Israel and Hezbollah have commenced a cease-fire that ends more than a year of cross-border air and rocket attacks and two months of Israel’s ground war to drive the Hezbollah terrorist group away from Israel’s northern frontier.
The cease-fire came into effect at 4 a.m. local time on Nov. 27 (9 p.m. ET on Nov. 26).
The deal calls for Israel to evacuate Lebanese territory within 60 days, and for the Lebanese army to move in and secure the area.
Lebanon has committed to having its army continue Israel’s work of destroying Hezbollah’s fortifications near the Israeli border, including tunnels meant to enable an Oct. 7-style attack.
President Joe Biden, in announcing the deal, emphasized that Hezbollah will not be allowed to threaten Israel’s security over the next 60 days, nor rebuild its terrorist infrastructure.
Civilians on both sides, Biden said, “will soon be able to safely return to their communities and begin to rebuild their homes, their schools, their farms, their businesses and their very lives.”
“We’ve determined this conflict will not be just another cycle of violence,” he said.
Biden pledged that no U.S. troops would be deployed to southern Lebanon, but that the United States, France, and others would provide “necessary assistance” to implement the deal “fully and effectively.”
“Let me be clear: If Hezbollah or anyone else breaks the deal and poses a direct threat to Israel, then Israel retains the right to self-defense consistent with international law, just like any other country,” Biden said on Nov. 26.
Biden called for a similar cease-fire in Gaza to end the suffering there and said Hamas “has a choice to make.” The terrorist group must release the hostages, including the Americans among them, to end the fighting and bring about a “surge of humanitarian relief.”
The deal was reached after Biden’s envoy, Amos Hochstein, traveled to Lebanon and then Israel to confer with Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, empowered by Hezbollah to negotiate on its behalf, and then with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s office said the Israeli Cabinet approved the deal, 10–1.
A senior U.S. administration official distinguished the agreement from that of 2006, after which Hezbollah never withdrew northward from the Israeli border region. The international community will remain engaged through what he called a “tripartite mechanism,” chaired by the United States and coordinating directly with the Lebanese army to monitor their occupation of the border zone and the withdrawal of Hezbollah’s heavy weaponry from it.
The French and U.S. militaries will coordinate with the Lebanese army. They and other countries will provide equipment, training, and financial support to the Lebanese army to strengthen it enough to carry out its task.
The international community will also support the rebuilding of south Lebanon, the official said.
“Hezbollah is extremely weak at this moment, both militarily and politically, and this is the opportunity for Lebanon to reestablish its sovereignty over its territory,” he said.
He acknowledged that Israel’s ultimate goal, after Hezbollah’s attack on Israel began after Oct. 7, 2023, was to return people to their homes in northern Israel “as safely and securely as possible” in a “durable cease-fire that they can trust.”
Reports emerged on Nov. 24 that a deal was close. Netanyahu was in agreement and planned to present it to his Cabinet on Nov. 25.
The agreement aims to end the fighting, which has killed more than 3,500 Lebanese—more than half Hezbollah fighters, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—and more than 70 Israelis plus 50 IDF soldiers killed in the offensive. The war forced between 60,000 and 80,000 residents of Israeli border communities from their homes for more than a year.
Under the agreement, Hezbollah must withdraw its forces north of the Litani River. That would put the terrorist group 10 to 15 miles from most of Israel’s northern frontier.
This is not the first time Israel has sought this withdrawal. It was called for as well in U.N. Resolution 1701, passed in 2006, to wind down a previous war between Hezbollah and Israel. But it was never implemented.
The U.N. has said it was not its peacekeepers’ responsibility to enforce the resolution. That responsibility belonged to Lebanon, which did not enforce it. The Lebanese army never occupied the south Lebanon border zone. Hezbollah heavily fortified the area over the years, building tunnels and bases often within sight of U.N. peacekeeping troops. And it moved sympathizers there from other parts of the country.
Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shia militia designated a terrorist group by the United States and at least 20 other countries, possesses significant influence in Lebanon and is considered the de facto government in Shia strongholds such as along Israel’s frontier, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs where it is headquartered.
