What has befallen Lebanon over the last two years is nothing short of a devastating earthquake.

It’s part of the deal that the Biden administration struck with Israel — a deal that was pursued with vengeance by Donald Trump.

After Oct. 7, the Biden administration conferred on Israel the right to commit genocide in Gaza, and the genocide continues unabated.

In Lebanon, the Israeli government pursued similar savage strategies against Hizbullah and against Lebanon as a whole (the entire population of South Lebanon has been affected, either in murder or in injury or in displacement or in destruction of properties). Israel never (since the Zionist gangs of the 1930s) distinguishes between combatants and civilians in fighting wars.

Israel and Zionist media have been referring to its “war against Hizbullah” or its “war against Hamas” when tens of thousands of people have been slaughtered by Israel in the process. Some 1,000 Palestinian children have died since the ceasefire deal in Gaza, which was announced with great fanfare by the Trump administration.

Those Israeli wars in the aftermath of Oct. 7, were the total wars that Goebbels spoke about during WWII. Israel is intent on exterminating the enemy — in terms of people and infrastructures (homes count as “infrastructures” in Israeli military and political parlance) and not armies or armed groups.

Israel received unconditional support from the Biden and later Trump administrations and knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iran. They knew no method of mass killings would be denied to them by the U.S. Israel went about its mission with great biblical vengeance (literally as Benjamin Netanyahu cited Amalek from the Old Testament).

Aftermath of 2024

With Lebanon, Israel never adhered to the “cessation of hostilities” agreement which was arranged by the U.S. in November 2024. Hizbullah was deeply and devastatingly hurt by a series of Israeli strikes and devious plots in that year. Top political leaders were killed along with top military commanders. Almost all of the elite Rudwan military force was wiped out in one strike.

Israel used massive violence leaving no room for survivors — even if it required the destruction of entire city blocks. Hizbullah suffered thousands of casualties from pager attacks (along with children and other civilians. The pagers were also used by medics and nurses).

Most devastatingly for Hizbullah, Israel deeply penetrated its intelligence (largely electronically). Israel knew most of its hiding places and the locations of strategic missiles that could destroy entire buildings in Israel (missiles Iran presumably used to destroy the Weizmann Institute). Hizbullah was fighting with its hands tied behind its back and largely blinded, literally and figuratively. Israel enjoyed a great advantage.

As the 2024 “cessation of hostilities” agreement set out, Israel was fighting a war without a response from the other side. For fifteen long months, Israel was bombing anywhere it wished in Lebanon while Hizbullah was inactive and non-responsive militarily.

Many assumed the party was lethally wounded and would not rise again. That essentially put the onus of defense on the Lebanese government. Taking advantage of this dramatic decline of the “resistance axis” (after the fall of the Syrian regime), the U.S. and Israel set up a new political order in Lebanon.

The Fall of Assad

We still don’t know precisely how the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was arranged. He clearly lost much of his support, even among members of the ruling elite. From the outside it looked like a coup agreed on by the U.S., Qatar, Turkey and Israel, the four principal governments behind the 14-year jihadist insurgency to topple him.

After al-Assad’s departure, the U.S. put Joseph Aoun in power as the Lebanese president. He had previously served as commander-in-chief of the Lebanese Army and in that capacity was a known quality for the U.S. government. The U.S. is the chief supplier and overseer of the Lebanese Army, and it uses that capacity not to arm the army, but to deprive it of the strategic weapons that would enable it to defend Lebanon against Israeli aggression. The Israeli lobby in D.C. decides which arms Lebanon can and can’t have.

But the election of Aoun was also partly due to the arrogance and intransigence of Hizbullah. As soon as the term of President Michel Aoun (no relation) ended in 2022, Hizbullah insisted that it (with its Shiite ally, the Amal Movement) wouldn’t allow the election of any Maronite president other than Sulayman Franjiyyah. He is a loyal ally who was recently put on the U.S. sanctions list because of his alliance with Hizbullah.

By precedent, Lebanese presidents are always Maronites, prime ministers Sunni and the parliament speaker Shiite. That a Shiite party was trying to force the election of a Maronite president was an indication that Hizbullah’s political behavior had become arrogant and tinged with a degree of hubris.

The U.S. and its allies were waiting for the right moment to secure the election of their choices for prime minister and president. Hizbullah had no choice at the time and couldn’t swim against the tide. The balance of forces — in Lebanon and in the region — had been radically altered by 2024. Not Finished Yet

Hizbullah’s obituary was prematurely drafted, especially after the September 2024 assassination of Nasrallah and the massive pagers’ attack which was — as Nasrallah himself conceded — an enormous success for Israeli intelligence. Hizbullah was isolated and many Lebanese grew weary or opposed to its military role at the border with Palestine – and in Syria in defense of the regime of the Assad family.

But the new leader of Hizbullah, the non-charismatic, Naim Qasim, has proved — thus far — to be an able leader organizationally. He quickly imposed new stringent security measures to minimize the chance of Israeli assassination of leaders and party members.

He also followed Nasrallah’s practice of regularly delivering pre-recorded speeches. His speechmaking carries none of Nasrallah’s qualities: he does not have the eloquence, sense of humor or easy, improvisational delivery of his predecessor. But he restored the effectiveness of the group even while failing to produce influential propaganda that could reach most Lebanese and Arabs, as Nasrallah had done.

His speeches — and the party’s behavior — show that it has become less sensitive to Lebanese public opinion and keener in coordinating all steps with the Iranian regime – and specifically the Revolutionary Guards, who have long invested in Hizbullah.

Yet again, Israel is frustrated in its war against the armed resistance group (it is actually an Israeli war against all of Lebanon because the apartheid state does not distinguish between civilians and combatants).

