US-Brokered Israel–Lebanon Framework Links First IDF Pullback to Hezbollah Disarmament

Borders between Israel and Lebanon have been managed by makeshift deals since UN Resolution 425 (1978) first called for an Israeli pull-out; Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in May 2000 and the ill-fated 2006 cease-fire (UNSCR 1701) tried—and failed—to replace Hezbollah with a sovereign Lebanese force. Like the 1991 Paris Peace Accords that sought to demobilise Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge yet left a rump insurgency, this pact again tests whether an external guarantor can translate paper disarmament clauses into guns collected on the ground. Structurally, it reflects a century-long arc in the Levant: weak central states ceding space to non-state militias, then periodically reclaiming it under great-power tutelage—from the French Mandate’s 1920s “state-building” to today’s U.S. conditional aid model. If the Lebanese state really monopolises force, the agreement could close the chapter opened by Israel’s 1982 invasion; if not, it may join a lineage of half-implemented accords. Either outcome will ripple through the next hundred years of Eastern Mediterranean security by reaffirming—or refuting—the idea that transnational militias can be tamed without total war.