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The US dispatched an envoy to Beirut after a wave of Israeli attacks on Lebanon in recent days, as Israel and Washington push the country to press ahead with disarming Hizbollah in the wake of last year’s war.
Israel has over the past week hit what it says are Hizbollah targets across southern and eastern Lebanon, including construction material and equipment. More than a dozen people have been killed, with a Lebanese security official saying most of the casualties were Hizbollah operatives.
The strikes came shortly before Washington’s envoy Morgan Ortagus travelled to Beirut to lobby officials over their plan to disarm the militant group, meeting with President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and Nabih Berri, the powerful speaker of the house and a Hizbollah ally.
The apparent intensification of the aerial campaign by Israel, which has continued to regularly strike the country despite a US-brokered truce to end its war with Hizbollah in November 2024, has raised fears in Lebanon of a renewed escalation.
Morgan Ortagus meets with Nawaf Salam in Beirut © Lebanese Government Press Office/AFP/Getty Images
The militant group suffered the worst battering in its history in last year’s war, which left swaths of the country in ruins. Under the terms of the truce, Hizbollah agreed to withdraw its fighters and installations above the Litani river, which runs some 40km from Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.
Repeated Israeli attacks since have inflamed tensions across the country, killing hundreds of people — including more than 100 civilians, according to a recent UN tally. Israel has also continued to occupy a handful of military outposts inside southern Lebanon.
Israeli military officials, who say they only target Hizbollah operatives and infrastructure, disputed the idea of a recent uptick in attacks or shift in tactics.
“This is the same strategy that has been in place for over a year: ‘offensive defence’, where we identify threats and act so as not to let them grow,” one said.
But some analysts perceive a change, with Assaf Orion — a retired Israeli brigadier now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — saying there appeared to be “an increase in tempo [of attacks] in recent weeks”.
Lebanese government and military officials complain the monitoring mechanism in place to oversee the ceasefire is biased, routinely ignoring violations of its sovereignty.
The country’s reform-minded government has committed to bring Hizbollah’s weapons under the control of the state and tasked the army with devising a plan to do so.
The army has since the war uncovered dozens of Hizbollah weapons caches, dismantled infrastructure and recruited more soldiers to deploy to the south.
The five-phase plan would result in southern regions being disarmed before the end of the year, before moving north and east without a concrete timeline.
But the plan’s trajectory is unclear as Hizbollah has roundly rejected the move to give up its weapons completely.
A destroyed vehicle after an Israeli drone strike. Israel has continued to carry out attacks on Lebanon despite a US-brokered truce in November 2024 © Anadolu/Getty Images
The government is wary of provoking civil strife amid threats by the Iran-backed militant movement, which began firing on Israel in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack in what it said was “solidarity” before the eventual all-out war.
Weeks of escalatory rhetoric from US officials have suggested Israel and Washington were losing patience with the slow pace of disarmament. But official readouts of Ortagus’s meetings in Beirut suggest she adopted a softer tone than what Lebanese officials were expecting.
Asked about a possible Israeli escalation by one local news outlet, deputy speaker Elias Bou Saab said: “The impressions left by the US envoy point in the opposite direction.”
Orion said the Israeli attacks were a bid by Israel to keep Hizbollah weak and out of the southern Lebanese border regions, and a tool to force its disarmament.
“The Israeli attacks are leverage on Hizbollah, and also indirectly leverage for the Lebanese government on Hizbollah . . . showing them that the alternative to a political agreement for disarmament is that [Israel] dismantles them militarily from the outside,” he said.