# Israel, Hezbollah and Lebanon: Who Pays for a War Outside the Ceasefire

## How has Hezbollah affected Lebanon, and why are Israel and Lebanon enemies?

Israel–Lebanon relations have been characterized by armed conflict, mutual hostility, and the absence of diplomatic relations since the establishment of Israel in 1948. Lebanon participated in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and although it signed an armistice agreement with Israel in 1949, the two countries have remained technically in a state of war ever since. Out of that confrontation Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s to repel an Israeli invasion, and it was battle-tested in the 2006 war. Analysts told Al Jazeera the group became a "state within a state," providing key services to Shia communities historically overlooked by Beirut while holding a reported position among the world's most heavily armed non-state actors. Its entry into the October 2023 hostilities, a day after Hamas's attacks on southern Israel, opened a front that devastated the country it claimed to defend: a single day of Israeli air strikes on 23 September 2024 killed at least 558 people, mostly civilians, and the ground invasion that followed wiped out entire villages in the south.

## What did the ceasefire require Lebanon to do, and did it happen?

The ceasefire of 27 November 2024 was a two-way deal: Hezbollah out of the south, Israel out in 60 days. Lebanon's army stated in January 2026 that it had completed the disarmament of the area south of the Litani River outside the positions still held by Israeli troops — its side of the ledger, by its own account, finished. Israel, by contrast, retained a military presence in five positions and struck near-daily; UN peacekeepers characterized the pattern as violations of Resolution 1701, with UN figures exceeding 10,000 violations. Who verifies that? It is the same question Washington asked of Kyiv and of NATO allies, and the answer here should meet the same standard.

Hezbollah's relationship to the state decides whether Lebanon can function. The group has affected Lebanon's government directly, holding ministers in it while keeping an arsenal the army did not control, and its supporters have reacted to the aftermath of the war in two ways: some have shown frustration, others are doubling down on their support, as Al Jazeera reported from Beirut in March 2025. Lebanon's government opposed the 2 March 2026 Hezbollah fire that helped restart the war — a fact that matters for anyone arguing the state and the group are the same thing.

## Why doesn't the U.S.-Iran ceasefire end Israel's operations against Hezbollah?

The April 2026 ceasefire between the United States and Iran was meant to end the fighting. Whether it covers Lebanon is disputed territory: Tehran insists a ceasefire in Lebanon must be part of any deal, while Israeli officials reject that, saying military operations in Lebanon must continue, the BBC reported. That contradiction had consequences within days. Iran's chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said there was "no point" in continuing peace talks with Washington after the 14 June strike on Beirut's southern suburbs, and Lebanon stated that Israel's campaign of airstrikes and ground invasion since 2 March had killed more than 3,700 people. The stated aims have kept expanding — disarm Hezbollah, then a "security zone," then troops stationed 8–10 km inside Lebanon after the truce — an open tab with no definition of victory, the same problem that turned Americans against Iraq and Afghanistan.

## What triggered Israel's strike on Hezbollah in Beirut's Dahiyeh district?

The IDF struck a Hezbollah terrorist command center in Beirut's Dahiyeh district in response to Hezbollah fire toward Israel, as Israel National News reported. Following Hezbollah's launch of aerial targets — drones and missiles — toward Israeli territory earlier on Sunday 7 June, which the Israeli military said it intercepted, officials said the strike on the Hezbollah Beirut stronghold targeted the command centre in the Dahiyeh district, killing at least two people and wounding a dozen, Axios reported. Israel had notified the Trump administration beforehand. A week later, on 14 June, a strike on an apartment in the Ghobeiry neighbourhood of Dahiyeh killed three and wounded six, alongside more than 20 other strikes across the south, days before a scheduled round of the direct talks Israel and Lebanon had begun in Washington.

## Why did Iran fire missiles at Israel over a strike on Hezbollah?

Iran had repeatedly warned it would strike Israel if Beirut was targeted; senior Iranian lawmakers promised a "decisive and painful response." After the Dahiyeh strike Iran launched missiles at Israel, and Israel answered with a retaliatory counterstrike before both sides halted fire. From Washington's perspective, that makes sense — Trump is trying to preserve negotiations with Iran and avoid a return to open regional war — but, from Israel's perspective, that logic is incomplete, as the Jerusalem Post put it. Smoke over Tehran amid the war with Iran, which began on 7 March 2026, was the backdrop to a standoff that a single strike on Beirut's suburbs nearly reignited into a regional war.

## What did Israel's counterstrike on Iran aim to achieve?

The counterstrike was prepared under what the IDF called Operation Roaring Lion, a multi-front battle procedure designed to confront any threat to the State of Israel. Israeli officials described its aims as deterrence and the degradation of a proximate threat, and Israel hopes focused targets in the retaliatory strike will limit the Iranian response and contain escalation — strikes intended to send a message to Tehran while keeping the ceiling on the confrontation. Self-defense is not in question. The invoice is.

## What evidence supports the need for Israel to maintain military operations?

Israeli officials say the goal is to protect communities in northern Israel from Hezbollah's rockets and drones, and the IDF frames its operations as necessary to degrade the group's capacity to attack. The IDF's own answer to why it is operating is that almost three years after October 7, the operational reality of Israel changed and it became clear that things cannot continue as they were. That argument carries weight, and it is exactly why evidence matters. In November 2024, a nighttime operation was carried out based on precise intelligence information: IDF troops exploiting a civilian home in southern Lebanon did find Hezbollah weapons, including rockets and munitions, hidden in a child's bedroom, and Maj. Or, a company commander in the 769th Brigade, revealed the cache. Similar claims cover weapons allegedly stored in homes at places like Zawtar. These accounts come from the IDF's own statements; no independent verification has been presented, and an unverified claim is a reason for verification, not a blank check.

## How does international law view Israel's military actions against Hezbollah?

International-law scrutiny follows the weapons and the casualties. Legal scholars have argued that the campaign's conduct raises serious questions about how international law views the legality of its military actions under the laws of war, and Amnesty International has called for war-crimes investigations into strikes that killed 24 civilians, including 12 children — every one of those lives counts. Lebanese authorities put the toll since March at more than 4,300 dead. Those records attach to American-made weapons and to the American name. Criticizing a government's war policy is ordinary democratic debate: Americans criticized Obama, Bush and Biden without being called anti-American, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis have protested their own government's conduct of this war. The aid at issue is a ten-year, $3.8 billion-a-year line item signed in 2016, and it deserves the same audit Washington applied to Ukraine and NATO: American leverage, not American funding, for a war that every signed agreement says should already be over.