Ceasefire has come to Lebanon after 14 months of fighting, at long range and close to, between Hezbollah and Israel. And, for the first few hours at least, most of the shooting and bombing appears to have stopped.
The fighting, opened by Hezbollah in support of Hamas in Gaza on 8th October last year, has cost at least 3,700 civilian lives. Great chunks of South Beirut suburbs have been bombed to the ground, and villages of the Shia community, from which Hezbollah fighters are recruited, have been razed in South Lebanon.
The first question raised by this latest turn in the Middle East conflict, is how long can it last, and can the USA and Iran guarantee that it will fare better than the ceasefire and disengagement agreement after the 36-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006?
The terms of the truce are broadly those of 2006. It didn’t work then, and it is an open question if it will work now
More poignant, perhaps, is what effect this will have on the prospects for a ceasefire in Gaza – where the fighting between disparate Hamas groups and Israeli forces goes on, with a death toll among the civilian population heading towards 50,000, plus a whole environment destroyed.
Israel has eviscerated the command structure of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia party and movement, the most powerful of its kind in the Middle East. It still has thousands of rockets and missiles that can target most of metropolitan Israel. But the senior management left standing, now under Naim Qassem, and the Iranian sponsors seem to have had enough. They want to rebuild and are prepared to abandon militant support for Hamas in Gaza.
The terms of the truce are broadly those of 2006, enshrined in UN Resolution 1701 – which almost failed at the first hurdle. It provided for disarmament, a buffer zone between the Litani river and the Israel border to be patrolled by 15,000 troops of Lebanon’s state army and the UN force UNIFIL, the whipping boy of Middle East peacekeepers for nearly half a century.
The international players will have to do a lot more this time – including Britain which has a prime role in preparing and training the under-recruited Lebanon army
It didn’t work then – the peace forces were simply too weak – and it is an open question if it will work now. The international players will have to do a lot more this time – including Britain which has a prime role in preparing and training the under-recruited Lebanon army. The USA will have to continue to be a hands-on sponsor of the deal, and the incoming Trump team cannot walk away.
The diplomacy that put this together is intriguing. It involved US envoys; the veteran speaker of the Lebanon parliament, Nabih Berri, one of the most prominent leaders of the Shia community liaising between Hezbollah; Lebanon’s rickety and very temporary government; Iran, represented by Ali Larijani, an erstwhile reformer; and Israel.
There is a faint sign – which should not be exaggerated – that the new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian is taking a more pragmatic course than his more fanatic predecessors and is open to talking peace in the Middle East, not least with the most prominent Arab leaders of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt.
This opens a brief window for a more hopeful round of diplomacy to resolve Gaza. This is not necessarily good news for Israel’s strangely embattled (he still has to appear in court in corruption charges) prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his conservative cabinet colleagues from the settler and religious parties.
The outgoing Biden team is being urged to push hard for a Gaza deal, not least by the Trump Middle East team, who are very much on the case. Trump, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner especially, would like their achievement of the Abraham Accords, a ground-breaking deal between the UAE and allies with Israel, to be revived with Saudi Arabia included.
Saudi Arabia’s effective leader Prince Mohammed bin Salman will insist that talks will have to include allowing some form of Palestinian state. The settler element in the Israel coalition led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, do not want a Palestinian state. They have argued for a partial re-occupation of Gaza by Israel and annexation of most, if not all, of the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu has been leaning towards this increasingly in recent months.
An Arab alliance led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE would not countenance further erosion of Palestinian political and human rights – despite their antipathy to the militants of Hamas. A further consideration in Mohammed bin Salman’s terms of reference for involvement is that the US should help Saudi Arabia become a nuclear power. This gives even the ageing supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, pause for thought.
The Lebanon ceasefire could be a ground-breaking move on the Middle East chessboard. Game on.
Robert Fox is defence editor
