In Lebanon, Both Israel and the Lebanese Government Want Hezbollah to Be Disarmed

In Lebanon, both Israel and the Lebanese government want Hezbollah to be disarmed, and its civilian wing to be dismantled. But so far, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has not been willing to take on Hezbollah, deeming it still too powerful to challenge, despite the battering it has taken from the IDF, with thousands of its combatants killed and nearly 4,000 so severely wounded in the “pagers caper” that they will never fight again. It still has an estimated 40,000 combatants; the Lebanese Armed Forces has 85,000 men under arms, but it is Hezbollah fighters, not the Lebanese soldiers, who are battle-hardened. The IDF has also managed to reduce Hezbollah’s huge store of missiles and rockets by 90%. Israel has been doing all the heavy lifting, responding to every Hezbollah rocket or drone attack on Israeli civilians with more ferocious air attacks on Hezbollah combatants, weapons depots, command-and-control centers, and the terror group’s network of tunnels where it can hide both its weapons and combatants.

Sarit Zehavi is the founder and president of the Alma Research and Education Center, a well-respected Israeli think tank, dedicated to researching the security challenges on Israel’s northern borders. She has just issued a report here on the folly of settling for another ceasefire with Hezbollah. “Israel cannot settle for another ceasefire with Lebanon, Alma Center head says – interview,” by Gabriel Colodro, The Media Line, April 22, 2026:

Israeli officials are still debating what comes next in southern Lebanon, including whether to pursue a more permanent ceasefire. For Sarit Zehavi, founder and president of the Alma Research and Education Center, the real question is not the pause itself but whether it produces a lasting change in the security reality along Israel’s northern border.

Zehavi said the current debate cannot be understood without revisiting what she sees as the central failure of the past two decades. “Between May 2000 and until actually the end of the previous war in 2023, there was no Israeli presence in Lebanon and there was no buffer zone in Lebanon,” she told The Media Line. The area south of the Litani River, she noted, was supposed to be free of “any illegitimate weapon,” but “it never happened, and nobody enforced that.”

In her account, the problem did not begin with the current campaign. After Israel’s maneuver in 2024, the army remained on only five hills overlooking Israeli communities, a posture she said quickly proved inadequate. Hezbollah’s Radwan forces were still able to maneuver near the border, she said, while rockets could be launched from both north and south of the Litani….

It is true that the IDF did not maintain a presence in Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah attacks until after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack. It was then, on October 8, that Hezbollah joined Hamas’ war against Israel, and Israeli forces entered Lebanon.

Zehavi rejected the language of occupation, saying it distorts Israel’s objective. “I don’t accept the word occupation, because we have no interest in keeping lands of Lebanon,” she said. “We want to make peace with Lebanon.” But, she stressed, peace and a ceasefire are not the same thing. “We are not interested in just another ceasefire,” she said. “It will not only fail to solve the problem but… will enable Hezbollah to rebuild and to threaten us again.”…

Zehavi is right: while Israel may occupy part of Lebanon now — between the Litani River and the border — Jerusalem has no interest in permanently holding onto that territory. Its ”occupation” is temporary, and will end once Hezbollah has been disarmed and dismantled. Using the term “occupation” to describe Israel’s temporary buffer zone makes the IDF out to be more aggressive than it is; the IDF is there only to make sure that Hezbollah respects its commitment under UNSC 1701 to fully withdraw north of the Litani.