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For the first time since 1993, Lebanon and Israel are talking to each other directly. But the question that overshadows their agenda in Washington is about a party that won’t be present: Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia whose resistance to disarmament has become a major fault line in the wider crisis across the Middle East.

Last September, the Lebanese government launched its most ambitious disarmament plan ever. It saw some early success seizing weapons and deploying Lebanese Armed Forces soldiers south of the Litani River. Then came the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, Hezbollah’s retaliatory rocket barrage into northern Israel, and Israel’s devastating air and ground campaign in Lebanon, which has killed more than 2,500 people and displaced over a million since March. Despite a tenuous cease-fire with Israel, Lebanon’s disarmament efforts against Hezbollah have ground to a halt.

For the first time since 1993, Lebanon and Israel are talking to each other directly. But the question that overshadows their agenda in Washington is about a party that won’t be present: Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia whose resistance to disarmament has become a major fault line in the wider crisis across the Middle East.

Last September, the Lebanese government launched its most ambitious disarmament plan ever. It saw some early success seizing weapons and deploying Lebanese Armed Forces soldiers south of the Litani River. Then came the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, Hezbollah’s retaliatory rocket barrage into northern Israel, and Israel’s devastating air and ground campaign in Lebanon, which has killed more than 2,500 people and displaced over a million since March. Despite a tenuous cease-fire with Israel, Lebanon’s disarmament efforts against Hezbollah have ground to a halt.

In the United States and Israel, the conventional response to such an impasse with Hezbollah is to press harder: more sanctions, more conditional aid, more military escalation. But these approaches all rest on a flawed diagnosis, treating the issue as something that can be imposed from the outside, ignoring the popular domestic support that any sustainable disarmament requires. As long as a critical mass of Lebanese citizens see Hezbollah’s arms as necessary, any disarmament—whether negotiated or forced—will be temporary.

In a recent study completed in December 2025 as part of the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy, and Trends (XCEPT) research program at King’s College London, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 Lebanese citizens and conducted additional hourlong conversations with 300 participants. We found that only 18 percent of Lebanese express political support for Hezbollah, in line with its recent electoral results. But almost half—45 percent—resist its disarmament. Why are there so many people who do not support Hezbollah politically yet want it to hold on to its weapons?

To answer this question, we tested the most prominent explanations for the group’s popular support and compared how respondents who scored higher or lower for each factor differed in their backing of Hezbollah, after accounting for demographic and regional differences. What we found challenges fundamental assumptions about the disarmament........

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