On Friday, June 26, Israel and Lebanon signed an agreement—mediated by the United States—ending the conflict that began last March. The agreement covers several decisive points, including active US involvement in its implementation and in financing Lebanon’s armed forces (LAF), while also accommodating firm positions held by both sides. On the Lebanese side, it backs Beirut’s insistence that it not be treated as a junior partner to Tehran, which had claimed the right to negotiate on Lebanon’s behalf in Switzerland. On the Israeli side, it grants Israel’s request to avoid mandating an immediate troop withdrawal, a move that would have gone down badly with an Israeli public still favoring continued war.
The agreement also shows a strong dose of pragmatism, embracing a logic of gradual implementation: Israel and Lebanon will first need to test their ability to coordinate in two “pilot zones,” where the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the deployment of the LAF in their place will begin—preliminary steps before residents can return. To that end, a trilateral military coordination group involving the United States, the LAF, and the Israeli army is set to be established, enabling direct communication between the parties.
The Lebanese government thus emerges politically legitimized, while Israel retains considerable room to maneuver in Lebanon: the ability to fly over its airspace, to respond militarily to actions taken against it (broadly interpreted), and to remain in the “buffer zone” until Hezbollah’s disarmament becomes a reality. Yet Israel itself is among the parties that may prove an unreliable partner when it comes to the agreement holding.
The Hezbollah Disarmament Problem
The current war between Israel and Lebanon is known on the Lebanese side as “the war of solidarity with Gaza” and on the Israeli side as “Operation Northern Arrows.” Even in the terminology used by the two camps, it’s clear the war’s objectives were understood differently: while Israel aimed to separate the two fronts and treat them as independent of one another, Hezbollah kept pointing back to the single shared origin of a struggle launched between the so-called “Axis of Resistance” and Israel in the wake of October 7, 2023.
Each of these two narratives carries an ideological charge and a willingness to obscure some important omissions: on the Lebanese side, the emphasis is on how the war, three years on, has never really ended—as if it were still about armed solidarity with the Gaza Strip rather than a proxy response to the killing of Ali Khamenei. The Israelis, for their part, omit the fact that they lost the open confrontation with the Shiite world after waging war against the Iranian regime—a war Tel Aviv thought it could win in a matter of weeks—and that this is precisely why the government decided, with all the more determination, to stake everything on Hezbollah: a lightweight adversary, badly weakened and decimated in its leadership, especially after the pager attack (September 2024).
If in 2024 Hezbollah’s then-leader Hassan Nasrallah was still boasting of having 100,000 fighters and an arsenal of 150,000 missiles, today it’s clear he never had more than 45,000 militiamen between active fighters and reserves, of whom between 2,500 and 4,000 are believed to have been killed in the various military operations since October 2023. Meanwhile, many missiles, weapons depots, and launch pads are believed to have been destroyed or damaged, especially after Israel’s ground invasion in March 2026.
Despite a serious blow to its chain of command, Hezbollah’s ranks have likely been quickly replenished: the group has relatively little trouble recruiting, since a militiaman’s salary is paid in dollars and comes to about 600 euros a month, while pay for regular LAF soldiers has collapsed to somewhere between 60 and 300 dollars, in a Lebanon that is economically on the brink of collapse. Hezbollah’s manpower, then, isn’t much smaller than that of the regular army—the LAF—which today numbers around 60,000 troops and would now be tasked with disarming it. Beyond the Lebanese army’s economic and morale problems—between 40 and 50 percent of its ranks are thought to be Shiite soldiers who share the same cultural background as Hezbollah, though no official statistics exist on this—and the high risk of sectarian clashes, there’s also the Israel factor to reckon with.
The Limits of Israel’s Commitment
Since October 7, its population seems never to have fully recovered from the collective trauma, and appears to have given its military a blank check to ensure the country’s defense, well beyond the limits that applied before the attack. The IDF is reported to have received a mandate to expand its Dahiya doctrine—developed by then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, today, paradoxically, a moderate voice in the current Knesset, and already designed to authorize the massive use of force and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure in enemy-controlled areas as a tool of deterrence—to embrace a new strategic line of so-called “scorched earth” tactics and ethnic removal along all of its borders.
