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How the Lebanon Ceasefire Could Make It Harder to End the War on Iran

The deal is a welcome reprieve from Israel’s bombing — but separating Lebanon from the ceasefire with Iran sets a dangerous precedent.

For the first time in history, the Lebanese ambassador to the United States, Nada Moawad, and Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, sat in the same room at the State Department in Washington, D.C., facing one another as two states ostensibly on equal ground, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials presiding over the talks. Lebanese and Israeli officials had been in the same room before, having held indirect negotiations in 2022 and direct talks last in 1993, but this was the first time that Israel and Lebanon’s flags were hung next to one another — a high-level public meeting of a kind never before attempted.

A 10-day ceasefire inside Lebanon was finally implemented on Friday, one previously agreed to during the Iran ceasefire talks in Pakistan and then almost instantaneously undermined by Israel. The United States, and the Israeli state to a certain extent, have portrayed this ceasefire as the result of this breakthrough, a direct negotiation with an enemy nation that, as Netanyahu said on Thursday, could lead to the “opportunity to forge a historic peace agreement” with Lebanon. 

Many Lebanese have been able to return to their home villages under the ceasefire, but this was also the case in 2024, which then was followed by the implementation of an Israeli military buffer zone that left much of the south even more in ruins than from the war itself. The danger of these negotiations lies not in the immediate short term, as the residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs and the south experience a reprieve from intensive bombardment, but in the long term, beyond the 10 days.

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

Israel has now reaped the fruits of unilaterally declaring Lebanon outside of the Iranian ceasefire, against its previous agreements, and has now made permanently ending the war, as Iran has desired, a much more difficult prospect. Such a long-term cessation is now reliant on the ability of the Lebanese government to do what America and Israel demands, dismantling Hezbollah by any means necessary even if it means speeding headfirst into a civil war.

While Lebanese President Joseph Aoun hailed the ceasefire as evidence Lebanon is “no longer a card in anyone’s pocket,” Hezbollah members of Parliament, as well as Iranian officials, have told a different story. Even if Hezbollah “will cautiously adhere to the ceasefire,” the deal did not come about from these talks but instead from Iranian pressure to reach a ceasefire as a precondition to another round of negotiations between Tehran and Washington, now set for Monday, albeit looking increasingly fraught. Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf announced after the ceasefire that it was the result of the “resistance and steadfast struggle of the great Hezbollah and the unity of the Axis of Resistance.” Hezbollah MP Ibrahim Moussawi was more blunt, telling Drop Site News that this was the “same ceasefire agreement” reached in Islamabad days ago, only now stamped with Israel’s belated co-sign.

While Hezbollah had significant leverage to force a ceasefire on its behalf — with Iran’s threats to return to war with missiles already reportedly on the launchpad if Lebanon was not included in the deal — it is unclear what leverage the Lebanese government had to negotiate a ceasefire on its own. Throughout the previous ceasefire and into this war, Israel argued Lebanon’s government was incapable of disarming Hezbollah, with Israeli government-aligned newspapers deriding the state’s inability to even expel the Iranian ambassador after Lebanon’s foreign minister ordered him out in March. Israel’s Foreign Ministry routinely criticized the Lebanese government for being “all talk and no action” on disarming Hezbollah, and Israel’s........

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