The last time Lebanon and Israel signed an American-brokered agreement, it took less than a year to die.
The 17 May Agreement of 1983 ended the state of war between the two countries, set out mutual recognition of sovereignty, and laid down a timetable for Israeli forces to withdraw from the country they had invaded the year before.
That deal did not survive the test of time. Israeli negotiators had added a clause that their troops would leave only once Syrian forces left too, and Syria, which had never sat at the table, simply refused.
The clause handed Damascus a veto over the whole arrangement, and Damascus used it. Beirut abrogated the deal within 10 months, and Israel stayed in the south for another 16 years .
It was an almost unachievable clause, and history is repeating itself in 2026.
The framework Israel and Lebanon signed in Washington on 26 June carries the same feature that killed its predecessor. Israeli withdrawal is once again tied to a condition Beirut cannot deliver on its own, according to some Lebanese analysts.
Under the leaked text of the framework's security annex, the Lebanese army must move into designated villages in the south, clear out Hezbollah's weapons and infrastructure, and pass an assessment by a committee that includes Israel and the United States, before Israel will consider withdrawing from the ground around them.
The soldiers sent into the cleared zones are described as "highly qualified" Lebanese Armed Forces personnel. Whether that implies extra vetting or training is unclear, though it is not understood to point directly to the army's elite Ranger Regiment.
The first “pilot zones” slated for an Israeli withdrawal include Zawtar Gharbieh, sitting north of the Litani in the shadow of Beaufort Castle, its buildings wrecked and its people gone. The soldiers there hold positions around the town without having taken it.
Further south, across the river, the second zone covers Froun and Ghandourieh. Neither was in Israeli hands when the framework was signed, as residents and security officials are quick to note.
That detail sits at the heart of a debate that has divided Lebanese military analysts and political observers since the formula emerged from Washington-brokered negotiations.
One camp reads the pilot zones as the only available path to extracting any Israeli withdrawal, underwritten by an unusually direct level of American engagement. The other camp reads it as a mechanism designed to manufacture Lebanese failure and provide legal cover for a prolonged conditional occupation . Pilot zones: The army's impossible task Retired Brigadier General Bassam Yassin, former head of Lebanon's delegation to the indirect maritime border negotiations with Israel, explains that the Lebanese army is asked to enter areas that are not directly occupied, to conduct extensive search operations for weapons caches, tunnels, and equipment, and to dismantle Hezbollah's infrastructure, under the direct monitoring of an international committee in which the United States and Israel take part.
“This mechanism was designed to produce an inevitable and direct clash between the Lebanese army and Hezbollah,” he tells The New Arab , pointing to the fact that the movement regards unoccupied villages as areas where it retains the right to maintain military readiness for as long as Israeli forces hold the forward line and have not withdrawn. “In fact, Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc has stated publicly that disarming in these areas serves the occupation,” he continued.
He adds that when the Lebanese army refrains from entering a bloody confrontation with Hezbollah to remove the weapons by force, Israel will take this "failure" as an overt pretext to shirk its commitments and announce the suspension of the pilot zones project, holding onto the vast areas it has occupied in the south and covered by the terms of the agreement signed in Washington. Withdrawal on Israel's terms Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has sought to shield the army from its critics, dismissing the periodic "campaigns of doubt and slander" aimed at it as something that would dent neither its work nor the trust of the country's leadership. A former army chief himself, Aoun directed the remark to the man who now holds that post, General Rodolphe Haykal, who had recently come back from Britain and Turkey after days of talks with defence officials in both NATO states.
Aoun credited the military with holding the state together, from extending its authority and guarding the borders to keeping the peace at home.
The two met Admiral Brad Cooper on Monday. As head of Central Command and the officer directing the American war with Iran, Cooper is the most senior US commander in the region, and he is expected to steer the opening phase of the framework that Beirut and Tel Aviv agreed on the previous week.
