by Tony Issa
It has now become certain that the ceasefire agreement was stillborn. Lebanon has entered a dangerously escalated new phase. Israeli airstrikes continue to pound villages in the South and the Western Bekaa, while Hezbollah—categorically rejecting the provisions of the "Washington Declaration"—presses on with its bombardment of settlements and northern towns using missiles and drones.
This is absolute deadlock. In its wake, the Lebanese entity appears destined for an inexorable scenario: from without, an unconstrained Israeli ground incursion; from within, a looming demographic, political, sectarian, and factional fracture poised to explode.
Israel is now mobilizing its military apparatus, capitalizing on an international—and particularly American—strategic environment it deems ideal for shaping the geographical reality it aspires to establish in Lebanon. The US stance reveals a profound shift in approach toward the Lebanese file.
Thus far, Washington has granted Benjamin Netanyahu's government a conditional, restricted green light—one that ensures continued military operations against Hezbollah's infrastructure anywhere in Lebanon, while maintaining a "partial exception" for Beirut and its southern suburbs, limited to emergency and constrained operations.
However, with Hezbollah's public and decisive rejection—backed by Iran—of the proposed settlement terms and disarmament, this conditional light has transformed into a full and open American mandate. Israel now possesses the perfect pretext before the Trump administration and the international community to expand its ground incursion and deepen its entrenchment north of the Litani—and perhaps the Zahrani—on the grounds that the Lebanese side is the one that torpedoed the "peace initiative."
This dramatic development places official Lebanon—its military and political negotiators in Washington and Beirut—in an acutely embarrassing and utterly powerless position, caught between the international guillotine and the local veto. The political authority, represented by the presidency and the government, finds itself trapped in a crushing vice. On one hand, it is compelled to adhere to the technical and security agreements and understandings crafted under Washington's auspices to salvage what remains of the state and secure financial and diplomatic cover; on the other, it crashes against the hard wall of Hezbollah's refusal, anchored in its surplus military power and Iranian influence.
In the midst of this quagmire, the state will be incapable of fulfilling its logistical commitments—namely, imposing a monopoly on arms and extending the army's authority. This will strip it of its status as a trusted partner in any international agreement. Lebanese diplomacy will become a mere echo of profound internal paralysis, a victim of the collision between rival factions.
To state it plainly, the risk of a catastrophic internal tremor is no longer a pessimistic hypothesis; it has become a fate toward which the country is racing at breakneck speed for three reasons:
1. There is a growing impression that the fierce offensive launched by Hezbollah's leadership against the political authority—coupled with seething resentment among other Lebanese factions toward the party and its conduct in service of an Iranian "agenda"—will sever the last remaining bridges of understanding that the Taif Accord sought to establish.
2. The massive evacuations and organized displacement of residents from the South, Nabatieh, and the Western Bekaa toward the Mountain, Beirut, and the North have begun to generate acute, simmering social and economic frictions. As these southern and Bekaa areas turn into scorched earth, making return impossible, this protracted displacement will become the fuse for civil strife at the first political or security clash on the home front.
3. If the state, under the weight of pressure and US Treasury sanctions, attempts to proceed unilaterally with implementing the provisions of the "Washington Declaration," it will find itself in a direct security and military confrontation with Hezbollah. Conversely, if the state retreats and submits to Hezbollah's logic, it will be internationally branded a "rogue entity," thereby legitimising Israel—and the United States—to utterly crush its economic and sovereign foundations.
Thus, Lebanon today stands in the eye of the storm, hostage to a profoundly bleak equation. It cannot prevent Israel from continuing its operations of crushing, destruction, and ground incursion. Nor can it prevent Hezbollah from persisting in its fight to the last breath, with utter disregard for the cost to geography and demography. In fact, Israel is now more capable than ever of playing the card of internal discord with considerable "innocence," just as Hezbollah continues its absurd regional war under slogans of "innocence"—namely, liberating the land and protecting the people.
The danger of this parallel path between two lines that never meet is that it will allow the stronger party—Israel—to pursue its expansionist options to the very end, while Lebanon sinks day by day into a "political and civil tsunami" whose losses may surpass those inflicted by the incursion and the destruction of Israeli airstrikes. The persistence of this vertical "national schizophrenia" means the country will not only lose its maritime and land borders; it will become the laboratory mouse upon which the real experiments of the "New Middle East" project commence. It is the party defeated abroad and defeated at home. There is no light at the end of the tunnel—unless a miracle suddenly occurs. And that, so far, remains impossible.