Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his government to immediately begin direct peace negotiations with the Lebanese government. The goal is straightforward: full Hezbollah disarmament south of the Litani River and the establishment of peaceful relations between the two states. This is not diplomatic theater. It is the logical conclusion of a campaign that first destroyed Hezbollah’s offensive capacity and is now converting that battlefield success into a permanent strategic advantage.

Let me be direct. Hezbollah began this war with an arsenal of 130,000 to 150,000 rockets and missiles; successive Israeli operations have cut that stockpile to between 11,000 and 13,000 projectiles. The Israel Defense Forces report destruction of 85 to 90 percent of launch infrastructure, figures corroborated by the Wall Street Journal and the Alma Research Center.

Since Hezbollah opened its support front for Hamas on October 8, 2023, it has fired more than 3,500 rockets, missiles, drones, and mortars into Israel, displacing over 60,000 Israeli civilians from the northern border for nearly two and a half years.

Hezbollah never acted as a “legitimate Lebanese resistance movement”. It functioned as a parallel state with its own command structure, veto power over governments, and direct funding from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

For eighteen years Lebanon ignored the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which demanded Hezbollah’s complete disarmament south of the Litani River, exclusive Lebanese Armed Forces control in the south, and the removal of all foreign fighters. Instead, Hezbollah kept its estimated 40,000 terrorists—including the elite Radwan Force—and turned civilian villages into forward launch pads for Iranian strategy.

The negotiations now underway lock in those gains.

Thus, direct bilateral enforcement of Resolution 1701 is the only way to dismantle Hezbollah’s dual role as Tehran’s Mediterranean proxy. Removing its rocket army ends the cycle of cross-border attacks that has kept the northern border in permanent crisis.

On the other hand, for Lebanon, these talks offer a chance to reclaim sovereignty over its own territory and begin repairing an economy gutted by Hezbollah’s patronage networks, illicit finance, and central role in the 2019 national collapse.

In tandem, anyone claiming Israel is using these talks as cover for permanent annexation or some mythical “Greater Israel” project from the Nile to the Euphrates is repeating a century-old antisemitic and anti-Zionist conspiracy theory. The historical record destroys the myth.

In 1979 Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula—23,000 square kilometers, roughly three times the size of pre-1967 Israel—to Egypt under the Camp David Accords, pulling the largest Arab army out of the Soviet orbit into the Western camp. In 2000 Israel unilaterally withdrew every soldier from southern Lebanon to the internationally recognized border, certified by the United Nations without any peace treaty. In 2005 Israel evacuated every settlement and every soldier from Gaza. The pattern is consistent: seize or hold territory in defensive operations to neutralize immediate threats, then trade that control for verifiable demilitarization and peace. The current Lebanon campaign follows this effective doctrine.

Geostrategically the payoff is larger than the border. Hezbollah was the most effective link in Iran’s network of proxies, threatening global energy arteries and regional stability. The Strait of Hormuz carries 20 percent of the world’s petroleum and 25 percent of seaborne oil trade. Disrupting that flow would spike prices worldwide and reward the Iran-Russia-China-North Korea partnership. By breaking Hezbollah’s offensive power, Israel severs a critical node in that axis and reduces Tehran’s ability to escalate through proxies. Sunni Arab states already hedging against Iranian ambitions now see concrete proof that proxy warfare no longer pays.

This is the script flip that was always coming. After months of international pressure for Israel to stop in the name of “regional calm,” the Lebanese government itself has come to the table because sustained Israeli pressure made continued Hezbollah dominance untenable. Fragile pauses that left the terrorist infrastructure intact never worked. Only battlefield success created the conditions for serious diplomacy.

The raw reality is simple. Israel did not start this conflict. Hezbollah launched it in coordination with Hamas right after the biggest massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust and sustained it for two and a half years. Israel responded by systematically dismantling the threat. Now it is translating that hard-won advantage into a diplomatic opening that weakens Iran’s reach, restores deterrence, and gives Lebanon a genuine path out of paralysis.

The data on arsenal reductions, the eighteen-year record of Resolution 1701 violations, the repeated Israeli territorial withdrawals for peace, and the explicit focus of today’s talks leave no room for conspiracy theories.

In the Middle East, peace is not born from weakness. It is forged when the side that seeks your destruction loses the means to carry it out. Israel has once again made that happen. These negotiations are the proof.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)