Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that peace between Israel and Lebanon is "imminently achievable"—if Beirut can finally confront Hezbollah. But even as Washington presses the two governments toward unprecedented security understandings, Israel and Hezbollah continue to trade fire in southern Lebanon.
The ceasefire declared by President Donald Trump on April 16, and then extended on April 23, now hangs in the balance.
For the governments of Israel and Lebanon, the uptick in violence comes at a delicate time. The ambassadors from both nations have met twice now in Washington in a bid to reach new security understandings—but Hezbollah remains powerful enough to stymie these efforts.
The Israelis warned Hezbollah against joining the war amid combined U.S.-Israeli operations in Iran on February 28. But in early March, the Iranian-backed group fired five rockets into northern Israel. The Israelis reacted with predictable ferocity, and the conflict between Israel and Iran's most powerful proxy ignited anew.
In what is now commonly referred to as the "October 8 mindset" in Israel (referring to the oft-repeated vow that lingering threats will no longer be tolerated), Israeli defense officials made it clear they were playing for keeps. The Israelis launched their heaviest bombardments to date, especially in Beirut, on April 8. This would not be yet another round of "mowing the lawn" with the Lebanon-based terror group.
Iran saw this campaign for what it was: Israel preparing to deal Hezbollah potentially irreversible blows, including through a deeper ground incursion into south Lebanon. Seeking to save its most important proxy, Tehran tied the continuation of its ceasefire with the United States to de-escalation in Lebanon. The Iranian regime believed that the ceasefire was important enough to Donald Trump that its proxy might get a reprieve.
The Lebanese government, realizing its sovereignty was at stake, countered, refusing to allow the regime to speak for its national interests. Washington readily obliged Beirut's initiative, sponsoring rare trilateral talks between the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors in Washington.
That was the good news. The bad news was that Lebanon came to the table seeking to leverage American pressure on Israel to return to the same status quo ante of inaction that has repeatedly ensured Hezbollah's survival. Beirut requested a ceasefire—just as the Iranian regime did. While this was designed to buy time for negotiations, it would also buy time for Hezbollah.
After decades of wars that ended in containment, the Israeli desire to destroy the terror group now appears genuine. On October 8, 2023, when the ground in southern Israel was still soaked with the blood of 1,200 Hamas victims, Hezbollah attacked Israel and sparked what would become a yearlong war of attrition. With the shock of the Hamas attack still fresh, Israel displayed uncharacteristic reticence. It was only in mid-September 2024, nearly a year later, that the Israelis dropped the gloves: Its first blow, the explosive beeper operation, killed or maimed hundreds of Hezbollah fighters. The Israelis then eliminated Hezbollah's senior-most political and military figures, including Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah; took out a significant part of the group's arsenal; and launched a limited ground incursion. Throughout, however, their goals remained limited to pushing Hezbollah back far enough from the frontier for residents of northern Israel to return home.
A tenuous ceasefire followed. The Israelis kept Hezbollah on its back foot by striking its military assets once or twice per day, but over the last 17 months, the group was nevertheless able to reconstitute. Now Israel is seeking to continuously degrade Hezbollah until either the organization collapses or Lebanon is finally able, or willing, to disarm it.
When the U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect in November 2024, Israelis hoped that Beirut would step up and begin dismantling the terror group. After all, the very existence of a well-armed and well-trained militia within the country is a challenge to Lebanese sovereignty. But Lebanon's government remains weak, and Lebanese society is notoriously fractured along sectarian lines. This has left Beirut and the Lebanese Armed Forces fearful of a civil war, or worse, losing one.
Neither fear is unfounded. Hezbollah retains enough of its arsenal (roughly 20 percent of its previous arsenal of 150,000 projectiles, plus loads of light arms, per Israeli estimates) to make forcible disarmament militarily daunting. Lebanese Shiites, who make up roughly one-third of the population, remained broadly supportive of Hezbollah, allowing the group to continue threatening Lebanon with internecine conflict. Beirut tried to convince the group to voluntarily surrender its arsenal. Hezbollah, not surprisingly, refused. And the Shiites of the country are not complaining.
It is too soon to determine whether the renewed war, and the concurrent diplomacy, has changed these conditions enough to break Lebanon's barrier of fear. Ceasefire or not, diplomacy or not, the Israelis are still eyeing a major military operation.
While fears of a massive military operation remain, the Israelis are signaling more modest goals. The Israeli brass don't seem interested in occupying Lebanese territory. Southern Lebanon is the immediate threat to Israeli security because of the short-range munitions that threaten Israeli villages on the border. Yet the organization's infrastructure extends well beyond it: Its political and operational nerve center sits in Beirut's southern suburbs, and it maintains military assets and training sites in the northermost reaches of the Beqaa Valley, which sits astride the Syrian border.
Israel simply lacks the manpower to conduct large-scale military operations across the entirety of this terrain. And the soldiers it does have are already weary from more than two and a half years of fighting in Gaza.
This reality helps explain why Israeli war planners appear to be gravitating toward an intermediate option of seizing southern Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, with plans to then launch large-scale air operations to degrade the longer-distance weapons held by the group in territories farther north.
Israel has already shaped the battlefield for such an incursion. Evacuation warnings have pushed hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians out of southern Lebanon. Israel has slowly but steadily expanded its footprint in this area, and is on the cusp of seizing Bint Jbeil—the so-called "capital of the resistance." Meanwhile, it has struck bridges and other connective infrastructure to complicate Hezbollah's efforts to move in reinforcements and materiel from positions farther north.
Modest diplomatic progress notwithstanding, IDF ground troops remain tasked with holding this area and protecting the border communities until Hezbollah's presence in the area is dismantled. After that, IDF planning suggests the Israeli army will hold this area as a "kill zone" in southern Lebanon (similar to the territory it holds alongside Hamas-controlled territory in Gaza) while continuing to relentlessly target the dangerous weapons Hezbollah has hidden farther north.
Critics have warned that this is a repeat of a failed strategy adopted by the Israelis at the end of the 20th century. But this revived security zone need not reproduce the failures of its 1985-2000 precursor, when Israel first engaged Hezbollah.
The very idea of a southern Lebanese security zone emerged from the wreckage of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, initially aimed at clearing the Palestine Liberation Organization from south Lebanon—but which reached Beirut and ultimately proved unpopular with many Israelis. Hezbollah's intervening rise precluded a complete Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, while Israeli public opinion prevented the pursuit of a decisive victory over the nascent group. The IDF was left in military limbo. Israeli troops fought the group in a series of operations and limited engagements that, individually and collectively, failed to reach Israeli aims. The Israeli population lost patience. This ultimately led to Israel's unilateral withdrawal in 2000, enabling Hezbollah to claim it had forcibly ejected the IDF from southern Lebanon and, thus, victory.
Looking back, there were several clear lessons for Israel. The IDF's doctrinal advantages lie in mobility, initiative, and overwhelming combined-arms maneuvers. Yet the constraining weight of public opinion pushed the army into static defense in southern Lebanon. Israeli troops hunkered down in outposts that Hezbollah could harass at will. Lebanese proxies, like the South Lebanon Army, were of little help. If anything, they became a liability, as their forces were both unprofessional and cruel.
The new southern security zone's purpose, by contrast, should not be to act as a mere buffer zone. Instead, it should enable the IDF to press its advantages and to facilitate direct, sustained, and offensive pressure by the IDF deep into Hezbollah's strongholds.
These operations will doubtlessly be costly. The longer Israeli soldiers are deployed in Lebanon, the higher the likelihood of mounting casualties. However, in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks and the multifront war now underway against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies, Israelis today are likely to view prolonged operations against the group, and even the loss of soldiers, as necessary. Recent polling shows most Israelis opposed halting operations against Hezbollah, with these sentiments particularly pronounced among the country's northerners.
There is, to be sure, an element of resignation to this strategy. Reviving a security zone amounts to an admission that Lebanon will remain either unwilling or unable to disarm Hezbollah on its own for the foreseeable future. It is also an admission that there is no other way to gain a handle on the northern front without exposing IDF forces to direct and sustained contact against a Hezbollah that remains determined to rearm and continue fighting.
But if Israel uses a zone in Lebanon's south not as an end in itself, but as part of a strategy to degrade Hezbollah faster than it can recover, the cumulative effect could be lethal for Hezbollah. To the extent that the Lebanese government steps up, perhaps as a result of the ongoing negotiations in Washington, the IDF can reduce its operations in tandem and consider transferring control of pacified areas of the revived security zone to the Lebanese Armed Forces. Peace would not emerge overnight, but a security zone could yield durable quiet along the frontier and non-belligerency between Israel and Lebanon. Over time, the absence of war and mutual bloodletting resulting from quieter borders may facilitate ongoing Israeli-Lebanese talks and eventually make normalization a possibility.