While France and the US seek to implement a 21-day temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, the belligerents exclude the option. And Lebanon is on the brink of hell
Wednesday, September 25: Israel’s UN envoy, Danny Danon, ensures to the General Assembly that his country does not seek a full-scale war. Thursday, September 26: the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, while the Israeli Prime Minister is en route to New York, denies it. Firmly. “I have ordered the army to continue fighting in Lebanon with all its strength,” he was reported saying, echoed by Foreign Minister Israel Katz. “There will be no ceasefire in the north. We will continue to fight against the Hezbollah terrorist organization with all our strength until victory and the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes,” the latter posted on X.
In between, 173 more dead and 556 injured later – the ones recorded in Lebanon the past two days alone – not counting the amount of destruction suffered by civilian infrastructure, France and the US have been working to implement a 21-day temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, set to allow time for broader negotiations.
The pause in hostilities would apply to the Blue Line, the demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel, and would allow the warring parties to negotiate towards a potential diplomatic resolution of the conflict. Twelve signatories of a joint statement issued by the White House urged for an immediate resolution, despite temporary, “to provide space for diplomacy” which would enable “civilians on both sides of the border to return to their homes in safety.”
Yet, eleven months from the beginning of cross border fighting, negotiations have had no development; the concept of safety turned to be the emblem of the international community’s impotence – when not collusion – in the disruption of Gaza; and south Lebanon, its roads and villages, have gone lost. Without any home to return to, for the nearly 500,000 displaced – 90,500 of whom only in the last week – while Gaza stands as the specter of an undesirable future, it seems hard to trust such proposals. Especially given the fact that officials in a background briefing emphasized that it would not apply to the end of Israel’s restless onslaught in Gaza – a point that Hezbollah has claimed inalienable since the beginning -, and that the US, while continuing discussions to push for the proposed three-week truce, announced almost 9 billion dollars in military aid for Israel.
The 24-hour ultimatum demanded by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri for the achievement of a decisive diplomatic solution – which has already expired – while the Israeli bombs raze Tyre, Nabatieh and Baalbeck to the ground, has put Lebanon under a pressure that it had not been accustomed to, having the country normalized, for almost a year now, the state of low-intensity war in the south and the Beqaa Valley, as well as the massive internal displacement in the same regions. As if, all of a sudden, the future of Lebanon, the implementation of the much acclaimed Resolution 1701, the lost diplomatic efforts, the distrust of diplomacy, the categorical refusal of Hezbollah to any negotiations with Israel until a definitive ceasefire is reached in the nearby besieged Gaza Strip – as if, all of a sudden, the dead, perceived, described and acclaimed as martyrs in the communities to which they belong – did not count, and eleven months of war fought by the ‘Party of God’ could end without the consultation of the same, excluded from the talks.
That is why the joint statement of the UN countries sounds both illusory and contradictory; the desperate outcry of Secretary General Antonio Guterres – “hell is breaking loose” – so easily ignored; their call “on all parties, including the governments of Israel and Lebanon, to endorse the temporary ceasefire immediately” out of a reality in which the main aggressor is calling for the disruption of Lebanon “until victory,” Hezbollah steps back from any compromise, and the whole world wants a ceasefire that the belligerents clearly don’t.
