The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon, or rather between Israel and Hezbollah, which went into effect on the morning of November 27, could not have been reached without Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's realization that there was little point in further warfare on the Lebanese front. What Israel was able to achieve from the attack on Lebanon was already achieved in two months of multifaceted targeting; in order to make greater progress on the ground, Israel had to pay a high price. In terms of aerial bombardment, there are no longer any appreciable number of targets that can add up to tangible gains in the military campaign against Hezbollah's assets or cadres.
Hezbollah, which took massive blows at the beginning of the Israeli campaign, has come to a similar realization that prolonging the war will not make any qualitative leap in its achievements on the ground, or in its use of rockets and drones to inflict casualties on Israeli positions and economies in northern and central Israel. But there are other reasons behind Hezbollah's acceptance of negotiating under fire (something it refused to do at the beginning of the war), or agreeing to an agreement whose provisions are tilted in favor of the Israelis. The most important of these reasons is undoubtedly the Iranian position and Syrian indifference to the fate of Hezbollah.
Implementation of the agreement actually began on November 27, and in the next few weeks it is not expected to face major setbacks. However, because the interim period between the entry into force of the agreement and the parties' implementation of their respective obligations is already long, and the agreement was written with a degree of ambiguity, the future of the permanent ceasefire hangs in the balance.
Why is an agreement possible?
Israel opened its attack on Lebanon with an intelligence operation on September 17 that blew up thousands of portable pagers used by Hezbollah operatives and cadres as they moved out of their positions. During the following days of September, before the IDF launched the ground offensive along the Lebanese-Israeli border, Israeli intelligence succeeded in blowing up thousands more walkie-talkies, assassinating Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, assassinating the head of Hezbollah's Executive Council, Hashem Safieddine, who was considered the second most important leader after Nasrallah, and carrying out assassinations in Lebanon and Syria of other prominent military and political leaders of Hezbollah.
The Israeli government has declared that the official goal of the military operation in Lebanon is to secure the villages and towns in northern Israel, which since late 2023 have been under constant bombardment from Hezbollah and have become uninhabitable and unlivable. However, whether in Netanyahu's statements or those of other ministers in his government, Israeli officials have made no secret that the war on Lebanon is aimed at eliminating Hezbollah's military capabilities and political influence, thereby changing the security-strategic climate surrounding the Jewish state.
However, once operations began on the ground towards the villages and towns of the Lebanese border strip, the Israeli forces began to face tangible difficulties. Hezbollah had quickly restored cohesion to its leadership structure after the painful campaign of assassinations of its political and military leaders, and its units in the areas of engagement showed solid resistance, resulting in tangible losses to the soldiers and equipment of the advancing Israeli units. As a result, the Israeli advance in the south stalled, and plans for a large-scale invasion towards the Litani River were changed to attempts to penetrate in limited axes, mainly by special forces, backed by massive artillery shelling and indiscriminate air strikes. Outside southern Lebanon, particularly in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and Tyre, Israel relied on aerial bombardment, avoiding large landings.
By mid-November 2024, uncertainties surrounding Israel's military operation in Lebanon had accumulated. First: Because its achievements were limited after the resounding intelligence successes in September; and because attempting to make further progress meant more Israeli losses. Second: It became clear that Israel's ground and air attacks against what the Israelis thought were Hezbollah's military assets, which reached the limit of their reach, had little effect on the volume and quality of Hezbollah's daily rocket and marching attacks on northern and central Israel. And third: Because the Americans apparently warned Netanyahu that they would not be able to veto a draft resolution calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon that he was planning to submit to the Security Council. Lebanon, after all, is viewed differently by the United States and the wider Atlantic West than the Gaza Strip; already a Western sphere of influence, its internal political equation should be rebalanced, not destroyed.
For all these reasons, the Israeli leadership agreed to launch a new round of negotiations to reach a ceasefire agreement on the Lebanese front. In all likelihood, the US Special Envoy for Lebanon's latest round would not have begun without an Israeli request.
