{"id":253,"date":"2026-05-29T10:41:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T10:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=253"},"modified":"2026-05-29T10:41:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T10:41:27","slug":"inside-lebanons-fraught-push-to-disarm-hezbollah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=253","title":{"rendered":"Inside Lebanon\u2019s Fraught Push to Disarm Hezbollah"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The thud of Israeli air strikes shook Beirut\u2019s military court as it worked through its docket one morning in early March. Inside a black metal cage at the courtroom\u2019s edge, three men waited silently to face the chief judge, a burly brigadier general in the Lebanese Army. The procedure was ordinary. The defendants were not. They were Hezbollah fighters, members of the powerful Iran-backed group that has long held sway over Lebanon. Men like these were supposed to be untouchable.<\/p>\n

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Days earlier, Hezbollah had fired a volley of rockets into Israel, plunging Lebanon into a regional war that its leaders were desperate to avoid. In response, Lebanon\u2019s government took the extraordinary step of outlawing Hezbollah\u2019s military operations. As Israel began a large-scale bombing campaign, Nawaf Salam, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, demanded that Hezbollah hand over its weapons, and ordered security forces to take \u201cimmediate measures\u201d to enforce the decision and arrest violators. It seemed an epochal moment. For decades, Hezbollah\u2019s arsenal had been tolerated, even tacitly condoned\u2014shielded by the group\u2019s political power and by its status among supporters as a counterweight to Israel. The three Hezbollah fighters had been stopped at a checkpoint in the country\u2019s south, caught ferrying Kalashnikov rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition toward the front line. After nearly a week in detention, they made no effort to hide what they had been doing. \u201cWe are trying to defend our land,\u201d they said, according to two senior judicial officials present at the hearing that day. \u201cOur place is not here in the court. Our place is in the south.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mere presence of Hezbollah fighters in the dock shattered the group\u2019s long-standing aura of impunity in Lebanon. But, after a hearing that lasted barely five minutes, the men were released. Each paid a fine of nine hundred thousand Lebanese pounds\u2014about ten dollars\u2014according to internal court records obtained by The New Yorker<\/em>. They had been convicted not of any national-security offense but of the misdemeanor charge of transporting unlicensed weapons. For many Lebanese, it felt less like a turning point than an anticlimax.<\/p>\n

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The landmark case\u2014the first of around two dozen brought against Hezbollah members in recent weeks\u2014offered a rare window into the fraught push to curb a militant group that has long eclipsed the country\u2019s own Army. With disarmament now at the center of U.S.-brokered talks between Lebanon and Israel, Lebanon\u2019s leaders have sought to present any criminal conviction as a step forward. \u201cThere has been tremendous change,\u201d Adel Nassar, Lebanon\u2019s justice minister, told me. \u201cPeople have a short memory and forget where we were before.\u201d But, as fighting has intensified, arrests have slowed, even as some penalties have grown tougher. The unevenness of the crackdown has revealed Lebanon\u2019s dilemma. The state is trying to show the world that it can act against Hezbollah, but inside the country significant divisions persist regarding how, or even whether, the group should be disarmed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After the previous war between Hezbollah and Israel ended in a tenuous ceasefire, in 2024, Lebanon\u2019s cash-strapped military was required to dismantle Hezbollah\u2019s arsenal. By January, the Lebanese Army announced the completion of the first phase of a slow, cautious disarmament plan: clearing weapons depots, disabling tunnels and rocket positions, and taking over abandoned Hezbollah sites, often with the group\u2019s acquiescence. Hezbollah\u2019s leadership had been decimated by an Israeli assassination campaign, and much of its stockpile of weapons was destroyed during the war. (Israel also continued near-daily strikes during the ceasefire.) Then came the collapse of the Assad regime, in Syria, severing the land route long used by Hezbollah to transport rockets, antitank missiles, and precision-guidance systems from its Iranian patron. It was in no position to fight over what remained.<\/p>\n

