Lebanese army making progress in displacing Hezbollah near Israeli border

BEIRUT — The Lebanese army has increased its deployment in the country’s south over the past few months, confiscating Hezbollah’s arms and dismantling its positions under the terms of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement between the militant group and Israel, according to interviews with Lebanon’s prime minister, Lebanese military officials and diplomats.

So far, an additional 1,500 troops have been deployed in the southern part of the country, closest to the border with Israel, bringing the total to 6,000 with 4,000 more still being recruited, military officials said. The armed forces have also resumed reconnaissance flights, set up checkpoints and secured towns after the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers.

“The army is making serious progress. It’s expanding and consolidating its presence in the south,” Lebanon’s new prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Such an effort was unimaginable only a year ago, when Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader who was killed in an Israeli strike in September, was touting new weapons and vowing to maintain the group’s positions.

The ceasefire agreement calls for the gradual deployment of 10,000 Lebanese soldiers who will be responsible for confiscating Hezbollah arms and dismantling the Islamist group’s positions in the south. A five-member committee headed by a U.S. official is overseeing the implementation.

A diplomat with knowledge of the matter, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject, said the committee receives coordinates of arms depots and missile launchers from the Israelis or U.N. peacekeepers and then the Lebanese military is to take action. The diplomat said the armed forces have so far dismantled more than 500 military sites operated by Hezbollah and other groups.

The ceasefire, however, has been shaky from the start. Despite a mid-February deadline for Israeli forces to withdraw, they have remained in five strategic positions in southern Lebanon close to the border and have continued to carry out airstrikes against Hezbollah.

In late March, Israel carried out strikes in the south and later in the suburbs of Beirut after two rocket barrages were launched from southern Lebanon toward Israel. Hezbollah denied any involvement in those attacks, but the incidents underscored the fragility of the ceasefire.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “attack anywhere in Lebanon against any threat to the state of Israel,” while Hezbollah leader Naim Kassem has said that if the Lebanese state does not prevent Israeli ceasefire violations, the militant group will take matters into its own hands.

Filippo Dionigi, a professor at the University of Bristol and author of “Hezbollah, Islamist Politics, and International Society,” said continued Israeli airstrikes would inflame Hezbollah’s support base and undercut the Lebanese army’s role. “If the situation escalates further, the already limited agency of this government risks being completely undermined,” he said.

In recent weeks, calls have mounted for the Lebanese military to disarm Hezbollah across the country, not just south of the Litani River in the region closest to the border with Israel. On a visit in early April, the deputy U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus, urged government officials to exert full control over the country.

Prime Minister Salam, meanwhile, said his country is working to ensure the state’s right to monopolize the bearing of arms “north and south of the Litani.”

Despite the progress the military is making in the south, it would face a significant challenge disarming Hezbollah in the rest of the country. The military is stretched thin as it has sought in the past few months to reinforce the border with Syria amid sporadic clashes between smugglers and the new Syrian government.

The army, like most of Lebanon, is also reeling from the country’s economic crisis — now in its sixth year — and relies on foreign aid to help finance everything from soldiers’ wages to fuel and food. The military has received more than $3 billion in aid from the U.S. government since 2006. Salam said his government is discussing a pay increase for soldiers in next year’s budget.

Troops often moonlight to make ends meet. One soldier, Mohammed, 36, said he works three days a week at a supermarket bagging groceries and shelving goods to support his family. He said he brings home only $300 a month from the army and can hardly afford to care for his two children. “You need around $30 daily for food without considering other expenses such as fuel and electricity generator fees, which are around $150 a month. We cannot live in darkness,” he said.

Edward Gabriel, a former U.S. diplomat who heads the nongovernmental American Task Force on Lebanon, said in an interview that the Lebanese military would need more training and resources to disarm Hezbollah and urged the United States to lend support.

As for the ultimate status of Hezbollah’s weapons and fighters, Lebanon’s new president, Joseph Aoun, has said a likely course would be to absorb some of the group’s fighters into the military, as was done with militias after the Lebanese Civil War.

But Dionigi said this could prove daunting, raising issues about the chain of command within the army as well as Hezbollah’s willingness to engage in the process. Hezbollah has been an independent paramilitary force since it first took up arms four decades ago.

Despite sporadic rocket fire, the army has a greater degree of control than before Israel’s war with Hezbollah, when violations reported by international peacekeepers would be ignored. Now, the government is committed to taking action, said the diplomat.

Another diplomat said that the army is doing the best it can and that the key to preventing rocket fire toward Israel would be a complete Israeli withdrawal and the demarcation of the land border between the two countries.

Lebanon is bound by U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, which calls for the removal of all “armed personnel, assets and weapons” outside the hands of the state between the Litani River and the Blue Line — the unofficial demarcation between Lebanon and Israel. For years, Hezbollah defied international resolutions and had free rein near the Israeli border.

From this perch, the Iran-backed group launched rockets and drones at Israel in support of its ally Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. But after Israeli strikes wiped out most of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, the group agreed in November to the ceasefire requiring it to withdraw fighters and arms to north of the Litani River.