Hezbollah, for its part, has reached a similar point, albeit for different reasons than those that prompted the Israelis to accept the idea of a ceasefire. The war has taken a heavy toll on Hezbollah's command structure, with losses in its fighting forces that are now difficult to estimate. Hezbollah is believed to have lost as many as 4,000 fighters in the southern battles, as a result of Israeli aerial bombardment. The Israeli attacks certainly hit military storage and manufacturing sites, whether in Dahiya and Bekaa, or in various areas in Syria, in addition to the widespread destruction of Hezbollah's economic, financial, social and service infrastructure. Most impactfully, the Israeli attacks caused widespread destruction in Lebanon as a whole, especially in the party's popular incubator areas in the south, Dahiya, and Bekaa, with an estimated 100,000 homes partially or completely destroyed across Lebanon.
Equally important is the fact that, despite the enormous resistance it faced, the IDF did manage to make progress, albeit limited, in the ground penetration axes in the south. Because the IDF was quick to change its tactics, its losses declined significantly in most of the axes of engagement during the second month of the ground operation.
In terms of aerial exchanges, the losses inflicted by Hezbollah's rockets and marches in Israel have been limited and have not added much to the displacement of residents of towns and settlements in northern Israel. To increase the cost of the war on the Israeli side, Hezbollah had to resort to another qualitative level of rockets and drones and expand the scope of the Israeli target area. But such a development would have led to a parallel development in the scope of Israeli attacks on Lebanon, thus destroying the infrastructure of the Lebanese state and inflicting enormous losses on the country. This is in addition to the pressure on Hezbollah from Iran, which has made it no secret that it has adopted a policy of de-escalation.
Iran: De-escalation and Losses
The ceasefire agreement was not only negotiated between Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Israel, but Iran was an integral part of the contacts that produced the agreement. The United States, which acted as mediator, is believed to have indirectly exchanged messages with Tehran throughout the negotiating process. Hezbollah's relationship with Iran is no secret, and the Americans know that Hezbollah would not have accepted an agreement on the end of the war on its Lebanese front without Iranian approval.
Iran has unwillingly become a party to the war since its outbreak in October 2023, mainly due to Israel's accusations that Iran supports the Palestinian resistance, Hezbollah's support for the Gaza Strip, and Netanyahu's desire to exploit the state of war in the Middle East to undermine Iran's nuclear program. However, the Iranians tried from the beginning to distance themselves and avoid turning their territory into the epicenter of an expanding conflict, the extent of which would be difficult to control. Iran responded to the assassination of Hamas bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh with a composite strike of missiles and drones. Israel responded with a limited response. Iran launched a larger composite strike involving hypersonic missiles. Israel struck again, affecting multiple Iranian sites, including one of the nuclear program sites. Iran promised a response but seems to have postponed it or decided to retract its previous threats to retaliate altogether.
Taking into account the repeated American assurance to defend Israel, Israeli threats to Syria and Iraq, and the leaked American request for Iran to leave Syria, Tehran found that continuing the war in Lebanon opens the door to all kinds of risks to its regional status and even to Iranian territory itself. Iran may have also assessed that the Israeli military operation in Lebanon has inflicted tangible losses on Hezbollah and its popular support, and that the continuation of the war, regardless of the costs borne by Israel, may lead to the political weakening of Hezbollah and perhaps even its complete neutralization in the Lebanese political arena and the determination of Lebanon's future.
The Iranians were not oblivious to the indifference of their ally Assad in Damascus and the rumored intelligence leaks by the Assad regime's services regarding Hezbollah and Iranian positions and the Shiite militias that Iran brought into Syria. In Lebanon, even before the start of the Israeli military operation, some of the most prominent voices known to be associated with the Assad regime rushed to criticize Hezbollah, Iran, and the way the confrontation with Israel was managed. In the few weeks before the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon, three senior Iranian officials, including the Iranian army chief of staff, visited Damascus, seemingly in an effort to energize the Syrian position and secure the necessary support for Hezbollah. But it is unclear whether Iranian pressure led to any tangible change in the Syrian position.
The most important factor in determining the nature of the Iranian position and Tehran's support for the Lebanon ceasefire agreement was certainly Trump's victory in the US presidential election and the announcement of the candidates to fill the national security and foreign policy positions in his administration, a number of whom are dedicated adversaries of Iran. Not only did Tehran extend lines of communication with Trump's inner circle, but in a significant reversal of its previous position, it officially announced its willingness to negotiate a new nuclear agreement, replacing the one signed with the Obama administration and canceled by Trump in his first presidency.
