Citizens being asked to place their security exclusively in the hands of the state need to see that the state is capable of protecting them.
From this perspective, a full Israeli withdrawal is not a diplomatic demand separate from the process of dismantling Hezbollah’s military capabilities. It is one of the conditions that make such dismantlement politically viable.
Washington’s Commitment Must Now Become Policy
This is also why the commitments made during President Aoun’s visit to Washington are now more important than the visit itself.
Lebanon has made clear the path it wants to pursue. It wants the Lebanese Armed Forces to expand state authority, and it wants weapons to be placed under the control of legitimate institutions. What it lacks are some of the material and political conditions necessary to complete that transition, and the United States can influence both.
Trump’s pledge to support Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces should now be translated into sustained military assistance, training, and institutional support proportionate to the scale of what the Army is being asked to do. The Lebanese Armed Forces are expected to deploy in contested areas, impose a new security order, facilitate the return of civilians, and ultimately assume responsibilities previously exercised by Hezbollah. This cannot be achieved simply by declaring the Army the legitimate security authority and expecting the necessary capabilities to follow automatically. Nor can the military issue be separated from reconstruction.
Years of conflict have damaged homes, roads, businesses, and public infrastructure, particularly in southern Lebanon. Municipalities are trying to provide services to returning residents while the economy continues to suffer from 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 the state must be able to function.
That requires reconstruction funding, functioning municipalities, economic reform, and public institutions capable of providing services without pushing citizens back into systems of partisan dependency. These are not peripheral development issues attached to a security agreement. They will determine whether a transfer of authority away from an armed movement can endure.
U.S. support for the Lebanese Armed Forces is therefore only one part of the commitment Washington made in July. The second part is political.
Israel should not be allowed to turn withdrawal into an indefinitely deferred 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 people that choosing state authority leads to genuine sovereignty. Washington helped shape the agreement precisely because neither side was able to resolve the sequencing problem on its own. Its role cannot end with the signing of the framework.
No Agreement Can Survive Without Reciprocity
The current impasse is especially dangerous because Lebanon is attempting this transition amid a broader confrontation involving Israel, Iran, and the United States that remains highly unstable.
Regional conflicts have repeatedly overwhelmed Lebanese politics, despite Lebanon having only limited control over them. The current U.S.-mediated negotiating process between Lebanon and Israel mattered precisely because it offered the possibility of insulating Lebanese security from this pattern by returning decisions over war, peace, and territorial defense to the state. A prolonged Israeli presence would push Lebanon in the opposite direction.
Critics of the agreement will be able to argue that Beirut accepted major commitments while Israel retained control over territory and freedom of military action. Hezbollah will argue that negotiations failed to secure an Israeli withdrawal and that its armed presence therefore remains necessary for Lebanese security. Iran will have every incentive to encourage that conclusion.
Washington would then face an outcome almost exactly opposite to its stated objectives: an agreement intended to strengthen the Lebanese state and reduce Hezbollah’s military role would instead reproduce the very conditions from which Hezbollah derives the political strength of its armed-resistance narrative. Avoiding that outcome requires reciprocity in practice, not merely on paper.
Lebanon needs stronger institutions, a capable army, economic reform, and a serious, nationally owned process to resolve once and for all the issue of weapons outside state authority. The United States needs to continue supporting those institutions and use its influence to keep the Israeli withdrawal on track. Israel needs to relinquish Lebanese territory rather than use its continued occupation as leverage to force Lebanon toward particular domestic political outcomes.
These are not competing demands. They are the conditions under which the agreement can work.
A Path Toward Peace Already Exists
The demand for a full Israeli withdrawal should also not be understood as a rejection of peace.
Lebanon remains part of an Arab position that has long proposed a negotiated path toward 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 the achievement of a just settlement of the Palestinian issue.
The initiative’s relevance today does not lie in nostalgia for a diplomatic document written nearly a quarter-century ago. It lies in the principle that lasting peace still requires addressing occupation rather than managing it indefinitely.
Peace and security in Lebanon cannot be entirely separated from this broader settlement. Nor can a sovereign Lebanon be built on the basis of a permanent cycle in which Israeli military action is cited to justify weapons outside state control, and those same weapons are then cited to justify continued Israeli military action.
The agreement signed this summer created a rare opportunity to begin dismantling that cycle. That opportunity has not disappeared. But for this transition to succeed, Lebanese citizens must see that the state can recover territory through diplomacy, protect them through national institutions, and offer a more sustainable alternative to the narrative of endless conflict that Hezbollah seeks to rebuild.