For nearly half a century, U.N. peacekeepers have patrolled the volatile borderlands that separate Israel from southern Lebanon — a region long dominated by the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

Now, the future of that peacekeeping force is in question.

After an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah erupted last year, the United Nations is facing pressure to disband the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL. This week, the force’s annual mandate is up for renewal.

Relations between Israel and UNIFIL have long been tense, with the United Nations accusing Israel of firing on its peacekeepers in Lebanon on numerous occasions and injuring dozens of them. With Hezbollah severely weakened, Israel says UNIFIL’s mission is obsolete.

Lebanese and European officials warn, however, that a withdrawal could imperil the already fragile cease-fire that has been in place between Israel and Hezbollah since November.

“The situation is still fragile,” Brig. Gen. Nicola Mandolesi, a senior UNIFIL commander, said during a recent patrol of border area in southern Lebanon, where towns and villages have been reduced to rubble.

About 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers are stationed in southern Lebanon as part of the mission established in 1978 during the Lebanese civil war. Over the past few decades, it has operated as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah.

With no mandate to use force except in self-defense, the peacekeepers have long drawn criticism on both sides of the border.

Hezbollah supporters view them as foreign interlopers, and sympathetic to Israel. In Israel, before the all-out war with Hezbollah, UNIFIL was considered a toothless body incapable of restraining the militant group.

“Over time, we should not need international forces in Lebanon, UNIFIL or otherwise,” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute, a research group in Washington. But the Lebanese state has not exercised full control over its territory for many years, leaving a vacuum if the peacekeeping mission were to suddenly withdraw, he added.

As diplomats debate UNIFIL’s future in New York, Israeli fighter jets routinely strafe the skies over southern Lebanon, pounding what they say are Hezbollah targets.

“We used to stop at this little shop to get something to drink or speak to the locals,” Lt. Col. Enrico Massaria, an Italian peacekeeper, said recently, as he passed by the site of an Israeli drone strike a day earlier.

“Now it’s gone,” he said.

The most recent conflict began after the Israeli invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Hezbollah started firing rockets into Israel in support of its Palestinian ally.

After nearly a year of exchanging strikes, Israel invaded southern Lebanon. Eventually, it killed much of Hezbollah’s leadership, along with thousands of fighters and civilians, and destroyed large swaths of Lebanon.

Months on from the cease-fire, much of southern Lebanon is still in ruins. There is little sign of life except for a few hollow-eyed residents sifting through the remnants of their homes, hoping that something — anything — might be salvaged from the recent war.

Trundling along a dirt road across a stretch of the border with Israel recently, a convoy of U.N. peacekeepers made its way through the rubble, steering to avoid the makeshift graves and unexploded mortar shells that peppered the roadside.

“Look — above our heads,” alerted Capt. Giuseppe Falossi, the Italian soldier leading the patrol, craning his neck to the sky.

An Israeli drone began to circle.

Roads have vanished, their asphalt shorn away by Israeli tank treads. Atop the remnants of pancaked homes, Hezbollah’s yellow flags fluttered in the breeze, planted defiantly by supporters who had returned briefly during the cease-fire — some to gather belongings, others just to bury the dead.

“Glory to the martyrs,” someone had scrawled on the wreckage.

The convoy ground to a halt at a Lebanese Army checkpoint, reduced to little more than a single-story hut and a few sheets of tarpaulin. Lt. Khalil Abdel Rida, the platoon leader of a Lebanese unit accompanying the U.N. patrol, said the checkpoint had been destroyed months earlier by an Israeli bulldozer.

Lieutenant Abdel Rida traced a line across his body, pointing to where he said he had been struck by shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell. Dozens of his comrades were killed amid the conflict, according to the military.

Under the cease-fire deal, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to withdraw from southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese military promised to deploy there with the peacekeepers’ support.

But Israel has said that Hezbollah is trying to reconstitute, and it has accused Lebanon of violating the agreement by failing to ensure the group’s withdrawal. So it has kept a handful of military positions inside Lebanon, itself a violation of the agreement. That has led Hezbollah to resist mounting international and domestic pressure to lay down its arms.

The convoy descended into a forested valley pockmarked with blackened craters that exposed smashed concrete structures and tangled electrical wiring, remnants of what appeared to be Hezbollah positions.

Meandering around an unexploded Soviet-era Katyusha rocket, long a staple in the militant group’s arsenal, the peacekeepers emerged into a clearing where another peacekeeping unit was dismantling an abandoned Israeli roadblock and sweeping for signs of explosives.

The peacekeepers are authorized to monitor and report violations of the cease-fire, but not to enforce it, said General Mandolesi, the senior UNIFIL commander. So it falls on the Lebanese military to dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, like tunnels and weapons caches, in accordance with the deal.

“The Lebanese armed forces are the key to regaining full control of southern Lebanon,” the general said.

The Italian peacekeepers scanned the roadblock before sending in their bomb detection dog, Slash, named after the lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses. They watched anxiously as he sniffed the ground, and a suspected bomb was found. It turned out to be little more than the tail fin of a mortar shell, and everyone sighed with relief.

Another patrol complete, the peacekeepers returned to base. It was an oasis of sorts, with a gym, a barbershop and even a bar serving pizza (not quite like back home, the Italians admitted).

But with the situation still on a knife edge, many peacekeepers are quietly counting the days until they can return home, as they await the United Nations’ decision.

“I have two little girls and one little boy that are waiting for me,” said Captain Falossi. “I try not to think about them worrying.”