Following weeks of on-again, off-again talks about the “pilot zones,” a handful of Lebanon villages which Israel is meant to withdraw from first and hand over to the Lebanese military, the US State Department is now claiming that the first of those zones has officially been launched.
The State Department said that the villages of Froun, Srifa and Zawtar al-Gharbiya saw operations begin on Monday, a claim immediately thrown into doubt by the mayors of those respective villages.
Froun’s mayor said there had been no changes in his village, and IDF troops remained on its outskirts. Srifa’s mayor said he hadn’t even been told the program was meant to have started, and that the Lebanese military are there but indeed they’d been there since the war began and seemingly nothing had changed.
An Israeli flag hangs from a building in Lebanon as seen from the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border, in northern Israel, July 5, 2026 REUTERS
The IDF has suggested that its first redeployment will happen tomorrow, though it is unclear how much of a pullback will happen, and Israeli troops continue to express concerns about allowing the Lebanese military, which includes Shi’ites, to take security control over southern villages.
Zawtar al-Gharbiya reportedly hasn’t seen the introduction of Lebanese troops at all, despite the program being declared underway, because Israeli forces are still too close for them to safely enter the area.
The pilot zones were only ever meant to be “symbolic,” allowing Israel to cede a tiny fraction of the occupied territory in southern Lebanon while claiming they were showing good faith in doing so and avoiding any timeline on the pullout from Lebanon in general. Though such a deal was agreed to weeks ago, Israel had postponed it indefinitely, and it is only now that a portion of the agreed to zones will reportedly be ceded back.
