On Saturday, Aug. 9, the Lebanese army announced that six Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) soldiers had been killed in southern Lebanon while they were dismantling a Hezbollah weapons depot in the Tyre region.
The Lebanese army said that an investigation is underway to determine the cause of the incident. The specifics aren’t known, but the root of the problem is clear: Hezbollah’s illegal arsenal, estimated by some reports to still include tens of thousands of rockets in south Lebanon.
The incident came alongside a decision by the Lebanese government to begin the process of disarming the Iran-backed Shiite paramilitary organization, a move that has been backed by the U.S. government.
The LAF has been working in partnership with peacekeepers from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to dismantle Hezbollah’s paramilitary infrastructure in southern Lebanon in accordance with the cease-fire deal Hezbollah signed with Israel late last year.
However, despite signing an agreement that would mandate its disarmament, as the group also agreed to do many years ago under U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, signed in 2006, Hezbollah is refusing to cooperate, claiming the move favors Israeli interests.
Hezbollah has repeated the pattern of 2006. It uses Lebanese soil to conduct attacks on the state of Israel, triggering a war with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that it then proceeds to lose. It signs an agreement acknowledging that it has been defeated and agrees to surrender its arms, then once the international attention has died down, it refuses to disarm and then threatens violence against any part of the Lebanese state that tries to hold it to account.
The destruction wrought upon Lebanon by Israel as a result of these conflagrations has been severe and devastating. It cannot be blamed solely on Israel, as belligerent, extreme, and disproportionate as its response has been. Ordinary Lebanese are paying the cost of rebuilding their country again, after reaping the destruction sown by an Iranian proxy.
Late last year I wrote that Hezbollah was once again trying to portray its defeat as a victory, and that—after losing so much of its rank and file, its senior military and political leadership, and the land bridge from Iran to Lebanon via Iraq and Syria—the Lebanese government must move to forcibly disarm Hezbollah. As weak as the government is, it is the only force that can take Hezbollah’s knife away from the public’s throat.
Since then, things have moved in the right direction, following the election of Joseph Aoun as president and former International Court of Justice President Nawaf Salam as prime minister. Both men have made the disarmament of Hezbollah central to their policy platform. The tragic death of Lebanese troops carrying out those orders are yet further proof that this Lebanese government is serious about disarmament.
Iran immediately moved to condemn the policy, with Ali Akbar Velayati, an advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling the disarmament of Hezbollah “a dream that won’t come true.”
Despite the Lebanese Foreign Ministry condemning those remarks as “blatant and unacceptable interference” from Tehran, Iran’s newly appointed national security chief, Ali Larijani, was welcomed in Beirut on Aug. 13 for talks with the Lebanese government, including Aoun, who reportedly reiterated Beirut’s position that the Lebanese government rejects any foreign interference in its internal affairs.
Aoun’s administration has demonstrated that it has the political will to follow through on its policy of the Lebanese state having a “monopoly on arms” within Lebanon’s borders, but the road to achieving it will be long, difficult, and potentially painful for Lebanon. Hezbollah will not give up its power, backed by violence, easily.
As Salam bluntly said: “The disarmament of Hezbollah is the goal, not the starting point.”
As the Lebanese government moves to disarm Hezbollah, Hezbollah has ramped up the political pressure on Beirut. The Hezbollah think tank Consultative Center for Studies and Documentation has recently put out a poll that claims to show a majority of Lebanese opposing the disarmament of Hezbollah (58 percent) without a coherent national defense strategy.
Yet even this poll implies that Lebanese are willing to support disarmament as long as the country’s national security interests are put first. Before Oct. 7, 2023, Hezbollah was widely considered the world’s most heavily armed and well-trained non-state actor. Its military power exceeded that of many regional states, and through its patron, Iran, and its ally in Damascus, Hezbollah had become a dominant force in the Levant.
Despite all of this, even at the very height of Hezbollah’s power, it could not prevent Israel from the military campaign it conducted on Lebanese soil, both aerially and on the ground. It could not prevent the assassination of its leader, it could not prevent the occupation of Lebanese territory by the IDF, and it could not prevent the pager and walkie-talkie bombings that left thousands of its rank-and-file militants, and others caught in the blasts, suffering from life-changing injuries.
Hezbollah has been nothing but a catastrophe for the Lebanese people. Hezbollah’s hoarding of explosive material has already resulted in Lebanon’s worst-ever disaster, and not a single person has yet been held to account for the 218 people that were killed in the blast. Lebanon has suffered enough for Hezbollah’s ambitions. Enough is enough.
The Lebanese government must be under no illusions as to the dangerous path it is now treading. Hezbollah has already assassinated one former prime minister, Rafic Hariri, and it will likely strike at the state again.
But the status quo cannot hold. Neither Israel nor Iran is going anywhere, and the Lebanese government will have to find a way to govern as an independent and sovereign nation-state alongside both, or it risks its total destruction as a permanent de facto staging ground for a war between Iran and Israel.
The Lebanese people deserve a better future than this. The international community should provide the Lebanese government and LAF all the support they need to dismantle Hezbollah once and for all. The failure to do so will inevitably lead to even more bloodshed.