The United States and Israel nonetheless pushed the Army to move faster, warning that Hezbollah was attempting to reconstitute. But moving too aggressively risked internal strife. In 2008, after the Lebanese government attempted to shut down Hezbollah\u2019s telecommunications network and remove an airport-security chief seen as close to the group, Hezbollah fighters seized parts of Beirut within hours, forcing a humiliating climbdown. The memory of that episode\u2014and of the country\u2019s long and bloody civil war, fought from 1975 to 1990\u2014still looms.<\/p>\n

In the latest war, the second in just two years, more than three thousand people have been killed, and well over a million\u2014around a fifth of Lebanon\u2019s population\u2014have been displaced. The painstaking work of clearing depots has ground to a halt, overtaken by a more volatile reality. Hezbollah, though battered, has used the conflict to remind its rivals at home that it remains a potent force. It has kept up attacks against Israel, rejected calls to disarm, and broadcast sleek propaganda videos of its rocket and drone strikes in open defiance of the March ban. Wafiq Safa, a senior Hezbollah official, proclaimed that the group would \u201cforce the government to backtrack\u201d on the decision \u201cregardless of the method.\u201d Lebanon is now locked in a standoff over the future of one of the world\u2019s most heavily armed militias, the crown jewel in Tehran\u2019s network of proxies across the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah, which emerged in the wake of Israel\u2019s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, has long cast itself as the country\u2019s defender. To its supporters, it is often simply called al-muqawama<\/em>, meaning \u201cthe resistance.\u201d Its weapons are not incidental to that identity. Its flag encodes armed struggle: a raised fist gripping an assault rifle, paired with a Quranic promise of victory. Hassan Nasrallah, the group\u2019s longtime leader who was assassinated by Israel in 2024, once called resistance \u201ca condition of existence.\u201d The cost of that resistance has been borne, repeatedly, by the Lebanese people. In April, President Joseph Aoun put the grievance plainly: \u201cHow long will the people of the south continue to pay the price for others\u2019 wars on our land?\u201d Despite a ceasefire deal signed last month, Israel once again occupies much of southern Lebanon, where it continues to lay waste to border towns and strike at will. It is a difficult moment to ask a movement built on resistance to give up its guns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This past month, I visited Abbas Ibrahim, Lebanon\u2019s former national-security chief, at his apartment complex in a well-heeled neighborhood on Beirut\u2019s southern outskirts. The area had been heavily bombarded in recent weeks, and an Israeli drone buzzed overhead, looping around the cleaved remains of nearby buildings. Ibrahim, who retired in 2023, was once one of Washington\u2019s most valuable back channels in the region, a trusted interlocutor with access to the highest echelons of power in Hezbollah and in Tehran. His office was stuffed with books\u2014\u201cThe Invention of the Jewish People\u201d (Shlomo Sand), \u201cWorld Order\u201d (Henry Kissinger), \u201cThe Shia Revival\u201d (Vali Nasr)\u2014which formed a kind of syllabus on the region\u2019s unsettled questions. Many were spread open on desks and tables, as if he were busy moving between them all at once. In one meeting room was a worn copy of Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cThe Art of the Deal,\u201d which Ibrahim insisted I take with me. It was not a book he admired, but he had read it when Trump returned to office, hoping that it would provide some insight into the man now trying to exercise control over Lebanon\u2019s most intractable problem. I asked Ibrahim whether Hezbollah could be disarmed, particularly now, with Israel occupying so much of the country\u2019s south. \u201cForget about it,\u201d he said. \u201cBy force, it\u2019s impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 2006, the U.S. has poured more than three billion dollars into the Lebanese military, hoping that it could be made powerful enough to counter Hezbollah. But this aid always came with an implicit ceiling. It helped build an army largely for counterterrorism and border control, not one capable of fighting Israel, the enemy Hezbollah invokes to justify its arms. The state\u2019s arsenal comprises a patchwork of older and secondhand equipment, with no advanced air-defense system fit to challenge Israeli warplanes. Its soldiers have had to contend with other shortcomings. Lebanon\u2019s economy began to collapse in 2019, causing salaries to plummet; many enlistees were forced to take second jobs, and others to desert altogether. In Beirut, I have more than once found myself in a servees<\/em>\u2014one of the shared taxis that ferry passengers across the city\u2014driven by a moonlighting Army sniper. Other soldiers wait tables, deliver food, or guard buildings after hours. At one point, the military even started offering helicopter rides to tourists to raise cash.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah\u2019s case for keeping its munitions draws strength from this vacuum, especially in southern Lebanon, which Israel has invaded repeatedly and where many Shiites see the group as the only force willing to protect them. \u201cAre those Western countries ready to give us the weapons and equipment we need to defend the country if Israel tries to invade us?\u201d Ibrahim asked. \u201cThe answer is no.\u201d At the onset of the current war, the Lebanese military withdrew from the border region, citing operational concerns: it had to reposition units that risked being encircled by Israel. But the pullback reflected a broader strategic predicament. Lebanon had not started the war, and any confrontation between two U.S.-backed forces would have been politically explosive. It only lent credence to Hezbollah\u2019s argument. The state had ceded the front line just as it was asking the group to lay down its arms. Ibrahim said, \u201cHow can you ask people to be disarmed when you don\u2019t have an alternative?\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond the issue of brute capability, there is a deeper, internal danger. Rudolph Haykal, Lebanon\u2019s Army commander, has been wary of any disarmament campaign that could turn the military into Hezbollah\u2019s direct antagonist\u2014and, by extension, set it against a large part of the country\u2019s Shiite community, roughly a third of the population. In Lebanon\u2019s fragile political system, power is divided among religious communities, and the Army\u2019s cross-sectarian legitimacy depends on being seen as an institution\u2014one of the few\u2014that can stand above those divides. During the civil war, the Army splintered along sectarian lines, and, for a time, that consensus collapsed. The state lost control of roads, ports, and entire neighborhoods, as the country devolved into a patchwork of militia-held zones. Ibrahim warned that ordering the military into a direct confrontation with Hezbollah could reopen those fractures. The question, as he saw it, was not only whether the Army had the means to disarm the group. It was whether Lebanon could survive the attempt. \u201cWe passed through this experience before,\u201d he said. \u201cWhy do we want to drink from this bitter glass again?\u201d<\/p>\n

