A third round of direct Lebanon-Israel talks is underway in Washington, with a critical deadline looming: the current cessation of hostilities expires Sunday, May 17. Lebanese envoy Simon Karam and Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser Yossi Draznin are negotiating while Secretary of State Rubio travels with President Trump in Beijing — a telling absence. The talks are escalating in seriousness — higher-level envoys have replaced the initial ambassador-level sessions — but the diplomatic window is narrow. Israeli air strikes killed 22 people in southern Lebanon on Thursday, including eight children, even as diplomats conferred. The strikes targeted vehicles, villages, and what Israel described as Hezbollah weapons storage and rocket launchers. Hezbollah’s leader Naim Qassem dismissed the Washington talks, stating his group would “not abandon the battlefield.” Since the current round of fighting began on March 2 — two days after the joint US-Israel strikes on Iran — at least 2,896 people have been killed in Lebanon, and more than 1.6 million displaced. On the Israeli side, 18 soldiers and 4 civilians have died.
The received wisdom
The mainstream international community’s position on Lebanon is clear and largely correct as a matter of humanitarian priority: the strikes must stop, the ceasefire must hold, and the underlying conflict — Hezbollah’s armed presence in southern Lebanon in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, and Israel’s periodic violations of Lebanese sovereignty — must be addressed through negotiation and international monitoring rather than military force. The toll on Lebanese civilians, who bear the overwhelming brunt of a conflict that Hezbollah invited and Israel has escalated, is unconscionable by any reasonable reading of proportionality. The UN’s UNIFIL mission has reported Israeli military activity near its positions, the use of drones causing explosions near peacekeepers, and what amounts to the systematic demolition of entire towns in the south. More than 10,600 homes have been damaged or destroyed since the ceasefire was announced. The international community’s push for a durable settlement, backed by US pressure, is the only available mechanism for stopping a war that has been running well past the point of strategic logic.
A different read
The problem with the Washington talks is not that they are happening — they are welcome, and the mere fact of direct Lebanon-Israel negotiation is historically significant, given that the two countries have no diplomatic relations and Lebanon’s constitution bars normalisation with Israel. The problem is structural: the most powerful armed actor in Lebanon — Hezbollah — is not at the table, has explicitly declared it will “not abandon the battlefield,” and controls sufficient military capacity to ensure that any agreement between the Lebanese government and Israel is worth only as much as Hezbollah chooses to let it be.
This is not a new problem. UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed in 2006 after the last major Lebanon-Israel war, called for the disarmament of Hezbollah and the withdrawal of all armed groups south of the Litani River. Twenty years later, that resolution was unimplemented in its core provisions. Hezbollah rebuilt its arsenal — to a level far exceeding its 2006 capacity — while the international community engaged in periodic diplomacy and UNIFIL maintained its presence as a monitoring mechanism without enforcement authority. The current conflict, triggered by the broader regional conflagration following the Iran strikes, is in some sense the delayed bill for two decades of deferred enforcement.
The Lebanese government’s position is genuinely constrained. Lebanon’s constitution legally bars normalisation with Israel, and President Aoun declined Trump’s request for a direct meeting with Netanyahu, correctly calculating that such a meeting would cause domestic political collapse. Lebanon’s central government has never had meaningful coercive power over Hezbollah, which is simultaneously a political party with seats in parliament, a social services network, a regional military proxy for Iran, and — now — an active combatant in a war with Israel. Expecting the Lebanese state to deliver Hezbollah’s disarmament is like expecting the British government of 1972 to deliver the IRA’s decommissioning: theoretically within their jurisdiction, practically beyond their capacity.
What would actually end this conflict? The answer most strategists give — though rarely in public, and especially not in Washington — is some form of negotiated settlement with Hezbollah itself, possibly brokered through Qatar or Turkey, involving security guarantees that neither Israel nor the US is currently prepared to offer. Israel’s war aims reportedly include not merely ceasefire but the permanent removal of Hezbollah’s military infrastructure from the border region. Hezbollah’s war aims include the survival of the Iranian-led regional order that gives it strategic purpose. These are not obviously bridgeable positions.
There is an analogy with Northern Ireland here, however imperfect. The Good Friday Agreement required bringing Sinn Féin — an organisation that many in London and Dublin regarded as irredeemably committed to violence — into formal negotiations. The inclusion was politically costly and morally uncomfortable. It also worked, eventually, because the armed actors were given a stake in a political outcome. No one is suggesting that Hezbollah deserves equivalence with Sinn Féin in the moral ledger. But the structural logic — that you cannot end a war by negotiating only with the parties who did not start it — has a universality that transcends particular cases.
What to watch
Watch whether a renewed ceasefire is agreed before Sunday’s deadline — the alternative is a significant escalation with Rubio occupied in Beijing and Trump seeking any diplomatic win he can find. Watch Hezbollah’s response to any agreement: whether it observes, ignores, or actively undermines a new cessation will determine whether the Washington talks produced anything real. Watch the UNIFIL situation — any attack on UN peacekeepers would dramatically internationalise the conflict and put pressure on European troop-contributing nations. And watch the internal Lebanese political dynamics: if the Washington talks produce a framework that requires genuine Hezbollah disarmament, the political crisis inside Lebanon could be as consequential as anything happening at the negotiating table.
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