He crossed into Lebanon from Israel to work through how Hezbollah's disarmament in the pilot zones will be tracked and confirmed.
However, despite these strides, a Lebanese military official said on Tuesday that Israel has signalled to Beirut that vacating the two designated pilot zones held by its troops will not happen quickly, a delay that would push back the agreement's implementation.
According to Lebanese military expert Saeed Qazah, the reason why he feels optimistic about this deal, despite Israeli delays, is that American engagement in this phase is qualitatively different from any previous international involvement, closer in character to the 2005 pressure that ended the Syrian military presence.
“The pilot zones sit between the Yellow Line to the south and the Litani to the north,” he added. “From its positions above the line, Israel would monitor whether the Lebanese army had succeeded in clearing the zone below before deciding whether to pull back at all.”
He also believes that the current Washington process is an attempt to secure arrangements that protect Lebanese rights and authority, comparing it favourably to what he describes as the capitulation terms of the November 2024 Hochstein understanding. But political analyst and writer Qassem Qasir does not share the same optimism. In fact, he sees the framework as something that is “structurally sinister”.
“The security annex attached to the Washington framework grants Israel the legal right to re-enter areas at will if it determines that the Lebanese army has failed in its disarmament task,” he told The New Arab .
“Israel and the United States together hold the authority to decide whether the army has passed or failed. If the army declines to force a confrontation with Hezbollah, Israel declares failure and retains its positions. If the army attempts the operation and Hezbollah resists, a domestic military confrontation begins. Either way, Israel stays.”
Yassin draws the contrast with what Lebanon had historically demanded, which was full Israeli withdrawal to the international border, followed immediately by Lebanese army deployment. The current formula reverses that sequence entirely.
"Lebanon went alone with to deal with America and Israel," he says, "believing this would stop the war and achieve the domestic desire to remove Hezbollah's weapons, without understanding the consequences of separating from the regional umbrella."
That regional umbrella refers to what analysts call the Islamabad track, the Iran-US negotiating channel in which a 60-day framework for full Israeli withdrawal had been under discussion, extendable month by month alongside progress in broader regional talks. Yassin argues Lebanon's decision to pursue a separate track with Washington has given Israel a signed document it can use to manoeuvre, stay on the land, and pursue three strategic objectives simultaneously.
These include remaining in commanding positions in the south under the cover of the pilot zones framework , pushing Lebanon toward a path that lays the groundwork for a permanent peace agreement, and imposing full Hezbollah disarmament as a precondition for any sovereign step. The next phase: Three paths ahead Yassin and Qasir converge on the view that the pilot zones agreement was structured not to be implemented. Both argue that the parties who designed it understand the Lebanese army's national constraints and know it will not allow itself to be used as a tool of Israeli strategy while occupation forces remain on Lebanese soil.
Defence Minister Israel Katz has himself described the pilot programme as the first of three possible stages, with the army estimating some 2,500 Hezbollah fighters still to be cleared from the south. That assessment produces three scenarios for the period ahead. In the first, the conditional testing formula collapses, and Israeli forces find themselves pinned in their forward positions below the Yellow Line , giving Hezbollah the conditions to reorganise, conduct targeted guerrilla operations and raise the human and material cost of the occupation until Israel withdraws under pressure. “The second is that Israel declares the agreement failed, announces its cancellation and resumes wide military operations to expand its zone of control, returning the south to open-ended war,” Qasir says.
In the third, the south enters a tense frozen status quo in which Israel holds its advanced positions, the Lebanese army refrains from village searches, and both sides wait for the outcome of the larger Washington-Tehran negotiating track, which Qasir describe as the only framework with the regional weight to untie the knot. Whichever scenario arrives, according to Qasir, the outcome for Israel is the same. “It stays on the ground, and it holds and waits for Lebanon to fail a test it wrote.” Alaa Sarhal is a Lebanese journalist This story is produced in collaboration with Egab Edited by Charlie Hoyle