Israeli military achievements that delivered a crushing blow to Hizbollah. Reservists worn out by more than a year of fighting. Stores of arms beginning to dwindle. Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Many factors fed into Benjamin Netanyahu’s eventual decision to take up a US-brokered ceasefire and stop Israel’s offensive in Lebanon. His war aims against Hizbollah were also always more modest than the “total victory” he has sought against Hamas in Gaza.
But in confronting the many domestic critics of the deal — including far-right government ministers, northern Israeli mayors, and opposition figures — Netanyahu calculated that his goals had been largely met, while the risks of pushing on were mounting.
“Hizbollah is not Hamas. We cannot totally destroy it. It was not on the cards,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu who now works at Washington think-tank Jinsa. “Lebanon is too big. Hizbollah is too strong.”
This ceasefire deal “is not the dream that many Israelis had”, he said. But Amidror highlighted Israel’s dwindling munition stockpiles and the “pressure” on military reservists who had been fighting for months. “Israel cannot afford another year of war” at its current scale in the north, he said.
Israeli officials consistently said their goal was the safe return to their homes of the tens of thousands of northern residents evacuated after Hizbollah began firing on Israel following Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack.
Officials said this would require pushing Hizbollah fighters back from the Israel-Lebanon frontier and changing the “security reality” along the border.
After months of relatively limited exchanges of cross-border fire with Hizbollah, Israel escalated in September, setting off thousands of explosive pagers and walkie-talkies in an audacious covert operation, launching waves of air strikes across Lebanon, and initiating a punishing land invasion of its northern neighbour for the first time in nearly two decades.
In the span of a few weeks, most of Hizbollah’s leaders, including chief Hassan Nasrallah, were killed, and much of the group’s vast missile and rocket arsenal was destroyed. Israeli warplanes struck Beirut at will, and ground troops ranged across southern Lebanon.
Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
Tamir Hayman, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who now heads the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said “the military success has been exceptional”.
Israel’s ground campaign resulted in the “systematic destruction” of Hizbollah positions — bunkers, weapons caches, and firing positions — in the border region, he said, making it safer for Israeli residents to return to their homes and a ceasefire deal worth seizing.
But the offensive came at a devastating cost to Lebanon. Broad swaths of the south and east were destroyed by Israeli bombardment. More than 3,700 people, including an unknown number of combatants, were killed in Lebanon, the majority since September, and more than 1mn were displaced from their homes.
The ceasefire deal is based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last Israel-Hizbollah war in 2006 but was never fully implemented. Hayman called the newly concluded agreement a “tightened” version of the old accord.
Both the Israeli military and Hizbollah fighters are due to withdraw from south Lebanon, to be replaced by the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers. A reinforced US-led international monitoring mechanism is meant to raise alarms regarding any violations.
Senior Israeli officials have already made clear that they will take matters into their own hands and strike Hizbollah inside Lebanon again if the militant group violates the deal. Indeed, as part of the overall ceasefire agreement, the US provided Israel with a separate “side letter” codifying a certain degree of Israeli freedom to act militarily, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“Hizbollah will be in violation of the agreement not only if it fires on us. It will be in violation of the agreement if it obtains weapons to fire at us in the future,” Netanyahu said in a recorded video message on Tuesday. “And we will respond forcefully to any violation.”
A small girl is carried as people shelter from air strikes at the entrance of the American University of Beirut Medical Center © Ed Ram/Getty Images
For Israeli officials, however, the real strategic prize in the ceasefire may be the prospect of a realignment inside Lebanon itself.
“It used to be that Hizbollah was stronger than the state of Lebanon, but it’s now extremely weak,” Hayman said. “This is a big opportunity for the state to recalibrate the balance between the (various internal) forces and confessions . . . and break Iran and Hizbollah’s power over the state.”
According to two people with knowledge of Israeli government deliberations, US domestic politics played a critical role in the timing and substance of the agreement.
“The war wasn’t going to last for ever. Trump wanted to end it, and (Netanyahu) was cognisant of that,” said one person.
The initial 60-day ceasefire implementation period bridges the end of President Joe Biden’s spell in office until the staunchly pro-Israel Trump is inaugurated.
“(Netanyahu) was aware that without a deal you could see the Biden administration take certain ‘unpopular steps’ against Israel, including at the UN Security Council,” the second person said.
As with much of Netanyahu’s animating impulses over the past year, domestic politics also played a central role in the long-serving leader’s willingness to strike a deal.
Despite their opposition, Netanyahu’s far-right political allies have not threatened to topple the government over a ceasefire in Lebanon — in contrast to their vows over the past year to do so if he struck a deal in Gaza.
Unlike with Hizbollah, a deal with Hamas would probably require the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and the end of the Jewish ultranationalist dream of resettling Gaza.
“Netanyahu can do this deal for precisely the reasons he can’t do the Hamas deal,” said Aaron David Miller, a former senior US diplomat now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Indeed, for Israeli strategists, perhaps the most important aspect of the deal is that Hizbollah, in agreeing to stop fighting, has severed the direct link it made with Hamas at the outset of the war, when it began firing in “solidarity” with the Gaza-based group and vowed to continue until fighting in the enclave ended.
According to Amidror, who is still considered close to Netanyahu, Iran’s regional “axis of resistance” now lies in ruins. “There is now no connection between the two fronts, and from Israel’s point of view that is an important success,” he said.
Amidror said that with the so-called northern front resolved, Israel could again turn much of its ground forces and other military assets southward again to Gaza in a bid to finally “smash” Hamas.
Recommended
And Israeli officials close to Netanyahu contend that with the lack of Hizbollah’s support, Hamas may be more likely to cave to Israel’s conditions for a more favourable ceasefire-for-hostages deal.
“With Hizbollah out of the picture, Hamas is left on its own,” Netanyahu said on Tuesday. “We will increase our pressure on Hamas and that will help us in our sacred mission of releasing our hostages.”
Israeli defence officials, foreign diplomats, and western analysts remain sceptical, however.
“I do not believe this is going to somehow open the magic door to Gaza,” Miller added.
Additional reporting by Felicia Schwartz in Washington
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings