Israel will delay the withdrawal of its forces from southern Lebanon beyond the 60-day limit of its cease-fire deal with the Hezbollah terrorist group because the Lebanese army hasn’t deployed fully to the area to enforce Hezbollah’s removal from the region, the prime minister’s office said on Jan. 24.
Under the terms of the agreement, which took effect on Nov. 27, Israel had 60 days to remove the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from south Lebanon. That deadline arrives at 4 a.m. local time on Sunday, Jan. 26.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the withdrawal was “contingent on the Lebanese army deploying in southern Lebanon and fully and effectively enforcing the agreement, while Hezbollah withdraws beyond the Litani [River].”
“Since the cease-fire has not yet been fully enforced by the Lebanese state, the gradual withdrawal process will continue, in full coordination with the United States.”
In a statement on Jan. 23, Hezbollah said any withdrawal delay would be “an unacceptable breach” of the agreement. The terrorist group called on the Lebanese state to act, saying it would have to deal with such a violation “through all means and methods guaranteed by international charter.”
The agreement temporarily halted more than a year of fighting between the Iranian-sponsored Shia terrorist group and Israel. The Palestinian Hamas terrorist group, which launched a land, sea, and air attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, had hoped Hezbollah would join the subsequent war. Hezbollah, while it had prepared for the same type of attack, limited its support to rocketing after the IDF rapidly reinforced northern Israel.
The intensive rocketing, from the group’s stores of an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 rockets, forced between 60,000 and 100,000 Israeli civilians from their homes near the border over the next two weeks when the IDF evacuated 43 communities.
The IDF responded with its own rocketing and air strikes. Fighting ramped up in September as the IDF, seeking to secure northern Israel so its residents could go home, launched a ground offensive.
Hezbollah’s leaders, including longtime head Hassan Nasrallah and military head Fuad Shukr, were killed by targeted Israeli airstrikes, as were numerous other leaders.
The group’s higher- and mid-level ranks were decimated by Mossad’s Sept. 17 pager attack, where thousands of booby-trapped pagers exploded on their Hezbollah users, and a similar follow-up attack the next day targeting the terrorists’ handheld radios.
Under the agreement, Hezbollah, which had heavily fortified southern Lebanon over the past two decades, must withdraw its forces north of the Litani River, which runs generally 10 miles or more from the Israeli border. Only the Lebanese Army and the U.N.’s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeeping force would be allowed to bear arms south of it.
“There have been positive movements where the Lebanese army and UNIFIL have taken the place of Hezbollah forces, as stipulated in the agreement,” Netanyahu’s spokesman, David Mencer, said in a press conference on Thursday.
“We’ve also made clear that these movements have not been fast enough, and there is much more work to do.”
Jean-Noel Barrot, foreign minister of France, which negotiated and is monitoring the cease-fire agreement along with the United States, said Israel was removing forces from Lebanon. He was speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.
The Lebanese army was going to locations of Hezbollah ammunition stores and destroying them, but more time was needed to “achieve results,” Barrot said.
Dismantling Hezbollah’s weapons stores is an Israeli priority, said the Alma Research and Education Center, an Israeli military and strategic think tank focusing on its northern border with Lebanon and Syria.
Its biggest test will be in areas south of the Litani where the IDF did not maneuver that still have “extensive terrorist infrastructures and significant Hezbollah weapons stockpiles.”
The IDF seized large amounts of Hezbollah arms during its ground maneuver, the Alma Center said. They include about 6,840 rocket-propelled grenade and anti-tank launchers, including rockets and missiles, 9,000 improvised explosive devices, 2,700 weapons and rifles, 300 observation devices, 60 anti-aircraft missiles, 20 vehicles, about 2,000 shells and rockets, and tens of thousands of computers, technical systems, and means of communication.
“Every day there are cease-fire violations, and every day we hear explosions near the border,” Sarit Zahavi, the Alma Center’s director, told Asian News International in an interview.
The IDF, in the delay, is only staying in “a couple of spots,” Elliot Chodoff, a reserve IDF major, military strategist, and former deputy chief of staff for the IDF’s Northern Command, told The Epoch Times. “This is not a capricious, ‘We’re hanging out there.’”
Hezbollah is in a rebuilding stage, so shattered was it by the IDF and Mossad attacks, its Iranian sponsors knocked back, and the Syrian government has fallen, he said. They aren’t in a position to resume the war against Israel—at least not yet. Israel knows Hezbollah is sending people back to the south disguised as civilians.
They’re “testing the waters,” he said. Israel’s leaders can’t make the same mistakes they did with both Hamas and Hezbollah before Oct. 7, 2023, ceding incremental threats—troop and arms buildups and small attacks—as not worth going to war for. Over time, such buildups became formidable, he said.
Now, the IDF has a “zero tolerance” policy for Hezbollah in the denied area south of the Litani, he said. And the United States and France have accepted Israel’s right to attack any Hezbollah presence it finds there if the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL don’t, he said.
Israel has no confidence in the U.N. force but some hopes in the Lebanese Army, Chodoff said.
Both forces failed to evict Hezbollah and pacify the south after U.N. Resolution 1701, passed in 2006, required it. They’re now expected to carry that out.
Newly elected Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, at his inauguration on Jan. 9, pledged to “affirm the state’s right to a monopoly on the carrying of arms,” according to Al Arabiya News.
Hezbollah planned for an Oct. 7-style attack for years, Chodoff said, one far more massive than Hamas launched that day with 3,000 troops. Hezbollah’s plan was “ten times bigger,” he said, something Israel fully understood only after capturing tunnels bigger than Hamas’s and large underground installations.
The IDF knew of Hezbollah’s Radwan attack force designated for the attack but didn’t know the scale, he said. “It was pretty huge.”
Martin Sherman, director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, told The Epoch Times the IDF’s delay was a good idea.
“You have to be pretty naive to think that the leopard will change its spots,” he said. “Unless Hezbollah is completely defanged and stripped of all its military abilities, it’s only a matter of time before it’s back to its old mischief.
“It’s in its DNA. It does not have much raison d'etre if not attacking Israel or planning to attack Israel, or planning some aggression against the Jewish state.”
Sherman said it is questionable if the Lebanese Army would hold up its end of the deal.
“The cease-fire is a pipe dream. Hezbollah won’t resign themselves to peace,” he said.
“The best Israel can hope for is grudging acceptance of a Jewish state. The least they can strive for is to be greatly feared.”
