Let’s get the record straight on UNIFIL, for those who keep telling us it exists to contain Hezbollah.
In 1948, Palestinians were ethnically cleansed out of their country. Every attempt to resolve this was blocked. Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator who had saved tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi camps, created a framework allowing refugees to return.
On 17 September 1948 he was liquidated in Jerusalem by Lehi, a paramilitary group overseen by a young Yitzhak Shamir, later Prime Minister of Israel. No serious mediation replaced him. The refugees stayed displaced. The pressure stayed locked in.
In 1970 it exploded. The PLO, expelled from Jordan in Black September after a brutal military campaign that killed thousands, moved into southern Lebanon, where Palestinian communities had already been living since 1948. Nobody wanted these refugees.
No country in the region opened its doors, nor did it have to. Lebanon, too weak and too divided to repel or domesticate them, had no real choice. The Israelis, of all people, might have understood what it means to have nowhere to go.
Lebanon never chose to become a frontline. It was made one, by a chain of events it had no part in creating.
When Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978, the UN Security Council responded immediately. Resolutions 425 and 426 established UNIFIL with a clear mandate: confirm Israeli withdrawal, keep the border zone demilitarised and restore Lebanese sovereignty.
That is the whole mandate. Read it. There is no mention of Hezbollah. There is no mention of disarming Lebanese factions. Hezbollah did not exist. UNIFIL was created because Israel invaded a sovereign country. Not the other way around.
In 1982 Israel invaded again, all the way to Beirut. UNIFIL was overrun. The Security Council acknowledged the mandate could not be fulfilled, not because of Hezbollah, which did not even exist, but because of Israeli military meddling.
The invasion brought Israeli forces into Shia-majority areas of the south, which experienced a brutal occupation. That occupation caused the conditions for Hezbollah. Israel then held southern Lebanon for twenty-two years, until 2000.
Hezbollah did not cause the 1982 invasion. The 1982 invasion caused Hezbollah.
When Resolution 1701 was passed in 2006, it was built explicitly on top of the 1978 mandate, not replacing it. The Hezbollah disarmament clauses were aspirational additions with no enforcement mechanism: hollow words.
In the years that followed, those clauses were quietly spun into a precondition, while the original obligation, Israeli withdrawal and Lebanese sovereignty, was erased. This made the mandate permanently impossible to fulfill. That was the point.
Since October 2023, Israel has conducted sustained military operations across Lebanon, killed thousands of civilians, attacked UNIFIL positions, and launched a ground incursion into the south. Israeli forces remain on Lebanese territory today, in violation of both Resolution 425 and Resolution 1701. UNIFIL is now being wound down, set to expire in December 2026, while the occupation escalates.
So when Israel invokes Resolution 1701 to demand Hezbollah disarmament, one should ask why Israel never invoked Resolution 425, which came first, which it never honoured, and which exists for one reason only: to get Israel out of Lebanon and keep it out.
Focusing on Hezbollah while ignoring Israeli violations is not a reading of Resolution 1701. It is a political choice that turns forty-eight years of international law upside down, and rewards the party that has violated it most consistently.
The original mandate was simple. Israeli forces leave Lebanese territory. Lebanon governs its own south. The international community guarantees that outcome. Everything else follows from that. It was simple in 1978. It is still simple now.
Based on UN Security Council Resolutions 425 (1978), 426 (1978), and 1701 (2006)