The Ceasefire Scam in Lebanon

Who exactly is Israel negotiating with?

IDF operating in southern Lebanon (IDF/X)

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This is a guest essay by Mitch Schneider, who writes from Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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It is a curious thing to watch the world’s diplomatic machinery turn its attention to Lebanon and speak, with apparent seriousness, about a ceasefire.

Not because the desire for peace is insincere. It may well be genuine. But genuine desires and achievable outcomes are not the same thing, and the international community has a long and remarkably consistent record of confusing the two whenever Israel is involved.

The formula is familiar enough by now: An Iranian proxy fires rockets at Israeli cities. Israel responds. At some point, usually when the proxy needs time to regroup, the world discovers an urgent interest in de-escalation. Envoys fly to Washington. Statements are issued. A monitoring mechanism is proposed. Everyone looks serious.

And then the proxy rearms.

We are, at this moment, in the part where everyone looks serious. Lebanon’s ambassador was in Washington this week for the first diplomatic talks between Israel and Lebanon since 1993, which is a genuinely remarkable development. It was also the same week that Hezbollah fired 40 rockets at the Israeli city of Nahariya. A 60-year-old woman was hit by shrapnel in her own home — not on a battlefield, but in her living room. The ambassadors were shaking hands when the rockets were in the air.

So when the world speaks of a ceasefire with Lebanon, the question nobody in that Washington meeting room appeared to ask is the only one that matters: Who is on the other side of this agreement?

Negotiating a ceasefire with Lebanon right now is like filing a noise complaint with a landlord who lost control of the building years ago. He’s standing there, nodding, genuinely sorry about the noise, wants it to stop, says all the right things. He just doesn’t have a key to the apartment. The tenant changed the locks years ago, and the landlord smiled and called it a cultural arrangement, signed ministerial statements endorsing it, and built it into the constitutional formula of the state itself.

That’s Lebanon. That’s this negotiation.

Hezbollah called the Washington peace talks a free concession to Israel and the United States, said it publicly, to its own people, as a warning to the government supposedly negotiating on Lebanon’s behalf.

Hezbollah isn’t a party to these talks; it’s a veto over them. And when Lebanon’s ambassador sits across from Israel asking for a ceasefire, he’s asking a country under continuous armed attack to stand down while his government remains in breach of the very obligations it agreed to honor. That’s not a negotiation between equals; that’s a debtor asking the bank for more time.

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The international community’s demand for Hezbollah’s disarmament isn’t 18 years old. It’s 22. In 2004, the United Nations demanded it. In 2006, after a war, every permanent member of the Security Council guaranteed it unanimously. Hezbollah would disarm, withdraw north of the Litani River, and cease to be the private army of a foreign theocracy operating inside a sovereign state. The resolution didn’t recommend this; it explicitly prohibited any Hezbollah armed presence south of the Litani.

Then the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon deployed, and for 48 years filed annual reports documenting what it found in southern Lebanon: fortified positions, tunnels, rockets stored in civilian sites, and systematic obstruction of its own access. The Security Council read every one of those reports, reaffirmed its demands approximately 18 times, and did nothing.

There is no mechanism to hold it accountable for that. Russia and China made sure of it, vetoing enforcement whenever it threatened Iranian interests. The system didn’t fail by accident. It produced exactly the outcome it was designed to allow, which means the question worth asking isn’t why it failed to stop Hezbollah rearming. It’s why stopping Hezbollah from rearming was never actually the objective. Those are different questions, and only one of them has a disturbing answer.

Hezbollah went into the 2006 war against Israel with 15,000 rockets. The guarantee produced 150,000 by 2023. Israel then spent two years destroying the vast majority of that arsenal, striking munitions factories, weapons depots and supply routes. When Hezbollah resumed firing on March 2nd, the IDF’s own Northern Command chief acknowledged publicly that Israel had overestimated the damage. Nobody knows how many rockets remain. That uncertainty is itself the answer to the question of what ceasefires produce.

150,000 rockets is what the last ceasefire built. The next one starts the clock again.

Hezbollah is not a Lebanese political party with a military wing. It is an Iranian proxy, funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran, armed and directed by the Iranian regime, every rocket paid for with Iranian money, launched with Iranian weapons, in service of Iranian objectives. When Iran wanted to retaliate for the killing of its Supreme Leader on February 28th, it called its proxy, and the rockets started flying from Lebanon two days later. That’s not solidarity; it’s a chain of command.

