Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his support for a ceasefire deal to halt Israel’s fighting in Lebanon in a televised address Tuesday evening, projecting a message of victory to his Israeli audience. He spoke of a Hezbollah diminished by the Israeli campaign.
“This is not the same Hezbollah – we pushed them back decades,” Netanyahu said during his speech. “Lebanon is not the same.”
U.S. President Joe Biden spoke in support of the ceasefire later the same day, adding that his administration would use the momentum from Tuesday’s deal between Israel and Hezbollah to push toward a ceasefire deal in Gaza. Biden also blamed Hamas for the failure to secure peace in Gaza to date, alleging that the group has failed to negotiate in good faith, despite reporting to the contrary.
But Netanyahu’s own address seemed to undercut Biden’s point. In pitching the ceasefire to the Israeli audience, Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for potential war crimes, emphasized that closing the northern front of its war would allow Israel’s military to regroup and give the nation an opportunity to focus on other enemies: Iran and Hamas. He also emphasized that Israel would “retain complete military freedom of action,” adding that “should Hezbollah violate the agreement or attempt to rearm, we will strike decisively.”
The evidence that Netanyahu’s government is interested in any sort of lasting peace in both Lebanon and Gaza is thin on the ground.
Israel intensified its bombing campaign against Lebanon in recent days, up through and beyond the announcement of the pending ceasefire. A day before the truce was announced, Israeli strikes killed at least seven Palestinians in Gaza City. Reports have surfaced in recent days of the IDF using sniper drones to target and kill civilians. And as the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza has been slowed by Israel, experts warned of “a strong likelihood of famine” in areas of northern Gaza.
“The going conventional wisdom is that there’s no ceasefire deal because Netanyahu doesn’t want a hostage deal – he hasn’t wanted one because he wants to keep his coalition together, and the far right wants to resettle Gaza,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group focusing on Israel–Palestine. “You can’t pull out of Gaza if you’re going to build settlements there.”
She said Israelis are questioning why Netanyahu is striking a deal with Hezbollah instead of focusing on a ceasefire deal in Gaza, where more than 100 Israeli hostages remain. Residents of northern Israel have also criticized Tuesday’s deal, saying that Israel’s campaign in Lebanon has not improved their sense of safety near the border. While Hezbollah strikes have killed 45 Israeli citizens in northern Israel and in the occupied Golan Heights, the losses for Lebanon have been staggering.
Since Israel began its campaign on Lebanon in September, Israeli attacks have killed more than 3,800 Lebanese, injuring more than 15,000, many of them civilians. More than 1 million people have been displaced from Lebanon, including more than 500,000 Syrian refugees. The Israeli military has destroyed entire villages in the country’s south. The cost of rebuilding is estimated to be more than $8 billion.
“Despite the fact that I welcome and have begged for a ceasefire since day one, and that’s coming and I’m relieved, there is more than a bitter taste left in my mouth for the fact that the supposed ceasefire agreement is essentially what the status quo was before this entire operation,” said Drew Mikhael, an expert on displacement and conflict resolution with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.
“Some 3,000 deaths that we know about, the vaporized families that we’ll never know about that were killed because of killing Nasrallah, 1.5 million people who have been displaced – all for what?” Mikhael asked. Israel “decided to enact war crimes on its neighbor unilaterally for no apparent strategic gain,” he said.
Under Tuesday’s deal, the fighting will cease at 4 a.m. local time on Wednesday. Over a 60-day period, Israel must withdraw its soldiers from Lebanon while the Lebanese government takes control in southern Lebanon to restore a buffer security zone between Lebanon and Israel.
Such a zone already existed before the recent conflict as a result of a deal enacted in 2006. Under that agreement, the area was overseen by UN peacekeepers, which Israel has regularly bombed during the ongoing conflict. As part of Tuesday’s deal, Hezbollah, the Shia military group and political party, is not allowed to rebuild its military capacity or reassert itself in the country’s south.
Although Biden said the agreement was meant to be “a permanent cessation of hostilities,” he maintained that “Israel has a right to defend itself” if it suspects that Hezbollah is violating the deal. Netanyahu vowed he would still launch attacks into Lebanon if Hezbollah broke from the deal.
Zonszein said that the truce does not imply Israel is interested in peace. She said that continued U.S. support gives Israel the unilateral ability to move freely in and over Lebanon by land, sea, and air. Maintaining the threat of violence against Lebanon, and, as Netanyahu mentioned in his speech, Iran, is core to Israeli strategy, she said.
“Israel wants to be this angry monster, that’s the perception it wants, because it lost all of that deterrence and power on October 7,” Zonszein said. “So that’s part of what it wants to market: it wants people to think that Israel is crazy and kind of inhumane, that it’s going to target them, because that projects power.”
Mikhael agreed. Netanyahu “has to create islands of insecurity all around him,” he said, “He has only got violence and insecurity and anxiety to offer the Israeli people.”
Moments after Biden announced the deal, Israeli warplanes struck Beirut yet again. The bombing campaign continued in the hours leading up to the pending ceasefire.
