Having failed to broker a ceasefire, President Joe Biden’s administration is signaling its support for Israeli operations against Iran-backed Hezbollah and the group’s eventual withdrawal from southern Lebanon.
The hope is that a weakened Hezbollah – Tehran’s main proxy force and Lebanon’s most powerful political party – will provide an opening for the Lebanese to elect a new president and permanently sideline the militants and away from the southern border with Israel.
“We see that Israel has the right to conduct these limited raids to reduce Hezbollah’s capabilities,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said at a briefing last week.
“We want these incursions to be limited and ultimately we want to return to the implementation of 1701, which means the government of Israel withdrawing behind the border,” he added, referring to a United Nations resolution intended to to end hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel. Israel with the creation of a buffer zone.
The refocused U.S. diplomatic effort faces challenges on many fronts, including finding a way to implement the decades-old U.N. resolution, which has never been fully implemented.
1701 was adopted by the United Nations in 2006 after the last major war between Israel and Hezbollah and was intended to pave the way for a lasting peace.
For long-term security purposes, the resolution would have resulted in the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, which would have had full sovereignty over the south. Had Hezbollah been excluded, the Lebanese army and thousands of peacekeepers from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) would have maintained an armed presence south of Lebanon’s Litani River.
Nearly two decades later, the militant group has amassed more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, along with drones and anti-tank, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, according to the CIA’s World Factbook. The country is also mired in political and economic crises, with a vacant presidency since 2022 creating a leadership vacuum, while hyperinflation and a collapsed currency have caused widespread poverty.
Since October 8, the day after Hamas launched its terror attacks on Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostage, according to officials in the country, Hezbollah has fired rockets and other projectiles into northern Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian militant. group. The Israeli offensive in Gaza has since killed more than 42,000 people, according to health officials in the enclave.
For months, as the pair traded tit-for-tat attacks, more than 60,000 people were driven from their homes in Israel’s north, according to government figures – and Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu’s government cited this as the reason for launching its military campaign in southern Israel. Lebanon last month.
According to Lebanese officials, more than 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since the October 7, 2023, attack and an estimated 1.2 million people have been displaced. A large number of them left their homes after Israel began its widespread bombing on September 17, when pagers belonging to Hezbollah members exploded across the country.
The Biden administration shares Israel’s frustration that the UNIFIL peacekeeping mission has failed to stop Hezbollah from hiding weapons in tunnels and homes along their border, a senior administration official said.
Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, a former NATO commander, pointed to UNIFIL’s inability to prevent Hezbollah from hiding weapons in tunnels and houses along the border.
“If the UN mission did its job and ensured that there was a significant demilitarized zone just north of the Israeli border, up to the Litani River, Israel would not have had to invade the kind of military operations and take action that they are doing now. .”
“And frankly, this mission is something that military analysts and observers like me have been critical of for a decade or more. They just haven’t been effective at the task they were given.”
Now the Biden administration hopes to strengthen Lebanon’s political system by organizing new presidential elections and strengthening the Lebanese Armed Forces.
“The solution to this crisis is not a weaker Lebanon. It is a strong and truly sovereign Lebanon, protected by a legitimate security force, embodied in the Lebanese Armed Forces,” US Ambassador Robert Wood said at a UN Security Council meeting last week. “And so the international community must direct its efforts accordingly: to help strengthen Lebanese state institutions so that they can exercise effective control over Lebanese territory.”
Over the past two years, Hezbollah has also blocked the election of a president who was not an ally of the group – a leadership vacuum that has hampered the passage of new legislation and much-needed economic reforms.
Although Hezbollah lost its majority in the 2022 elections, Hezbollah and the factions supporting it retained 62 of the 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament, thus maintaining their status as a major player. Moreover, the country remains the main political outlet for the country’s Shia Muslims, one of the largest sectarian blocs.
Jeffrey Feltman, who served as US ambassador to Lebanon from 2004 to 2008, said a weakened Hezbollah could be beneficial to Lebanon, but he feared that Israel’s “limited, localized and targeted incursion will be anything but.”
“You hope they don’t go too far in a way that will lead to Hezbollah 2.0,” he told NBC News on Monday.
The other risks Feltman cited include a passive Lebanese state that cannot meet the moment, or a Hezbollah response that is so severe that it leads to the destruction of the Lebanese state.
In a series of calls in recent weeks, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called on his Arab and European counterparts, as well as Lebanon’s leaders, to rally support behind the diplomatic efforts. But critics of this push have raised concerns about US attempts to influence Lebanon’s political future.
“We hope that the Lebanese political system can break this impasse,” Miller said Friday. “And ultimately we hope that Hezbollah is degraded to the point where they have less of an influence in Lebanese politics and that they agree to withdraw above the Litani River so that 1701 can be implemented.”
Inside Lebanon, interim Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Friday that snap presidential elections were needed but that his country would formally ask the UN Security Council for a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal.
Such a resolution would be helpful, an Arab diplomat told NBC News, but they cautioned that it is unlikely to weaken Hezbollah as long as it maintains Iran’s support.
Lebanese lawmaker Ghayath Yazbek accused Hezbollah and its Iranian backers of holding the government hostage and said it would be impossible to implement Resolution 1701 unless the country’s army, not Hezbollah, was in control.
“Unless Hezbollah is defeated in the war, or Hezbollah has the wisdom to spare Lebanon and its people even more destruction and martyrdom, and decides to stop the war, 1701 cannot be applied,” he said.
Kassem Kassir, a writer and political analyst, agrees that implementing 1701 and holding elections would be impossible at this time, but blames the problem on Israel, the US and their allies, and not Hezbollah .
“What is needed first is to stop Israeli aggression against Lebanon and there is no possibility of negotiations on any political issue, local or international, before the aggression stops,” he said. “What is needed before negotiations are to stop the aggression and stop the attacks on the innocent civilians who are being killed.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