This is what is now known in Israel as the “Gaza model“: the creation of broad buffer zones along its borders after “leveling” the territory—that is, destroying all civilian infrastructure and removing every resident. As of now, Israel holds a ten-kilometer strip inside Lebanon, symbolically marked by a notional “yellow line” that echoes, even in its name, the one imposed on Gaza, from which some 1.2 million Lebanese (a fifth of the population) are reported to have been evacuated for “their own safety.” Of that strip, three to four kilometers are said to have already been reduced to scorched earth, with the devastation of agricultural fields and 5,000 hectares of forest, the demolition of more than 3,000 buildings in villages, and the destruction of seven bridges over the Litani River, which divides the central and southern parts of the country.
Defense Minister Katz reportedly made no secret of wanting to replicate the strategy applied in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in southern Lebanon as well, but the current Israeli government—often labeled the “most right-wing in Israel’s history”—is said not even to be the most extreme voice in the country’s internal debate. While the government continues to frame things in terms of “buffer zones” meant to guarantee security and allow the 60,000 displaced residents of the north to safely return home, other voices are reportedly rising within Israeli public opinion calling for a permanent hold on a portion of Lebanese territory.
The Israeli Right’s Plans for Lebanon
Two influential right-wing think tanks—the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) and the Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCSC), both made up of prominent former generals and career diplomats—argue that the agreement won’t hold, that the current defensive line is too long and vulnerable to enemy attack, and that Israel should therefore occupy the entire territory up to the Litani River, which would serve as a future “natural border” between the two countries. They make this case on security grounds: control of the Litani River and all of southern Lebanon would give the IDF 40 kilometers of additional strategic depth, reducing the impact of first-person-view (FPV) drones guided by fiber optics—responsible for killing many Israeli soldiers in recent weeks because they’re immune to radio interference and jamming, though limited by their short range.
However, behind the military rationale, other motives can be discerned. As lethal, these next-generation drones are certainly no more dangerous than the missile arsenal Hezbollah can still draw on, with Zelzal and Fateh missiles boasting ranges of 200-300 kilometers—meaning control of the Litani River would hardly amount to an insurmountable barrier. The goal of seizing the river, much touted in right-wing circles close to the government and military leadership, seems to respond instead to the ambition of permanently expanding Israel’s borders along biblical lines tied to the idea of Greater Israel, dressed up as a matter of security and exploiting favorable historical circumstances.
The Nabatieh plateau, then, is judged “too close” to the Israeli town of Metula—as if it hadn’t always been—so much so that, were it to be returned to Lebanon, it supposedly couldn’t guarantee full security for northern Galilee.
Similar reasoning to that invoked in 1967 for the conquest of the Jordan Valley and its eastern mountain ridge, regarded from then on as the only defensible eastern border, supposedly able to guarantee “strategic depth, high-ground surveillance, and a natural barrier” against infiltration from Jordan and, by extension, from every other Arab country. To this day, the Jordan Valley has never been returned and is still considered a pillar of Israel’s legitimate self-defense, even though the “strategic depth” argument has grown hard to accept in the age of missiles.
The Golan Model for Annexation
In March 2024, a support committee for the recolonization of Lebanon was reportedly founded, called “Uri Tzafon” (“Awaken, O North!”), with the aim of promoting new permanent civilian settlements alongside the 18 military outposts already erected in the zone controlled by the IDF. As Haaretz’s Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar wryly commented, settlers always talk of “seeds to plant” that will grow into “trees,” but the result is never a forest so much as a jungle. Given the strength of the collusion between extremist settlers—that is, the aggressive ones actively engaged in new colonization projects—and the government and Jewish agencies, as revealed by a 2023 Haaretz investigation (in which the Jewish National Fund donated a million dollars to the “Hilltop Youth”), even scattered groups of a thousand people like Uri Tzafon can grow over the years into major voices within the Israeli right.
The model of colonization they’re pursuing is no longer that of Israel in ’48, the “war of independence,” nor that of the West Bank—the occupation of territory with partial incorporation of its inhabitants—but rather that of the Golan: the military occupation of the heights in ’67 following the flight of all its Syrian residents, culminating in formal annexation in 1981, once international pressure had faded, with eventual US recognition in 2020.
