UN, France, and Hezbollah Seek To Revive a Failed — and Terminated — Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon

While all the usual suspects are trying to keep a nearly 50-year-old United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon alive, Washington is looking for better options to end Hezbollah’s stronghold over the Land of Cedars. Last year, as Israel battled Hezbollah, the Security Council ordered the UN Interim Force in Lebanon to end by December 31, 2026, a mission that was first launched in 1978. Paris, Beirut, and Turtle Bay are desperately seeking to extend the UN presence at least temporarily. Veto-wielding America, though, opposes such an extension.Washington touts agreements between Beirut and Jerusalem, which would hopefully succeed where Unifil failed, for the disarmament of Hezbollah and ending Israel’s presence on Lebanon’s territory. Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam are committed to confront the Iran-backed terror organization. As yet, though, the Lebanese army is failing to disarm Hezbollah even in small areas handed over by the Israel Defense Forces last month as part of a trilateral agreement signed in June. The American-sponsored pilot program is yet to succeed as Iran undermines any solution that would end Hezbollah’s chokehold over the Lebanese state.While Israelis are skeptical of the Lebanese army’s prowess, they consider a further UN presence in southern Lebanon as the worst of all options, even as new ideas are proposed daily at Turtle Bay for extending Unifil’s mandate. “France is pushing along with Lebanon, Italy, and others,” the Israeli UN ambassador, Danny Danon, tells The New York Sun. “We don’t want any UN presence there, even temporarily, especially that current proposals are not for deploying hundreds of peacekeepers, but thousands.”An alternative proposal for a non-UN force of French, Italian, or other European observers is similarly opposed by Israel. “We don’t want any of them near our border,” Mr. Danon says. Assisting the Lebanese Armed Forces from Beirut “might not be as bad,” he adds. “But any foreign presence near our border will guarantee the return of Hezbollah.”Unifil “hasn’t achieved its goals, hasn’t lived up to its mandate, and should be drawn down in the next year,” the American UN ambassador, Mike Waltz, told a congressional delegation in March. The UN force was deployed to prevent militias from “arming and operating south of the Latani River in southern Lebanon,” Mr. Waltz noted in a separate hearing on the Hill. “I think we’ve seen the exact opposite for the last 20 years from Hezbollah, at the cost of half a billion dollars a year.”Hezbollah: Refusal to DisarmAs of Monday, the IDF is tightening a siege on a strategically-located fortification, the Ali Taher ridge, just north of the Litani River. Israel captured Beaufort castle, just south of the river, in June. Both ridges became Hezbollah strongholds, complete with complex tunnel mazes housing arms, communication, and reconnaissance systems aimed at Israel. “I think if Israel had more time, they’d have done to Ali Taher what they did to the Beaufort,” a Lebanese-born research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hussain Abdul Hussain, tells the Sun. Capturing Ali Taher “will take longer than it should, but there’s no other way,” he predicts.Beirut insists that the Lebanese army, rather than Israel, must disarm Hezbollah fighters that are hiding in the Ali Taher tunnels. While Mr. Aoun, a former army chief, is committed to disarming the terror group, his successor, General Rodolphe Haykal, is seen as too close to Hezbollah to order a serious confrontation with its fighters.General Haykal is unlikely to confront Hezbollah because “like all army chiefs of the Lebanese Armed Forces he is auditioning for the presidency,” Mr. Hussain says. These generals are also “auditioning for Hezbollah because Hezbollah has 27 votes in parliament.” Meanwhile, Hezbollah seemed undeterred. “We will not give up our weapons,” its chief, Naim Qassem, said last week. The American-led Israeli-Lebanese negotiations “do not exist for us, and they do not concern us in the slightest,” he added. “We will not bow down, and we will not be defeated.”The UN: Peacekeeping Forces Never DieUnifil was first created by the UN Security Council in 1978 to oversee Israel’s full withdrawal from Lebanon following a Palestinian insurgency launched at Israel from Lebanon’s southern region. The force’s mandate was significantly expanded after the IDF-Hezbollah war of 2006. The council approved up to 10,000 peacekeepers commanded by European soldiers.Unifil was mandated to help the Lebanese army disarm all militias south of the Litani river, near the Israeli border. “At first there were confrontations” between Unifil and Hezbollah, Mr. Danon says. “But then Unifil settled on merely reporting ceasefire violations. And those reports are one-sided. They can’t even mention Hezbollah by name.” Visiting the Israeli-Lebanese border before the 2023 war, the Sun saw an extensive Hezbollah presence right next to Unifil positions. Under the guise of environmental groups like “Green Without Borders,” Hezbollah operatives dug tunnels to invade Israel, amassed rockets and missiles, and operated right under the UN peacekeepers’ noses. After October 8, 2023, the IDF has dealt major setbacks to Hezbollah, reducing its missile arsenal, hitting operators in the “beeper operation,” and eventually killing its longtime, charismatic leader Hassan Nasrallah.Unifil now seems increasingly irrelevant. Yet this year peacekeepers were killed in Israel-Hezbollah crossfire. “They are there under the mandate of the Security Council to fulfill their mandate, which is to observe,” the UN’s top spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told the Sun when asked if peacekeepers remain in southern Lebanon as cannon fodder. Winding down Unifil’s operation, meanwhile, seems a low priority for the UN secretariat, whose officials still hope to extend the mission beyond January 1, 2027. “There are people whose jobs are impacted,” Mr. Dujarric said last week. “There are supplies, there’s contingent-owned equipment, there’s real estate. All of that stuff needs to be dealt with.”President Emmanuel Macron of France and others have expressed the hope that Unifil’s mandate will be temporarily extended, as did President Aoun, the Beirut parliament, and Hezbollah. In June Secretary-General Antonio Guterres proposed three extension options, the largest of which would reduce to 5,525 uniformed peacekeepers the Unifil force that now boasts 7,462 personnel.America and Israel, though, consider Unifil an idea whose time has come and gone.

UN, France, and Hezbollah Seek To Revive a Failed — and Terminated — Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon

UN, France, and Hezbollah Seek To Revive a Failed — and Terminated — Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon

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