Like in Gaza, it pursues genocidal policies, hoping to finish off as much as it can of Shiite civilian society in the South. It also hoped that the massive scale of killing and destruction would drive a wedge between the Shiite community and Hizbullah. That last plan failed miserably.

Public opinion polls (including this last one by a reputable Lebanese firm) prove that some 90-95 percent of Shiites still support the “duo alliance” (as the alliance between the two Shiite organizations, Hizbullah and Amal, is dubbed in Arabic). The pro-U.S./Saudi camp made a big mistake in expressing hostility to Hizbullah in blatantly sectarian, anti-Shiite terms: terms like “they don’t look like us” or “they don’t resemble us.”

Taking advantage of the seeming weakness of Hizbullah, and assuming that Iran was falling apart as a regime or a country, the U.S. rushed the Lebanese-Israeli negotiations in Washington, assuming that Hizbullah’s opposition would not matter.

But that formula was tried before in 1983, when the U.S. and Israel forced the May 17 peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel. It was abrogated in 1984 and was never ratified by the state. The balance of forces had quickly switched by 1984 in favor of the Druze-Shiite and pro-Syrian camp in general.

New Circumstances

The situation today is different. The Shiite duos don’t have any allies left; the Saudi camp bought off most of the non-Shiite allies of Hizbullah. Only Sulayman Franjiyyah and the Syrian Social National Party remained faithful to the alliance.

But Hizbullah did not surrender. Far from it, it surprised enemies and allies alike by its stiff resistance to Israeli attacks in South Lebanon in the last stage of the present war.

Instead of retreating like the PLO had done in 1982, it faced the enemy where it could. But in a strategy different from the one pursued in the July 2006 war, Israel did not mass troops and invade in large numbers. Fearing direct combat with battle-tested Hizbullah fighters, Israel instead destroyed villages and towns before it advanced in small numbers, often abandoning a place during the night fearing Hizbullah attacks.

On the other side, Hizbullah reverted to their practice of the mid-1980s: instead of throwing large numbers of fighters into battle, they launched small disconnected units throughout South Lebanon. Each small unit had a commander who was authorized to make decisions for the group without having to wait for orders from Beirut (like U.S. Marines’ training).

Those units are operating without any communication devices. Runners (and people on foot in general) are the only ones trusted to deliver messages between leaders and units. The party learned its lesson from the 2024 war.

Israel is relying on the U.S. to impose dictates on Lebanon. The Lebanese regime has no leverage itself and rejects Iran’s strong leverage gained after defeating the U.S. and Israel to impose a ceasefire in the South during the negotiations in Islamabad.

The pro-Saudi, Lebanese prime minister audaciously declared he would not accept any intervention on Lebanon’s behalf — even if that intervention was aimed at ending the war with Israel. Nawwaf Salam told Asharq Al-Awsat: “No one negotiates for Lebanon except for the Lebanese state.”

He fears Saudi displeasure and U.S. rejection. But Israel is in no mood to make concessions; the unconditional support and indulgence accorded it by the Biden administration has continued under Trump, despite leaks to point to a public show of Trump’s displeasure with Netanyahu (we saw the same under Joe Biden when ostensible frustration with Netanyahu never amounted to shifts in policy).

The United States has agreed in its MOU with Iran that Israel must cease its attacks on Lebanon and withdraw its troops from the country. It is a point Iran is insisting on if there is to be peace with the U.S. This has handed Israel the opportunity to sabotage the Iran-U.S. negotiations by continuing its attacks on Lebanon. Iran struck Israel on June 7 in retaliation – not for a renewed attack on Iran – but for Israeli aggression on Lebanon.

This has left Trump, in a seeming bind. He has confirmed publicly that he has had harsh words with Netanyahu to try to get him to stop attacking Lebanon. If Trump is serious about this, he could tell Israel the U.S. will not defend it if Iran again retaliates.

Netanyahu, for domestic political reasons as well as in pursuit of the Greater Israel project, seeks to keep the war against Lebanon and Iran going.

An Impossible Deal

But in Lebanon, Israel is failing in its goal of “dismantling” Hizbullah. It wants the Lebanese Army, which does not want to be used to die for Israeli interests, to fight Hizbullah, even if the mission triggers a civil war — as the Lebanese Army commander, Rudolph Heikal keeps warning. (I have it on good authority that the president asked Heikal to resign on account that the US does not have confidence in him, but Heikal reportedly told the president: “I won’t resign. You have to fire me.”)

Nevertheless, as a compromise with Israel, the U.S. arranged a deal between Beirut and Tel Aviv on June 26 that indeed calls for the Lebanese Army to disarm Hizbullah – a task it will be impossible to fulfill. In this deal, the Lebanese prime minister actually agreed to allow Israel to continue occupying his country until the Lebanese Army defeats Hizbullah, despite the Lebanese commander’s warning. Aoun (not known for his intellectual skills or geo-political knowledge) insists that he will end the state of war between Lebanon and Israel “forever.”)

Such a plan has been discussed for decades and everyone knows the Lebanese Army is incapable of disarming Hizbullah. This means that the agreement will effectively allow the indefinite Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory.

This accords with Israel’s belief that there is no non-mass violent solution to its problems. As U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance rebuked Israel: “You can’t kill your way out” of your national security problem. But that statement was not, as usual, followed up with a firm U.S. stance vis-à-vis Israel. Trump keeps repeating that he is the best president for Israel — ever, and he may be right about that despite the stiff competition from his predecessors.

For the moment, the crisis in Lebanon shows no end in sight. Lebanese events and developments, however, tend not to stay rigidly static for long; the balance of forces are subject to shifts and sometimes extreme ones.

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