What the Iranians are trying to show, in other words, is that they are unwilling to escalate or widen the scope of the war, that they are pushing for the end of the war and the containment of instability in the regional neighborhood, in agreement with the approach that Trump claims will establish his policy in the Middle East, and above all that they are even willing to renegotiate their nuclear program.
Agreement and its risks
None of the parties, not even the U.S. mediator, published an official text of the agreement. However, it is likely that the text published by the Israeli media and unofficially circulated in Lebanese circles is correct or closely related to the official text. This text, which is referred to as the ceasefire agreement on the Lebanese front, is devoid of a number of other conditions that were agreed upon and may have been put in writing between the Americans and the Lebanese, on the one hand, and the Americans and the Israelis, on the other.
Part of these conditions concerns the Lebanese negotiator's agreement to elect a president no more than three months after the ceasefire goes into effect, regardless of whether the elected president is Hezbollah and its allies' candidate or not. In other words, Hezbollah and its allies must stop sabotaging the Lebanese parliament's session for the election of the president, which the party has resorted to over the past two years whenever it became clear that its presidential candidate failed to achieve a parliamentary majority. The other was that the Lebanese negotiator agreed to the renewal of the army commander and the heads of the Lebanese security services. What happened, of course, was that the renewal of the army commander and the heads of the security services did indeed take place, and Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament and Hezbollah's main ally who led the ceasefire negotiations, announced a session to elect a president immediately after the end of the Christmas and New Year's holidays.
As for the understanding between the United States and Israel, it is likely that it included guarantees from the American side to allow Israel to continue to address any threat from Lebanon that the Lebanese army fails to address, and an American pledge of intelligence cooperation with Israel to protect it from any future threat from Lebanon or Syria. The Lebanese side was not given a copy of this agreement, and the US administration did not even acknowledge its existence, although Israeli and American media circles confirmed that the Israelis would not have signed the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon without it, especially since the Israelis wanted to include this pledge in the ceasefire agreement but were surprised by the categorical refusal of the Lebanese negotiator.
Otherwise, the ceasefire agreement was framed as a 13-point set of measures to ensure the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war but was not fully implemented by both sides. These measures relate to the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces from the area south of the Litani, including Hezbollah's military capabilities, and the expansion of the committee charged with overseeing the implementation of the agreement to include the United States and France, with a Beirut-based U.S. general heading the committee. The agreement does not contain any reference to the war in the Gaza Strip, which means that the Lebanese side, and Hezbollah in particular, has completely abandoned the linkage between the Lebanese and Gaza fronts, a linkage that originally justified the limited clash between Hezbollah and Israel in October 2023, and then the large-scale Israeli attack on Lebanon since September 2024.
However, the agreement included three vaguely worded and generalized clauses, meaning south of the Litani and all of Lebanon, that put the responsibility on the Lebanese state to carry, manufacture, transport and purchase weapons throughout Lebanon and to dismantle unofficial military infrastructure and installations. What these clauses mean, in other words, is that the Lebanese state must strip Hezbollah of its military and armament capabilities, whether these capabilities are visible, or whether information about them has been received from any of the parties to the monitoring committee for the implementation of the agreement. If this is the correct interpretation of these clauses, they must open the way for potential clashes between Hezbollah and the Lebanese army and security forces, not only in the south, but also in other areas where Hezbollah is stationed.
But this is not the only risk to the implementation of the agreement. Both major parties, Hezbollah and the Netanyahu government, see the agreement as a procedural ceasefire and implementation of Resolution 1701, not a treaty to end the state of war between Lebanon and Israel. Because the agreement provides for a sixty-day transition period before the ceasefire stabilizes, Israeli forces gradually withdraw south of the Blue Line, and the United States facilitates indirect negotiations between Israel and Lebanon to reach a recognized land border, the potential for an explosive situation remains.
Hezbollah believes that the agreement is only meant to conceal armed manifestations in the south, and because most of Hezbollah's fighters in the south are from the south, there is nothing to prevent them from living in their towns and villages, as long as their weapons and equipment are not exposed, but the agreement this time included the addition of a committee to monitor the implementation of the agreement, which was not present in the 2006 agreement, so the party may not have difficulty reconciling concealing manifestations with maintaining weapons. The Israeli side believes that it has the right to continue targeting threats and what it calls violations of the agreement. In the four days following the signing of the agreement, the Israeli military did carry out several attacks, allegedly targeting Hezbollah members or Hezbollah missile battery sites. These attacks resulted in the death of at least four Lebanese and the capture and wounding of at least ten others. The Israeli government threatened further escalation, but the co-sponsors of the agreement called for calm and authorized the committee tasked with enforcing the terms of the agreement to begin work.
