Efforts to try to get Hezbollah to agree to disarm appear to have failed, with Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem announcing Wednesday evening that the group will not agree to give up its weapons, its land, or its right to resist.
Lebanon’s government has been in talks with Hezbollah according to recent reports, built around a US proposal / demand to fully disarm Hezbollah and every other faction within Lebanon by November in return for talks with Israel about normalizing relations.
It’s unclear the US could have delivered on this promise even if Hezbollah had agreed to disarm, since the proposals were effectively the same as came with last year’s ceasefire, which Israel never followed through on and which the US never called them to account over.
Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem | Image is CC 2.0 from Wikimedia
Since Israel is actively occupying parts of southern Lebanon, launching airstrikes nearly daily, and launching ground raids against the south, it is unsurprising that Hezbollah isn’t willing to unilaterally disarm on the slim hope that Israel will actually reciprocate.
Israel wasn’t even willing to engage in talks unless Hezbollah was disarmed first, and then it’s not clear that the normalization would necessarily end with either the withdrawal of Israeli troops or the end of Israeli airstrikes on Lebanese soil.
The US Treasury Department announced a new round of sanctions against Hezbollah-linked financial group Al-Qard al-Hassan on the grounds they helped Hezbollah evade other sanctions. They did not explicitly link this to the recent demands.
Qassem argued the question of armed groups inside Lebanon was purely a domestic matter and that they would not be convinced to disarm by US threats. The current government is reportedly keen on the idea of taking a full monopoly on all weapons in the country, but it’s not clear they have a mechanism to make that happen.
Since the ceasefire went into effect in November, Israel has launched several thousand strikes on Lebanese territory, and has never withdrawn its ground troops entirely from Lebanese soil. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has not launched a single attack on Israeli territory since then, though Israel regularly alleges Hezbollah’s violation of the spirit of the ceasefire by their very existence.