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That fear has weighed on even the most determined state officials. When I visited Nassar, Lebanon\u2019s justice minister, he alluded to potential legal action that could reach all the way up to Naim Qassem, Hezbollah\u2019s leader\u2014the kind of step that would have been unthinkable only months earlier. But Nassar was also wary of exposing the gap between the state\u2019s authority and its actual power. \u201cIt will be tough,\u201d he said, of disarmament. \u201cBut it is existential for Lebanon. Our fundamental effort is to get there without a civil war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Current conditions make getting there at all seem a long way off. Hezbollah says it will not discuss the future of its weapons until Israel halts its attacks and withdraws from southern Lebanon. Israel says it will not withdraw until Hezbollah is disarmed. Lebanon\u2019s government, which has pledged to bring all weapons under state control, is caught between these irreconcilable demands.<\/p>\n

For now, Lebanon\u2019s leaders have tried to press Hezbollah to lay down its arms with new assertiveness while insisting that the state will not be dragged into an internal war to impose it. \u201cWe are not seeking confrontation with Hezbollah,\u201d Salam said, in April, at a press conference in Paris with President Emmanuel Macron. \u201cBut, believe me, we will not be intimidated by Hezbollah.\u201d The United States, meanwhile, has been pushing Lebanon to adopt a more bellicose posture. President Donald Trump pledged to help Lebanon \u201cprotect itself\u201d from Hezbollah, which his Administration is keen to portray as primarily a foreign interloper. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, spoke of training and equipping \u201cvetted units\u201d inside the Lebanese military to \u201cgo after elements of Hezbollah and dismantle them so Israel doesn\u2019t have to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a good recipe to put the country on fire,\u201d Ibrahim said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very good recipe.\u201d<\/p>\n

