Israel and Lebanon have signed a framework agreement brokered by the United States, a step that officials in Washington are calling the beginning of a path toward lasting peace between two countries that remain formally at war.
Announcing the deal, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described it as a first move toward “lasting peace and security” and the product of several days of talks held in Washington. The agreement calls for a ceasefire and sets out a sequence of steps each side is expected to take.
At the centre of the deal are conditions tied to Hezbollah, the heavily armed group that operates in southern Lebanon. The ceasefire is contingent on a complete halt to fire by Hezbollah and the removal of its fighters from the South Litani Sector, the strip of territory closest to the Israeli border. In return, Israel has agreed to withdraw from two areas in southern Lebanon and hand those sites over to the Lebanese military.
The two sides also agreed to move quickly on creating pilot zones in which the Lebanese Armed Forces would take exclusive control, to the exclusion of any non-state actors. The idea is to demonstrate, in defined areas, that the national army can hold ground that armed groups have long dominated.
Supporters of the agreement say it could open a route toward eventual diplomatic normalisation between Beirut and Jerusalem, an outcome that would have seemed remote only a short time ago. The framework gives both governments a structure to point to and a sequence of confidence-building measures to test.
Skeptics are far more cautious. Analysts note that the deal’s success hinges almost entirely on a group it cannot directly bind. As long as Hezbollah remains armed and politically influential inside Lebanon, the question of who actually controls the south is far from settled, and some warn that regional rivals have every incentive to undermine the arrangement.
For now, the framework is exactly that, a framework. The hard work of implementation, verification and trust-building lies ahead, and the history of the region offers ample reason for both hope and doubt. Whether this agreement becomes a turning point or another short-lived pause will be measured not in the signing, but in the months that follow.
Leave a Reply