Lebanon’s latest ceasefire deal with Israel aims to disarm Hezbollah and hand the Lebanese armed forces exclusive control of the war-torn south. But nobody can enforce it, especially without Tehran’s involvement.
It may also serve Hezbollah’s interests, analysts say, giving the group cover to rest and rearm.
The ceasefire deal, concluded in Washington on 3 June, calls on Hezbollah to halt all attacks and evacuate its fighters from areas south of the Litani River.
In its place, the Lebanese army would take up control of so-called pilot security zones , a step meant to gradually restore state authority over Hezbollah strongholds across the south. Only then will Israeli forces withdraw, according to the agreement. Hezbollah and Tehran were excluded from the US-mediated talks, and both have rejected the deal. Another round of negotiations, meant to reach a “comprehensive agreement,” is scheduled for the week of 22 June - already in jeopardy before Israel struck Dahiyeh on Sunday.
A few hours later, Iran retaliated by hitting Israel's Ramat David air base, warning that “if the crimes in the Dahiyeh area of Beirut expand, we will attack targets in the occupied territories” - a striking signal that Tehran is tightening its grip on the Lebanese front, making itself a de facto party to the very agreement it publicly rejected.
On the other hand, Lebanon's opposition to Hezbollah's arms is not new. It is written into UN Security Council Resolution 1701 , which was adopted at the end of the 2006 July War, and has been repeated in every government policy statement since. Every Lebanese government has demanded it. None has managed to pull it off. But the current government has been the most explicit yet.
In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour on 5 June, President Joseph Aoun accused Iran of using Lebanon “as a bargaining chip in their negotiation with the United States”. On disarmament, he was under no illusion about the difficulty ahead.
“Eventually they will be persuaded,” Aoun said, referring to Hezbollah, “but the cost will be high.”
But enshrining the disarmament in a direct agreement with Israel, co-signed under American auspices, marks a qualitative shift in the stakes attached to that situation.
“The current war has upended the deterrence formula Lebanon previously enjoyed and created a clear imbalance, expressed today in a new Israeli occupation of southern villages,” political analyst Ali Sbeiti told The New Arab .
“The Lebanese authority has surrendered all its defensive cards and allowed its sovereignty to be violated, placing Israel in a better position to impose its conditions with broad American military and diplomatic support,” he said.
Political analyst and writer Nader Hijazi told The New Arab that the agreement “carries great ambiguity and is lacking in balance,” describing it as “a text that preserves for Israel full freedom of military action under the justification of protecting northern settlements, while tying its own withdrawal to the concept of experimental zones” - a mechanism so vaguely defined that it could extend for decades. A lopsided deal Since a so-called ceasefire agreed in April came into force, nearly 600 people have been killed, among them 23 children. Tyre has been bombarded and ordered evacuated .
Nabatiyeh has been seized in Israel's deepest ground incursion in a quarter-century, with residents of around 55 villages barred from returning as Israel imposes a self-declared buffer zone. UN experts have condemned Israel's continuing strikes as violations of international law.
None of the Israeli assaults has been stopped by the force that Washington's framework places at the centre of its security vision. The Lebanese Armed Forces, whose expanded deployment is the cornerstone of the Washington framework, have not deterred a single Israeli operation.
Lebanon is being asked to accept disarmament as a condition of peace while absorbing the violence of an ongoing war.
In Lebanon, even those who have long opposed Hezbollah are dissatisfied with the latest ceasefire deal.
Lebanese writer and intellectual Ahmad Beydoun described the deal as “humiliating,” “an approximate expression of where Lebanon has ended up: either defeated through negotiation or suicidal through fighting”.
Journalist Diana Moukalled, known for her long-time opposition to Hezbollah, was equally damning. “The agreement leaps, in its moral and national sense, over the Lebanese victims, over the destroyed homes and villages, over Israel's crimes, without any real guarantee for Lebanon or for the return of people to their villages,” she wrote on X .
“We had hoped for better from the Lebanese authorities, even at the level of language. We were waiting for a discourse that preserves the minimum dignity of the people, calls out the Israeli crime by its name, and refuses to turn the south into a security testing ground between Tel Aviv, Washington, and Hezbollah.”
Hijazi said that Nabih Berri, the Speaker of Parliament and a Hezbollah ally, had signalled Hezbollah's readiness for an immediate ceasefire and simultaneous Israeli withdrawal, and that sidelining him was a costly procedural mistake.
