Seven rounds of US-brokered talks and six Israel-Lebanon deals later, President Trump maintains that the ceasefire is “working.” What exactly that means and who exactly it’s meant to be working for is unclear, but the residents of southern Lebanon are telling a very different story.
Some 24 villages within southern Lebanon have been totally destroyed, according to Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz. That’s just the start of the matter, as locals have overwhelmingly been expelled from the area, no timetable has been given for them ever being allowed to return, and Katz is openly talking about a “long-term presence” in Lebanon, along with the various other territories Israel has occupied in the region.
To the extent the ceasefire can be said to be working at all, it’s fair to say it’s doing what it was designed to do. None of the six deals Israel and Lebanon agreed to ever required Israel to withdraw from occupied Lebanon, nor indeed to even stop attacking Lebanese territory. The obligations were almost entirely on Hezbollah to stop resisting, and since they were never a party to the deal in the first place, they’re understandably loathe to comply.
Even the “pilot zones,” mostly-destroyed villages Israel agreed to withdraw from on condition that the Lebanese Army occupy them instead. The army managed to get into a single village, Israel has been hassling them non-stop, and Israeli officials now say the Lebanese are “not doing enough” in that village.
The “pilot zones” were only meant to be symbolic in the first place, but the LAF has persistently found themselves blocked from moving into the areas, and IDF troops even snuck into one of the zones to construct an earthen barrier, around the same time Lebanese troops were wounded when unexploded ordinance was found in the same area.
Katz continues to brag about the “exceptional skill” of the IDF and how many Lebanese villages he’s destroyed outright, and President Trump may be able to insist that the ceasefire is “working” because, from their perspective, it may well be. But from the perspective of the southern Lebanese, working looks an awful lot like forced population transfers and deliberate attacks on civilian targets, illegal under international law.
