1 week Ago By National Post View
The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah that went into effect Wednesday morning represents a massive strategic victory for the Jewish state. Two weeks before Israeli troops invaded Lebanon on Oct. 1 — a response to near-daily rocket fire from Hezbollah that began a year earlier — Israel’s war cabinet made the “safe return of the residents of the north to their homes” an official war goal .
If the ceasefire agreement brokered by the United States and France holds over the coming weeks and months, that goal will have been achieved. But the magnitude of Israel’s strategic victory extends far beyond the promise of a return to normality in northern Israel — it represents a defeat of Hezbollah at the hands of Jerusalem’s cunning military and intelligence apparatus. In the lead-up to the invasion, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah terrorists detonated , in a meticulously planned and co-ordinated attack that took Israeli intelligence agencies years to develop.
The next day, hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies exploded, as well. In one fell swoop, Israel managed to kill dozens and wound thousands of terrorists, leaving the jihadist organization in chaos as Israeli troops prepared for a full-scale assault on Hezbollah’s infrastructure. In the weeks that followed, the Israel Defense Forces systematically destroyed Hezbollah’s weapons caches, dismantled its tunnel network and took out many of its top commanders and officials, including the group’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Hezbollah estimates as many as 4,000 terrorists may have been killed. The IDF believes it destroyed upwards of “80 per cent of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal within a range of up to 40 kilometres.” And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that Israel has “set it back decades.
” To be sure, this diplomatic breakthrough did not happen in a vacuum. Months of U.S.
-led diplomacy to put an end to Hezbollah’s incessant assaults on Israel failed until the terror group was weakened to such an extent that it had little choice but to crawl behind the Litani River with its tail between its legs. In the process, Jerusalem has reestablished its reputation as a formidable military power with sophisticated intelligence-gathering capabilities, after taking a severe hit following Hamas’s surprise October 7 massacre, and Iran has lost its primary means of deterring Israel. An easing of tensions on its northern border will also help alleviate pressure on the IDF, which has been fighting a multi-front war for over a year, and allow Israel’s military and political leaders to focus their attention on bringing an end to the war in Gaza and their broader struggle against Tehran.
The ceasefire agreement does, however, come with significant risk, and many questions remain as to how effective it will be, which is why Israeli society, including displaced residents of the north, is so bitterly divided over it. For starters, the new agreement is little more than a re-commitment to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 , which ended the 2006 Lebanese war but failed to prevent Hezbollah from stationing arms and fighters in southern Lebanon. It also relies solely on Lebanon’s army, which is far weaker than Hezbollah, and its government, which includes Hezbollah’s political wing, to enforce the agreement.
But it does come with a commitment from the United States and France to work within the Military Technical Committee for Lebanon to help the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) “achieve such an increase in its deployment levels in Lebanon, and to improve its capabilities.” The Americans and the French will also work within an enhanced “tripartite mechanism” to “monitor, verify and assist in ensuring enforcement” of the deal. Together, these two bodies will work to “strengthen the capacity and training of the LAF to inspect and dismantle unauthorized sites and infrastructure, above and below ground, confiscate unauthorized weapons and prevent the presence of unauthorized armed groups.
” How effective this will be remains to be seen. Optimally, Hezbollah would dismantle its military wing and hand its weapons over to the state, but the terror group’s leadership has vowed to continue their “resistance” against Israel. It will thus be up to Lebanon’s notoriously weak and financially insecure government to oversee the “disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon,” as Resolution 1701 calls for.
U.S. President Joe Biden has already said that America will not station troops in Lebanon, and questions remain as to how keen the incoming Trump administration will be to provide assistance to the LAF.
The risk is that if the Lebanese military does not have the ability to disarm Hezbollah, or cannot be trusted to do so, and the international community fails to ensure the agreement is being properly enforced, as it has done for nearly two decades, the terror group will merely use this as an opportunity to rebuild and rearm, and put itself in a position to threaten Israel’s security in the future. To help ensure that doesn’t happen, the international community must play an active role in supporting Lebanon, holding it accountable and preventing Iran from financing and arming its terrorist proxy. This is a burden that cannot be left to Israel alone if there’s any hope for a lasting peace, because we know the Israelis will no longer tolerate genocidal terrorist organizations camping out along their borders.
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