The southern port city of Tyre juts into the Mediterranean on land that was once an island. In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great, unable to take the Phoenician city by sea, built a causeway across the water and turned it into a peninsula. More than two millennia later, another invading army is again visible from its shore.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When I visited, in April, Israeli forces were positioned just across the bay, occupying the area around Ras al-Bayada, a coastal town about five miles inside Lebanese territory. It was part of what Israel calls its \u201cforward defense line,\u201d a depopulated buffer zone that Israeli officials say they will maintain until Hezbollah is disarmed, and perhaps in perpetuity. In total, Prime Minister Salam has said, sixty-eight towns and villages are now under Israeli occupation. The ceasefire had done little to stem the war. Fighter jets roared overhead, and air strikes pounded the surrounding hillsides, sending up thick plumes of acrid smoke. On a rocky outcrop, Ali Moussa, a thirty-six-year-old school-bus driver, cast his fishing rod into the sea. \u201cCeasefire? What ceasefire?\u201d he said, gesturing toward the explosions.<\/p>\n

On paper, the Lebanese state has a mandate for disarmament. According to a Gallup survey conducted last summer, seventy-nine per cent of Lebanese believe that only the country\u2019s military should possess weapons. But that consensus was thinner than it appeared. The poll excluded areas where Hezbollah is most entrenched, and among Lebanese Shiites\u2014the community that forms the bedrock of the group\u2019s support and has borne much of the cost of the war\u2014only a minority agreed. In Tyre, long held up by locals as a model of coexistence among Lebanon\u2019s various sects, Israeli occupation and bombardment were not weakening Hezbollah\u2019s case for its weapons. They were giving it new life.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, that national fracture ran through a single household. In the winding alleys of Tyre\u2019s Christian quarter, I found my way to the courtyard of Thereze Alawwi, where pictures of the Virgin Mary hung on walls blackened by mold and damp. Her daughter, Soraya, had taken refuge there with her three children, Christina, Charbel, and Elias, after fleeing Debl, a Christian border village now encircled by Israeli troops. After weeks of bombardment, the family had only managed to escape under the cover of a U.N. convoy. \u201cWe were living in a horror movie,\u201d Soraya said, her face drawn with exhaustion.<\/p>\n

Charbel wheeled Christina, barely eighteen months old, in a stroller over the cracked concrete of their new home. Their father, Elie, a soldier in the Lebanese military, had stayed behind in Debl. He wasn\u2019t on duty but had refused to leave. I had first met the family after the last ceasefire, at a Christmas Mass in Tyre, when Christina was still in her bassinet. One war had marked her birth; another was marking her childhood. For Soraya, that was reason enough to want Hezbollah disarmed. \u201cWe learned the hard way that wars do not get us results,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her brother Hanna was more conflicted. He is a municipal policeman who has a face tattoo and a mischievous energy. I had run into him earlier that day while searching for the family home, and he led me there through a tangle of backstreets on a rickety moped. Though he was an officer of the state, he understood the appeal of an armed movement outside it. Still, he suggested that Hezbollah had pulled Lebanon into a war at Iran\u2019s behest, which he resented. \u201cWhy are we always paying someone else\u2019s bill?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I left and made my way along Tyre\u2019s seaside promenade, where I found that ambivalence giving way to defiance. Older men sat drinking cups of bitter, cardamom-infused coffee and children splashed in the waves, clinging to whatever sense of normalcy they could. A thirty-one-year-old man who works at a furniture factory told me that he had cheered the handful of rockets Hezbollah fired into Israel, the salvo that set off the latest war. \u201cWe were proud,\u201d he said. When I asked who he believed could protect him now, he said the Army\u2019s retreat from the border had answered that question for him. \u201cWho else is there to fight for us other than Hezbollah?\u201d he said. \u201cIf they can take our weapons, let them try.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

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Lebanon has pledged to bring all weapons under state control. But in the face of continued Israeli attacks, Hezbollah refuses to hand over its munitions. Euan Ward reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-lede"],"yoast_head":"\nInside Lebanon\u2019s Fraught Push to Disarm Hezbollah - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=253\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Inside Lebanon\u2019s Fraught Push to Disarm Hezbollah - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Lebanon has pledged to bring all weapons under state control. 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