Lebanon braces for power struggle after ceasefire

Hours after a ceasefire took hold between Israel and Hizbollah on Wednesday morning, thousands of people began streaming back to their homes in areas across Lebanon that have been shattered by Israel air strikes over more than two months of brutal conflict.

In Beirut’s southern suburbs, the scene of some of Israel’s heaviest bombardment, roads were clogged with returnees who piled mattresses on to their cars as they wound around piles of debris, some still smoking from strikes just hours earlier. Many waved Hizbollah flags and praised the group for their “victory”.

For many, the truce promised respite from the violence that has peppered their daily lives since the outbreak of hostilities more than 13 months ago.

But amid that sense of reprieve and jubilation, there was also unease about what the deal portends for Lebanon, a fragile nation long hostage to its fractious leadership and gripped by a years-long economic crisis.

As the external threat from Israel begins to subside, analysts, officials and diplomats say the internal struggle has only just begun. Many of the agreement’s key provisions lack clear directives on how they will be implemented, leaving room for the deal to collapse or for political actors in Lebanon to exploit the gaps for their own gain.

And many in Lebanon fear that what they see as a deal overly favourable to Israeli interests will leave their nation more, not less, vulnerable.

“The hard part starts now,” one Lebanese official told the Financial Times after the deal was announced. “We’ve been paralysed politically for years now but . . . we must work together to make Hizbollah respect the deal so we don’t give excuses for Israel to start bombing us again.”

“It’s going to be very difficult but we have no other choice,” the official said, noting the history of enmity between Iran-backed Hizbollah and Lebanon’s other sectarian political leaders.

Israel’s campaign against Hizbollah, which began after the militant group started firing rockets into Israel following Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack, has taken a devastating toll. It has killed more than 3,800 people and displaced some 1.2mn more from their homes, most of them in the past two months after Israel escalated its offensive. Over 140 Israelis have been killed.

The agreement, brokered by the US, will begin with an initial 60-day ceasefire, a period during which Israel must withdraw from Lebanese territory and Hizbollah must pull its forces back from its southern stronghold to north of the Litani River, which runs some 30km from the shared border.

The Lebanese army and UN peacekeeping forces will move into the area to secure the border and prevent Hizbollah’s ability to regroup and rearm in the south.

Their efforts will be overseen by a US-led monitoring mechanism that is supposed to report violations. But the question of how those will be dealt with remains one of the most perilous parts of the deal.

In announcing the ceasefire on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel will retain the right to strike inside Lebanon if it believes Hizbollah poses an imminent threat.

But Lebanese officials have rejected this, with defence minister Maurice Slim saying on Wednesday that it “contradicts” the contents of the 13-point agreement on which the truce is based.

People familiar with the talks fear that giving Israel the freedom to continue striking inside the country tilts the deal too far in favour of Israeli security interests at the expense of Lebanon’s political realities.

But given Israel’s military gains, analysts say the country may not have a choice.

After the deal took effect, Israel told Lebanese citizens not to return to border areas where its military is still present. It reported firing on groups of people who had returned to what it called “no-go zones”, another sign of how difficult it will be to implement the deal.

Beyond enforcement, structural issues remain unaddressed, according to diplomats and analysts: how will Lebanon’s underfunded and under-resourced army fulfil its mandate without huge international assistance that has yet to be announced? Are troop-contributing countries prepared to bolster UN peacekeepers? What will happen to the strip of land along the Lebanese side of the border, whose dozens of villages were largely detonated by Israel in recent weeks? Will Lebanese residents be able to return to all areas of the south and east unobstructed?

“Every part of this ceasefire deal is a minefield, with a high risk of collapse at every stage,” said Rym Momtaz, a Lebanon expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank. Equipping and financing the Lebanese army will be “vital” to allow “the Lebanese state to have a fighting chance to break Hizbollah and Iran’s stranglehold on Lebanese sovereignty.

“That is far from a done deal,” Momtaz added.

Much will rest on Hizbollah. While Israel has undoubtedly weakened the group, picking off its senior leadership and destroying much of its military infrastructure, Hizbollah remains the most potent force in the country.

Its continued projectile attacks on Israel until the conflict’s final hours showed that it maintains an arsenal of some kind.

There are fears that Hizbollah could turn its weapons inwards to reassert its dominance, as it has done in the past. With much of its leadership now dead, there are also fears the group’s new generation of commanders could be more emboldened and radicalised.

Given that, it is unclear who will have the political will or courage to take them on, despite combative words from several of Hizbollah’s Christian political opponents, who appear to want to exploit the power vacuum and push through a candidate for the vacant presidency that Hizbollah opposes.

The truce will also open old wounds. The sectarian tensions exposed during the past 14 months — with many in Lebanon blaming Hizbollah for leading the country into what they considered a senseless war and taking out their resentment on its largely displaced Shia base — are likely to get worse.

“Iran and Hizbollah essentially triggered a futile war that massively damaged Lebanon [only] to end up accepting a worse deal than they had been offered by Franco-American mediators a year ago,” Momtaz said. She reflected a feeling among many in Lebanon on Wednesday, who are slowly contemplating a new reality where Israel might continue to monitor their skies and intervene indefinitely against perceived violations.

But amid the immense destruction in Beirut’s southern suburbs, for now, at least, was some relief. “Let’s talk politics tomorrow,” said Hajj Amin, 56, a notary public and supporter of Hizbollah. “Today, I’m celebrating victory.”

Additional reporting by Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv

Data visualisation by Jana Tauschinski and cartography by Cleve Jones