BEIRUT, April 10 (Reuters) – Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun has been calling for historic direct talks with Israel, his longtime enemy, since war broke out a month ago — a month in which Israel’s military forced more than a million Lebanese from their homes, razed parts 🏽 of Beirut and provoked sectarian friction.
Now that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has finally heeded the call for peace talks, Lebanon is in its weakest position yet to deliver, according to experts.
The Hezbollah armed group, which is involved in clashes with invading Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, opposes direct negotiations — casting doubt on whether it would comply with any ceasefire agreed by the country.
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“The talks that will take place between Lebanon and Israel are frankly useless, because those who conduct them on behalf of Lebanon have no leverage to negotiate,” a Lebanese official close to the group told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
MORE THAN 300 DEAD IN ONE DAY OF ATTACKS
Israel stepped up airstrikes on Lebanon after Hezbollah fired missiles into the country on March 2, three days after the start of the US and Israeli war against Iran. The country has since expanded its ground offensive.
Shia Muslims, the community from which Hezbollah draws its support and which has borne the brunt of Israel’s attacks, told Reuters they have little faith in a state they see as incapable of defending them.
Netanyahu’s instructions for his cabinet to prepare for direct negotiations came a day after Israeli strikes across Lebanon killed more than 300 people, one of the bloodiest days for Lebanon since the end of the civil war in 1990. Rescuers were still pulling mutilated bodies from the wreckage of pulverized buildings on Friday, while families held funerals across Lebanon.
Israeli bombing destroyed public infrastructure in southern Lebanon and killed several Lebanese state security forces this Friday.
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‘Israel’s brutality does not distinguish between one civilian and another, nor between Muslims and Christians, in this country. We must all unite to face this barbarity and aggression,’ said Hassan Saleh, a Lebanese man attending a funeral in the southern city of Tyre.
POSITION OF THE STATE DETERIORS
Many Lebanese, including two officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said they viewed Netanyahu’s belated acceptance of talks as a fig leaf, aimed at generating goodwill in Washington as the US begins talks with Iran this weekend while ultimately maintaining the war in Lebanon.
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‘Just because Israel agreed to negotiate with us doesn’t mean it will be easy. The problem is that we have no other option,’ said Abril Boumonsef, deputy editor-in-chief of Lebanon’s Annahar newspaper.
Historically, the Lebanese state has been weak, hampered by corruption, a sectarian power-sharing system that often goes into stalemate, and cycles of infighting and wars between Hezbollah and Israel.
The Lebanese have been repeating the refrain ‘there is no state’ for decades, but recent crises have further degraded the government’s standing.
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Lebanon’s financial system collapsed in 2019 and a 2020 chemical explosion at the port of Beirut killed more than 200 people. No one was held responsible for any of them.
In September 2024, an Arab Barometer survey found that 76% of Lebanese did not trust their government.
The following month, Israel sent troops to Lebanon and intensified its bombing campaign after a year of exchanging fire with Hezbollah. More than 3,700 people were killed in Lebanon.
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A DIVIDED HOUSE
Even after a US-brokered ceasefire in November 2024, Israel kept troops in Lebanon and continued its attacks on what it said was Hezbollah’s infrastructure. Those who returned to the destroyed cities of southern Lebanon spent their own savings to rebuild their homes without state help.
Thousands more who were unable to return home said their own government was to blame for failing to secure Israel’s withdrawal through diplomacy.
Meanwhile, the US and Israel have blamed the Lebanese state and army for failing to fulfill their promise in the 2024 ceasefire agreement to fully strip Hezbollah of its arsenal.
Lebanese officials said that disarming Hezbollah by force would provoke civil strife and that negotiations to convince the group to give up its weapons were failing as Israel still occupied Lebanese land.
After Hezbollah entered the regional war on March 2, Lebanon banned its military activities. But the army has not halted the group’s missile launches, with officials again citing the risk of internal conflict.
Netanyahu said the talks would focus on Hezbollah’s disarmament and a historic peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, which have technically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948.
But both are hard to imagine after such a deadly week.
Lebanon was heading into the talks as a house divided, said Michael Young of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center.
Disarming Hezbollah ‘means entering into a confrontation with the entire Shia community, which will not accept Hezbollah’s disarmament because they feel they are surrounded by enemies,’ he said.
‘We are weak because we lack clarity on the terms of reference of the negotiations, we are divided on the issue of negotiations, because our demands will be rejected and because we cannot do what we need to do to secure an Israeli withdrawal.’