Which makes the current conversation genuinely remarkable. Iran just agreed to stop fighting the United States, the same Iran that owns Hezbollah, and now the world wants Israel to negotiate a separate truce with Tehran’s proxy army, as though the hand and the arm belong to different bodies.

Since March 2nd, Hezbollah has fired approximately 3,000 rockets, mortars, and drones into Israel — every single day. The rockets were in the air while the ambassadors were shaking hands in Washington. They were in the air through every ceasefire announcement, every diplomatic statement, every expression of hope about a new chapter.

And it was the same organization that, within hours of Hamas launching the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7, 2023, opened a second front from Lebanese soil while Israeli families were still being murdered in their homes. The world spent two years debating the word genocide in Gaza while Iran’s proxy kept firing from a country the world was simultaneously asking Israel to make peace with.

Hezbollah calls its weapons the “resistance,” the defense of Lebanon. In those 47 days of firing, it hasn’t defended a single Lebanese civilian, hasn’t pushed a single Israeli soldier off Lebanese soil, hasn’t achieved a single military objective. The laws of war have a name for firing rockets from apartment buildings and storing weapons in civilian sites. It isn’t resistance. It’s a war crime, committed against Lebanese civilians, not Israeli ones. When a government allows that for 22 years, the question of who bears responsibility for the consequences has an answer, and it isn’t Israel.

This isn’t resistance; it’s a protection racket, and the Lebanese people are paying the premium while getting none of the protection.

Since March 2nd, not a single day has passed without rockets, mortars, or drones crossing from Lebanese soil into Israel — all of it declared illegal by the Lebanese government, all of it fired anyway. The same week Israel was asked to stop fighting, the majority of the Democratic Party voted to take away the tools it was fighting with.

Israeli soldiers have died in southern Lebanon since hostilities resumed. They went in knowing what finishing it would have to look like, not a document, but disarmament, a real ending. The families of those soldiers deserve an answer to one question: What exactly were they told they were fighting for? Because if the answer is a ceasefire that looks like the last one, somebody should have said so before they crossed the border.

There is a Lebanese government today that is genuinely trying to be a state. President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam rejected Iran’s offer to negotiate on Lebanon’s behalf, expelled Iran’s ambassador, declared Hezbollah’s military activities illegal knowing precisely what the response would be, and walked into a room with Israeli diplomats for the first time since 1993. They deserve a real outcome, and they know what one requires. Which is why Lebanon approached Israel, not the other way around.

Israel isn’t asking Lebanon for submission. It’s offering Lebanon the only arrangement under which Lebanon becomes a real state again.

Netanyahu said it plainly. Two conditions: the dismantling of Hezbollah’s weapons and a peace agreement that lasts for generations. Dismantling means the Lebanese army, not Tehran’s proxy, controls the south. It means the border that has been fired across for 22 years becomes a border again, not a pause.

Lebanon was once called the Switzerland of the Middle East, a place of genuine beauty and civilization within living memory, before an Iranian proxy army spread through it like a cancer while the world handed it ceasefire after ceasefire and called that stability. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon watched it happen. The Security Council filed the reports. The guarantees were unanimous, solemn, and worth nothing.

If a truce is declared, Israeli soldiers currently in southern Lebanon face exactly two options. They stay in place, frozen, weapons lowered, in territory Hezbollah has mapped and studied for years, waiting to see if a proxy that has fired every single day for 47 days honors a piece of paper. Or they withdraw and hand back every hill, every tunnel entrance, every launch site that cost something to take, to the organization that was firing from it last week, which moves back in quietly, the way it always has, and begins counting.

There is no third option.

The ritual demands we pretend otherwise. It demands we treat each ceasefire as a fresh start and each signed agreement as proof that this time will be different. It has demanded this after every round since 2006, and the world has obliged. Israel destroyed most of the arsenal the last ceasefire built. The world is now asking it to stop before it finishes the job.

Who, specifically, believes Hezbollah will stop firing? Not who hopes, not who needs to believe it for the diplomacy to hold together, but who genuinely looks at the evidence, at 22 years of demands, at an arsenal rebuilt from 15,000 to 150,000 rockets under the noses of UN peacekeepers, at a Lebanese prime minister ignored in real time, and believes that Hezbollah's secretary-general Naim Qassem sees a one-week truce as anything other than a week to count rockets.

The organization the world wants Israel to trust with a truce receives its orders, its weapons, and its money from Tehran. The same Tehran that agreed to a ceasefire while its proxy kept firing.

Put a name to it.

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