At the heart of desperate diplomatic efforts to stop Israel from invading southern Lebanon is a decades-old United Nations resolution aimed at demilitarizing the region and protecting Israel from cross-border attacks by Hezbollah. .
All States Parties agree that this measure, Security Council resolution 1701, has been a complete failure. They also agree that reviving it may be Israel’s only way out of the war as it spreads northward.
“Our desired outcome is full implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters Monday regarding continued Israeli attacks in Lebanon.
Miller said that would mean the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces from the Israel-Lebanon border and the deployment of the United Nations and Lebanese forces to the buffer zone in southern Lebanon that the resolution sought to create.
The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1701 in August 2006 as part of the ceasefire ending the last war between Israel and Lebanon. The resolution called for the Lebanese government and the United Nations peacekeeping force, known as the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), to secure “areas free of armed personnel, assets and weapons.”
In recent days, questions of how to restore the resolution have been weighed down by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and White House National Security Adviser Amos, who has been working for months to broker an agreement with Israel. Top US officials, including Hochstein, are worried. Hezbollah restores peace along the Israel-Lebanon border. Blinken also spoke by phone with Arab officials to discuss Lebanon’s political future, which U.S. officials hope will reduce the influence of Iran-backed Hezbollah.
But even as U.S., Israeli, and Lebanese diplomats are intensively discussing how to revive Resolution 1701, it faces some difficult challenges.
Chief among them is how to enforce the requirement that Hezbollah fighters remain behind Lebanon’s Litani River, several miles north of the border with Israel, an obligation the group has long ignored. That’s what I’ve done.
This has allowed Hezbollah to gather personnel and munitions within attack range in northern Israel, and it has been working in solidarity with Hamas over the past year since Hamas led the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. They were able to launch hundreds of rocket attacks. Ended the war of retaliation in Gaza. As a result, more than 60,000 residents of northern Israel have been evacuated from their homes, in what Israeli authorities are calling an intolerable situation. Tens of thousands of Lebanese have also been displaced by months of Israeli retaliation, and the number has increased since Israel launched a “limited” ground invasion of southern Lebanon on October 1. is increasing.
A related question is whether Israel can feel confident that it is safe to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. For years, the United Nations and the Lebanese military largely stood by as Hezbollah built a large and deadly presence near the Israeli border, and the Israeli military says it is determined to wipe out this presence. .
One reason for this is what some analysts call a fatal flaw in UNIFIL’s 10,000-strong UN peacekeeping force from 46 countries. In other words, they were not authorized to use force against Hezbollah. (Israel has been angered after three international troops were injured in two rounds of Israeli artillery fire on Thursday and Friday.Israel’s demand that UN forces be withdrawn from southern Lebanon during the invasion) )
At a press conference on Thursday, Israeli government spokesperson David Mensah gave a scathing assessment of Resolution 1701 and the peacekeeping forces tasked with enforcing it.
“A key part of that resolution was the UN’s deployment of troops to southern Lebanon’s northern border,” Mensah said. “It was called UNIFIL and its objective was to ensure that Hezbollah was not present between the Litani River and the northern border.”
“They have never accomplished that mission,” he added. “UNIFIL has been a dismal failure, as evidenced by the more than 10,000 rockets the country has received from Hezbollah.” Israeli officials also said the Lebanese army, which shares responsibility for defending the buffer zone, , has long complained that it is unwilling to clash with well-equipped Hezbollah fighters.
In recent days, U.S. officials have been considering ways to meaningfully enact Resolution 1701 if Israel and Hezbollah are able to agree to a ceasefire and Israel withdraws from southern Lebanon.
“The real question is, can it be enforced?” said Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has studied the issue for years.
Levitt made it clear that the United States and its allies, including the Gulf Arab states that ally with Israel against Iran and Hezbollah, would strongly support the Lebanese government if it deploys meaningful forces in the UN buffer zone. He added that it should be.
“We have to tell them we support them, but they have to act,” Levitt said of the Lebanese army. He called this a new opportunity, noting that the Lebanese government and military may be less afraid to challenge Hezbollah now that Israel has significantly weakened it.
Resolution 1701 also called for “the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon,” not just southern Lebanon. That means completely demilitarizing Hezbollah, which is an even more powerful task. But at the very least, Levitt said, it is critical to crack down on Iran’s efforts to rearm Hezbollah after the current conflict, something the international community failed to do after the 2006 war.
Some Israelis believe the plight of their compatriots evacuated from northern Israel has been overshadowed by the October 7 attack and the ensuing Gaza war. Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, led a delegation of displaced people to meet with U.S. officials in Washington.
Biden officials have implored Israel not to launch an invasion of Lebanon for much of this year as they pursue diplomatic alternatives. Levitt said one of the proposals presented by Hochstein was for Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters just 10 kilometers from the Israeli border. Although this is only about a third of the distance from the border to the Litani River, Israel was willing to support this measure. This move marks the outskirts of Hezbollah’s weapon of choice for cross-border attacks, the Russian-made Kornet anti-weapon. tank missile.
With Hezbollah’s attacks escalating over the summer and Israeli counterattacks, Blinken said Israel had effectively “lost sovereignty” over the north. In remarks during a visit to Laos on Friday, the prime minister said “Israel has a clear and legitimate interest” in restoring security to the Laotian people.
Mr. Blinken insisted that the best solution was a diplomatic one, and on September 26, the United States proposed a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
However, Israel quickly rejected the proposal and launched a so-called “limited invasion” into southern Lebanon on October 1.
Since then, U.S. officials have not treated the Sept. 26 ceasefire plan as an urgent priority, giving Israel room to press its surprisingly successful offensive against Hezbollah. On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Miller said the United States considers Israel “with the right to conduct such a limited invasion” to weaken Hezbollah and force it to retreat behind the Litani River. He noted that reinstating Resolution 1701 also requires the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon to its side of the border.
U.S. and Israeli officials now see Hezbollah’s military setback as an opportunity to shift the role of the group, which is also a powerful political party in the Lebanese government. Lebanon, which has a sectarian power-sharing system, has not been able to elect a president for nearly two years due to interference from Hezbollah.
On Wednesday, Miller said the U.S. government hopes the crisis will allow Lebanon to “break the stranglehold Hezbollah has had on the country and remove Hezbollah’s veto power over the president.” Ta.
Blinken went further on Friday, saying Lebanon’s political future “is for the Lebanese people to decide and no one else.” However, he noted the importance of “the state asserting itself and taking responsibility for the country and its future,” and said that “having a head of state would be very important” for Lebanon.
Mr. Blinken has called the leaders of Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in recent days to discuss how to proceed with the process, a senior administration official said.
“The biggest piece of U.S. diplomacy right now is ensuring that Lebanon elects a competent and internationally respected president,” said Edward M. Gabriel, director of the U.S. Task Force on Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to fight, determined to use force if its leaders feel that global diplomacy has failed.
“We have no territorial objectives or ambitions in Lebanon,” Israeli spokesman Mensah said on Tuesday. “In the absence of a diplomatic solution to stop the rocket fire, we will work to push Hezbollah back across the Litani River for the simple purpose of bringing our people home.”