It and its allies hold nearly half the seats in Lebanon’s parliament, and they have corresponding presences in the civil service and military.
Israeli military strategists say Hezbollah has prepared for an attack on Israel for years and that Hamas in the Gaza Strip got the idea for its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel from the Lebanese group.
Hamas attacked Israeli border communities, some of which were nearly destroyed, as well as Israeli military installations that were lightly staffed as a Jewish holiday was being observed.
Hamas killed 1,200 people, primarily Israeli civilians but also foreign nationals such as farmworkers and more than 300 IDF soldiers and reservists, and kidnapped 250 people. About 100 are still being held hostage. The IDF estimates at least a third of those are dead.
Thousands were wounded. New paraplegics and amputees overwhelmed Israel’s health care facilities.
Survivors, first responders, and emergency workers have detailed numerous atrocities, including rapes, beheadings, mutilations, and families found dead chained together. Hamas posted videos that day of much of the carnage.
Hamas hoped other enemies of Israel would join in, forcing the Jewish state to fight on multiple fronts.
But Israel immediately sent 100,000 IDF troops and reservists to the north, and Hezbollah blinked. On Oct. 8, 2023, the group expressed its support instead by beginning daily rocketing of Israel’s northern communities. It is estimated to have had between 150,000 and 200,000 missiles of various sizes and ranges supplied primarily by Iran, prior to Israel’s recent strikes.
One particularly egregious missile strike hit a Druze village in Israel’s Golan Heights on July 27. The missile hit a soccer field and killed 12 children, raising pressure in Israel to begin the long-forecast attack on Hezbollah. Israel had previously held off while intensively fighting Hamas to avoid a two-front war.
The rockets Hezbollah employs include anti-tank weapons that fly in a flat trajectory using a line of sight toward Israeli buildings up to six miles away. They impact in seconds and can’t be defended against using the Iron Dome missile interception system.
Unable to defend against such rockets and wanting to lessen its responsibility to protect vulnerable civilians, the IDF ordered the evacuation of 45 border communities.
Those residents have not been able to return home so far. In September, Netanyahu’s Cabinet formally added the residents’ return to its stated war aims.
Meanwhile, thousands of Lebanese civilians fled the south as the IDF, in an offensive beginning on Sept. 30, attacked border communities. Israel said many homes there were used to store weapons or hide Hezbollah activities, serving as human shields.
Many of those homes have been destroyed, lessening Hezbollah’s ability to attack Israel from the area.
Hezbollah has steadily vowed not to agree to a cease-fire until Israel ends its Gaza war. Hezbollah’s leadership ranks, though, have been decimated by targeted Israeli strikes, including the stunning September detonation of 1,500 booby-trapped Hezbollah pagers and hundreds more handheld radios the next day.
Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an airstrike on Sept. 27 targeting a leadership bunker outside Beirut.
Israelis were cautious about the deal as it approached. Some expressed wariness from the failure of previous agreements.
Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, a member of Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, said he would not back the deal if it were a “copy-paste” of the U.N. Security Resolution 1701.
David Azoulay, mayor of Metula, Israel’s northernmost city, denounced the pending agreement as a “surrender deal.”
Avichai Stern, mayor of Kiryat Shmona, just south of Metula, said, “This agreement hastens [a repeat of] Oct. 7 in the north, and this cannot happen.”
While a withdrawal north of the Litani River would distance Hezbollah from most of northern Israel, Metula sits about three miles from the river’s closest approach to Israel. Kiryat Shmona isn’t much further.
“I don’t understand how we went from total victory to total surrender,” Stern said, referring to Netanyahu’s slogan for the war. “What will our residents return to? To a destroyed city without security or a horizon? Someone here has lost it.”
Both Metula and Kiryat Shmona have been heavily damaged during the war.
And Hezbollah still possesses longer-range rockets that can hit Israel from outside the border zone, he said.
Israel may claim to have set Hezbollah back many years, he said, but it has made that claim before, including after 10 days of bombing in 2021, and it wasn’t always true.
But Israel’s 2006 border war with Hezbollah did, in fact, win the nation years of relative quiet, he said.
