The Trump administration will host a new round of talks this week aimed at ending the latest warfare involving Israel and Lebanon.
No new developments on the Lebanese front give reason for optimism that this round will yield an agreement that two prior rounds did not. The Trump administration, however, has an incentive to push for an agreement because of President Trump’s need to extract himself and the United States from the impasse involving the Strait of Hormuz.
The last time Iran lifted its closure of the strait — a move Tehran reversed when Trump continued his own blockade — was in response to the announcement of a ceasefire in Lebanon.
Iran has insisted from the outset of the war that any ceasefire must be comprehensive, covering what Israel is doing in Lebanon as well as combat in the Persian Gulf. Israel and the United States have resisted linking these two Middle Eastern theaters. But if either side in a conflict says that two things are linked, then there is linkage, whether the other side likes it or not.
The Iranian perspective on this question reflects the fact that the military operations in Lebanon grew directly out of the war against Iran. Shortly after Israel and the United States launched that war in late February, Lebanese Hezbollah responded by firing rockets into northern Israel.
Hezbollah has always been an ally of Iran. No one, least of all the Israelis, should have been surprised by this response.
The fighting on the Lebanese front since then has been as one-sided in the resulting death and destruction as Israeli combat with Palestinians. The Israeli assault has killed 2,700 people in Lebanon, while Israeli fatalities have been 18 military personnel and two civilians. At the height of the offensive, more than a million people — about a fifth of Lebanon’s population — were displaced, and most remain so. Israeli forces have destroyed entire villages in southern Lebanon.
The ceasefire that the United States brokered in March, like most ceasefires involving Israel, has seen at most a slowing of the tempo of offensive operations rather than a cessation of them. In addition to continued lethal operations in the south of Lebanon, Israel conducted one of its bolder airstrikes in the Beirut area, which destroyed an apartment building in the city’s southern suburbs.
The talks this week in Washington will be unusual as peace negotiations go, in that they are not really between two belligerents. The weak government of Lebanon has not sought a war with Israel, and the war that is taking place is as asymmetrical in nature as the casualty figures suggest. Israel says its enemy is Hezbollah, but Hezbollah will not be in the conference room.
Israel’s central demand involving Lebanon has been that Hezbollah must be disarmed. No one is talking about disarming Israel, or even limiting its arms, even though Israel has inflicted far more of the suffering on this front than Hezbollah has. In any event, even though many figures in the Lebanese government would welcome Hezbollah’s disarmament, that is far easier said than done.
The hurdles to any disarmament of Hezbollah are partly a matter of physical capability. They also are a matter of political realities within Lebanon. Hezbollah speaks for a substantial proportion of the Lebanese population, especially the nearly one-third of Lebanese who are Shiites. It holds 13 seats in the Lebanese parliament and did well in municipal elections last year.
One indication of those realities comes from Nabih Berri, speaker of the Lebanese parliament and one of the most powerful politicians in Lebanon. Berri heads Amal, the other major Shiite party in Lebanon and an ally of Hezbollah. Berri said last week that there should be no negotiations with Israel until Israel ceases its offensive military operations in Lebanon and withdraws from the south of the country.
That similar sentiments extend beyond the Shiite portion of Lebanon’s population is reflected in the position of President Joseph Aoun, who, like all Lebanese presidents, is a Maronite Christian. Aoun has resisted U.S. pressure for him to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that any such meeting must await a cessation of Israel’s offensive operations and a withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon. Aoun’s stance is why this week’s talks are being held at the ambassadorial level.
Hezbollah is not a prime mover of mayhem that somehow arose through spontaneous generation, now was it imposed on Lebanon by Iran. Hezbollah owes its existence and rapid rise in the 1980s to previous Israeli aggression and occupation of portions of Lebanon. Hezbollah presented itself as a defender especially of Lebanese Shiites but also of all Lebanese against Israeli predation.
That history is especially relevant to what Israel is doing to Lebanon today. In addition to the lethal aerial assaults, it is occupying much of southern Lebanon, in a replay of what it did four decades ago. It has singled out Shiites with a demand — not equally directed toward other sectarian groups — to abandon their homes in that portion of Lebanon.
Such discriminatory demands will stoke additional resentment and desire for revenge within the confessional group that has always been Hezbollah’s main base of support.
The results are already being seen in the attitudes even of some Lebanese who wish Hezbollah had never fired rockets in support of its Iranian ally and who blame the group for drawing Lebanon into the U.S.-Israel-Iran war. In the face of the suffering from the new Israeli offensive and the inability of the Lebanese government to do much about it, many of these Lebanese are again looking to Hezbollah as their main hope for defending themselves.
An implication is that even if some agreement is reached that silences the guns for now, the ingredients will remain in place for future rounds of fighting on the Israel-Lebanon front. A lasting peace would depend on a complete and permanent Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and some assurance by the United States that it would use its influence to keep the withdrawal permanent.
Violence on the Israeli-Lebanese front is a reminder of how much instability in the Middle East stems from Israeli subjugation of the Palestinians and the violent resistance that it inevitably provokes. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 involved going after the exiled Palestinian Liberation Organization — an organization that would not exist if there were no perceived need to liberate Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The last previous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in October 2024 grew out of the devastating Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that had been ongoing for a year, in response to which Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The government of Lebanon wants the United States to exert enough pressure on Israel to end the current Israeli offensive. Lebanon is one of multiple fronts in the Middle East in which the biggest variable in determining whether instability will lessen is whether the United States will pressure Israel. In this case, Trump’s desire to extract himself from the Iran quagmire may be sufficient to yield at least a ceasefire that holds up better than the one that currently is being repeatedly violated.
Whether even that limited form of agreement is achieved will depend mostly on the U.S.-Israeli dimension of this week’s talks, more than the government of Lebanon’s role in the negotiations. Given the linkage with events in the Persian Gulf, it may also depend partly on any wider bargains struck in Pakistani-mediated negotiations between Iran and the United States.
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