“The Lebanese negotiator could have raised the ceiling of his conditions had President Aoun involved Speaker Berri more significantly in the process,” he said.
But for political writer and analyst Marwan El-Amin, the Washington framework was simply the best option available to a state with no better cards to play.
“The Lebanese state has used this diplomatic track to reclaim sovereignty over its political decision-making and separate the Lebanese track from the Iranian one, so that Lebanon would not remain merely a negotiating card in Tehran's hands,” he said.
Still, the problem is enforcing the deal. “President Aoun made a deliberate decision not to confront Hezbollah militarily. This means Lebanon is not capable of enforcing what it committed to in Washington,” Sbeiti said, "particularly given the political cover that the Amal movement provides to Hezbollah and the absence of any popular Shia opposition to the party's armed presence.” Disarmament , El-Amin said, means applying the constitution and the law to a group that has placed itself outside of it.
“Hezbollah’s military setbacks had delivered its own constituents nothing but humiliation and displacement,” and predicted that its popularity would pay the price.
Hezbollah does not recognise the deal’s terms as binding. Secretary-General Naim Qassem said the negotiations violate Lebanon’s sovereignty and commit to “implementing the American-Israeli agenda in Lebanon.”
According to Hijazi, Hezbollah's public rejection of the agreement's terms renders it dead on arrival. He describes it as “an unsuccessful understanding” whose unbalanced formulation makes it impossible to implement, whether politically or on the ground. Hezbollah weakened but not finished Amid the stalemate, there’s an uncomfortable possibility - that the Washington framework, designed ostensibly to diminish Hezbollah's military role, may in practice accelerate its political rehabilitation.
The paradox is not lost on anyone. Hezbollah remains, in the eyes of a significant part of the Lebanese public, the only force that has ever practically stood between Lebanon and Israeli military power - a fact no diplomatic framework has been able to erase.
Sbeiti points out that the agreement serves, in its first phase, a tactical need for Hezbollah by consolidating the ceasefire and securing the return of displaced populations.
“Hezbollah has no objection to the Lebanese Army entering south of the Litani,” he said. “It sees it as an opportunity to give its fighters a rest, regroup, rearm through alternative channels, and reposition itself for the next phase.”
Contrarily, for El-Amin, no Lebanese state can exist alongside a parallel armed force. “The fundamental element of any state is its monopoly over the use of violence and the bearing of arms,” he said, adding that the Lebanese people had become “hostages to Hezbollah and the Iranian project.”
“It was legitimacy that liberated the land and diplomacy that stopped the fire,” El-Amin said, striking at the heart of Hezbollah's foundational narrative. “When the Lebanese state can protect its territory through international law and diplomatic leverage, the armed wing becomes harder to justify.”
El-Amin also warned that Hezbollah may move to sabotage the agreement to preserve its leverage. “The party may seek militarily to undermine the agreement in order to retain its influence,” he said, placing Nabih Berri and the Lebanese government before a decisive test.
“Either oblige Hezbollah to dismantle its military apparatus and become a political party under the law or face a move by the party that would give Benjamin Netanyahu a free hand to destroy what remains of Lebanon,” El-Amin said.
Underlying all three analyses is a shared recognition that the decisive variable lies outside Lebanon entirely. And for all their differences, Sbeiti, Hijazi and El-Amin share one conclusion. Disarmament by force or through government decisions on paper is a political illusion.
“The Lebanese and Iranian fronts cannot be separated,” Sbeiti said, meaning any disarmament scenario is structurally dependent on Tehran's consent.
According to El-Amin, Hezbollah’s arms are not a Lebanese security asset in any conventional sense.
“Hezbollah will not hand over its weapons by a decision from the Lebanese government as long as Tehran sees those weapons as its forward line of defence and its cards of regional power in negotiations with the United States,” he said.
Hijazi argued that the decisive negotiations are not even happening in Beirut. “The ceasefire and the larger settlements are being negotiated in Washington and Tehran, not in Beirut,” he said.
Hezbollah, Sbeiti said, is prepared to bear the cost of the war while waiting for what he described as its fundamental goal.
“The ceasefire is structurally linked to the broader regional settlement between Tehran and Washington,” he said. “Hezbollah is waiting for an agreement between Iran and America - that is the real prize.” Alaa Sarhal is a Lebanese journalist This article is published in collaboration with Egab Edited by Charlie Hoyle