The example of the Golan Heights confirms the success of this practice of creating “facts on the ground“—outposts in contested or hostile areas that, however much they draw international criticism, end up growing and attracting new settlers over time. There’s also a kind of “martyrology” being promoted by the settler movement: many new groups, Uri Tzafon included, invoke the death of a soldier in Gaza or Lebanon during the recent “Iron Swords” operation, claiming to act in ways that honor his memory and fulfill his dreams and aspirations posthumously. This line of argument seems to lend an almost sacred quality to what is, in fact, a political undertaking—colonization—taking root in a social fabric increasingly traumatized by war and increasingly steeped in a cult of death and religious references.
Political Consensus for Expansion
These extremist movements find backing in the Knesset as well: first and foremost among members of Likud, Otzma Yehudit, and Religious Zionism (parties in the governing coalition), but also, unexpectedly, a tolerant acceptance from opposition parties like Yisrael Beiteinu and Yesh Atid—both in favor of occupying southern Lebanon up to the Litani River—and a warm welcome among the ultra-Orthodox parties.
This last aspect may be one of the Israeli social dynamics most worth watching closely, and with the greatest concern: ultra-Orthodox parties like UTJ and Shas, which in the 1990s supported the Oslo Accords, today find themselves firmly on the other side of the barricade. In a country where, according to recent political polling (Direct Polls, June 2026), 73 percent of Israelis say they favor “encouraging Arab emigration”—without, notably, ever being asked where such emigration should actually go—almost all Haredim (96 percent) support extending Israeli sovereignty into southern Lebanon. Today the ultra-Orthodox make up just 14 percent of the population, but are projected to grow to 30 percent by 2050, eventually making up exactly half of the Jewish population—no small political and cultural challenge going forward.
Israel’s International Isolation
Finally, the recent falling-out between Netanyahu and Trump over the war in Iran and the ceasefire in Lebanon clearly points to a marked Israeli drift toward international isolation—a trend not lost on US Vice President J.D. Vance, who recently remarked that “Israel has few friends.” Even President Trump’s popularity in Israel has taken a sharp nosedive, with 69 percent of Israelis saying in a recent poll that “Trump is bad for Israel” (Mitvim, Israel Foreign Policy Index, 2026). This season of endless wars appears to be driven not only by a Netanyahu government intent on clinging to power through the next elections (October 2026), but also by a society that sees no tool but war to assert its right to exist.
One is left wondering what borders could ever be considered secure enough for Israel, since beyond every newly drawn line lies another potentially hostile group of people, hostile simply for being different. What’s certain is that the project of realizing the biblical Greater Israel—its borders undefined but stretchable from the Nile to the Euphrates—entails a radical historical revisionism that promises only further instability and terrorism. It’s no coincidence that the Saudis, currently under attack from the Iranian regime, have recently identified Israel as the region’s foremost threat, and that numerous opinion polls conducted across Gulf publics—as opposed to their leaderships—confirm a thorough alienation from Israel.
It’s too early to say whether the Israeli-Lebanese agreement will hold, though it’s a safe bet that the Lebanese government won’t be able to carry through a disarmament of Hezbollah that has already dragged on unfinished since 2005, and that Israel will find pretexts to remain in the south of the country—handing Hezbollah, in turn, a ready-made justification for not surrendering its weapons (which it wouldn’t hand over anyway). The Trump administration is too unstable and volatile to push through a plan this ambitious, one that would require not only signing a stable framework agreement with Iran, but also the active involvement of American troops and the deployment of observers in Lebanon, given that the UNIFIL mission has never proven equal to the task and is viewed with partial distrust by both sides.
The bigger fear, though, is that in the meantime some faction of Israel’s government and society might exploit this undefined state of neither-war-nor-peace to advance its own pawns on the chessboard, creating new “facts on the ground” in southern Lebanon—under the umbrella of the general impunity Israel has enjoyed across the Middle East since October 7.
Cover photo: This picture taken from a position in the Upper Galilee in northern Israel shows Israeli army tanks positioned along the Israel-Lebanon border, on July 1, 2026. (Photo by Jack GUEZ / AFP)
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