An uneasy and fragile balance of deterrence
The signing of the ceasefire agreement has triggered a multivocal debate in Israel, Lebanon, and the wider regional sphere about whether the ceasefire on the Lebanese front represents a victory for Hezbollah or the Jewish state. In truth, this is a marginal question that does not take into account that the war on Lebanon is only part of a multi-front war situation; given that the agreement does not represent a definitive end to the war on its Lebanese front, it seems a very premature question.
The Netanyahu government sees the agreement as having achieved a decisive separation of Lebanon from Gaza, something Hezbollah had rejected during more than a year of war. The destruction and losses inflicted on Hezbollah will make it think twice before joining an Israeli-Iranian confrontation, should the scramble between Israel and Iran evolve into open warfare. The agreement not only separated Lebanon from Gaza, but also from Syria, so that it does not put an end to Israel's continued targeting of threats in Syria, regardless of the state of the Lebanese front. Netanyahu also estimates that if the 2006 war imposed a climate of peace between Lebanon and Israel for two decades and led Hezbollah to avoid provoking Israel in any way, the recent two-month war will impose a new peace that will last for more than two decades to come; not only because the war inflicted heavy losses on Hezbollah and its popular base, but also because neither Lebanese public opinion in general, nor even Lebanese Shia public opinion, will allow the party to drag the country into a full-scale war again.
Hezbollah believes that only its steadfastness, and not any other force, forced the Israelis to sign the ceasefire agreement, and that the war is indeed coming to an end, regardless of the limited Israeli breaches here and there. Hezbollah also believes that Netanyahu failed to achieve his main and real goal of the war, which was to destroy Hezbollah and force it to surrender. Hezbollah also believes that despite the heavy losses it suffered, its military capabilities are still intact, and the fact that it maintained the level of confrontation and engagement until the last days of the war is clear evidence that the achievements claimed by the Israelis are nothing more than illusions. Hezbollah believes that no force in the world can prevent it from rehabilitating its infrastructure and developing weapons and other military capabilities, just as no one prevented it from doing so after 2006.
Behind the controversy and differing assessments, there are a number of political variables closely related to the outbreak of the full-scale war on the Lebanese front and the end of the war. The war showed, for example, that the Axis of Resistance project was not based on solid strategic foundations, and that its image had been exaggerated from the start. Hezbollah's approach to supporting the Gaza Strip remained low-key throughout the first year of the war on Gaza; when full-scale war was imposed on the party, its allies in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria did not move to any significant degree to support its resistance and popular support. Despite Israel's failure to destroy Hezbollah and remove it completely from the Lebanese political scene, the party may be politically weakened, both within Lebanon and in the regional neighborhood, where it has played an active role in asserting and protecting Iranian influence.
What is true of Hezbollah is also true of Iran in a sense, not only because Iran has not been able to emerge as an equal counterpart to Israel, but also because its regional allies have been relatively ineffective in countering Israeli aggression. Only the Palestinian resistance has remained steadfast in its positions; but the Palestinian resistance's alliance with Iran has always been partial and temporary, and the resistance has never been an Iranian tool, nor has it expressed support for Iran's expansionist project. In the next phase, Iran may seek to further mobilize its allied armed factions in the Arab region and adopt a more hardline policy in Syria after the setbacks suffered by the Assad regime's forces in northern Syria to reaffirm its regional position and the effectiveness of its allies.
On the other hand, the war and the resulting ceasefire agreement highlighted the limits of Israeli power, and the early hopes that Netanyahu and the Israeli right had placed on the war were not borne out by the facts. The Israeli government declared that the goal of the war on Lebanon was to secure northern Israel and the return of displaced Israelis to their towns and villages in the north. In fact, the goal of the war was to destroy Hezbollah and marginalize it, if not completely eliminate it from the Lebanese political equation, thereby changing the entire security climate surrounding the State of Israel. What happened was that Netanyahu was forced to accept the ceasefire agreement without achieving any of these goals; even the return of displaced Israelis to northern occupied Palestine is still conditional on the stability and permanence of the ceasefire.
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