Lebanon is everyone’s playground and peace in the region looks as elusive as ever

LONDON – Prospects for a ceasefire in the Gulf remain poor, as the United States and Iran have continued to exchange military strikes.

But in another part of the Middle East, the chances of a more peaceful outcome can improve after US President Donald Trump welcomed at the White House on July 21 Lebanese President Joseph Aoun for discussions about a withdrawal of Israeli troops from parts of Lebanon they currently occupy.

Aoun is the first Lebanese head of state to be received in Washington in two decades, in itself a diplomatic triumph for the small Middle Eastern country. And Trump received him warmly, announcing that US airline companies would soon be allowed to resume direct flights to the Lebanese capital of Beirut, a boon for Lebanon’s significant tourism industry.

But on the critical question of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, the American president remained vague. And without further clarity on this matter, the negotiation of any potential ceasefire deal between the US and Iran will be much more difficult.

Always the victim

Lebanon has always been the first victim in the confrontation between Iran and the US and Israel. The 5.3 million-strong nation used to be majority Christian, but the Christians now number not more than a third of the population, with the rest being largely Muslims, divided roughly equally between the Shiite and Sunni strands of Islam.

The bulk of the Shia Muslims live in the south of Lebanon adjacent to the border with Israel, and the Iranians have armed and funded Hezbollah, the Shiite militia which vastly outnumbers Lebanon’s own national army.

Hezbollah has always acted as Iran’s proxy, by not only shelling Israeli cities whenever that suited Iran, but also by sending fighters to neighbouring Syria, where Iran propped the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a Shia.

The Israelis repeatedly invaded Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah; in 1982 Israeli troops reached Beirut, and have occupied various parts of Lebanon for the subsequent decades.

Successive Lebanese presidents – who the country’s constitution stipulates must be Christians – and prime ministers, who by law must be Sunni Muslims, have watched helplessly as their state, of breathtaking natural beauty and once considered as the Middle East’s most developed country, was torn apart by this Iran-Israel proxy confrontation.

Matters took a different turn in late 2024, when a surprise Israeli military offensive killed all of Hezbollah’s top leadership and decimated the militia’s fighter base. Yet contrary to Israel’s expectations, the organisation survived, and in March this year it resumed its attacks on Israel.

US mediation

Trump largely ignored developments in Lebanon until June 18, when the US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to end their recent military confrontation. At Iran’s insistence, that MoU included an explicit link between the ceasefire in the Gulf and a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Trump’s decision to accept such a connection took US policy experts by surprise, since all previous US administrations rejected the idea that Iran should have a say over Lebanon’s future. And it infuriated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who remains determined to destroy Hezbollah.

To appease its critics at home and reassure Israel, the Trump administration negotiated on June 26 a framework agreement envisaging a gradual Israeli pullback from Lebanese territory, the deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in areas vacated by Israel, and the removal of Hezbollah’s weapons and infrastructure.

Characteristically, Trump hailed it as a “super deal”. But to all intents and purposes, the document is just a super-fudge. The deal does not say in which order its provisions are to be implemented, and every party reads this ambiguity to its own advantage.

Netanyahu insists there will be no withdrawal until Hezbollah is disarmed in full. Lebanese President Aoun insists, correctly under any reading of international law, that no state can be asked to surrender the means of its own defence while a foreign army sits on its ridgelines, so he claims that Israel must withdraw first.

More significantly, Hezbollah denounces the entire deal as a Lebanese capitulation, and Iran sees the agreement as another betrayal of the MoU it signed with the US.

Phased withdrawal?

To get around all these objections, the US proposed the creation of three “pilot zones” on Lebanese territory, patches of land where the LAF would be allowed to return, and prove that it can keep both Israel and Hezbollah out.

But the first pilot zones selected were never under Israeli control to begin with, so Israel “withdrew” from nothing by allowing the Lebanese army to enter them. And where the LAF did move into genuinely contested ground, its soldiers were met by obdurate Israeli troops, or boobytrapped Hezbollah houses.

So instead of becoming a confidence-building measure, the newly created pilot zones are undermining confidence even further.

While hosting Aoun at the White House, Trump offered reassurances: “The Israelis are in the process of redeploying to other sections,” he told a media gaggle assembled in the Oval Office on July 21. But when pressed by a Lebanese reporter on what evidence he can offer, Trump merely replied, “You’ll find out.”

Even if Trump succeeds in pressuring the Israelis into a real withdrawal from south Lebanon, the cruel irony remains that the LAF – “the backbone of security and stability,” as Aoun called it in Washington — does not have the power to disarm Hezbollah and is distrusted by the Shia residents of southern Lebanon.

In effect, therefore, Aoun is asking a bombed and displaced Shia population to transfer its security from the Hezbollah militia that failed to protect it to the state that also failed to protect it, all on the strength of a vague American promise.

Still, Naim Qassem, the Shia cleric who inherited the Hezbollah command, leads an organisation that remains capable of fighting but is no longer capable of dictating the terms of any deal inside Lebanon.

Aoun therefore still has a historic opportunity: for the first time since the 1980s, the Lebanese state can contemplate disarming Hezbollah because Israel has already done most of the disarming for it.

But this opportunity only exists if the United States will coerce Israel to begin withdrawing from Lebanon. And nothing suggests it will. Netanyahu faces elections in October, so he has every incentive to stall the withdrawal. And Iran has every incentive to torpedo the entire deal.

Lebanon seems set to remain everyone’s playground.