Israeli aircraft struck targets in Lebanon on Monday. Hezbollah and Hamas military infrastructure was targeted in the Hezbollah heartland of the Beka’a, and in Hatta and Aanan villages in the south of the country, according to a Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman. The Israeli strikes came days after the expiry of the 31 December deadline set for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to complete the disarmament of Hezbollah south of the Litani River. This runs according to the terms of the ceasefire agreement which ended the last war between Israel and the Iran-supported Shia Islamist militia in November 2024.

The LAF has predictably failed to complete its mission. No one in Israel expected otherwise. Hezbollah’s current leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, warned on 15 August that the group ‘will not surrender its weapons while aggression continues and occupation persists’. Rather, he said, the movement would fight any attempt to enforce what he referred to as an Israeli-American project to ‘hand over the country to an insatiable Israeli aggressor’.

A further round of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is a near certainty

This is a fairly blunt warning of civil war. No one expected the Lebanese government of president Joseph Aoun and prime minister Nawaf Salam to take any action that might cause the Hezbollah leader and his patrons in Iran to act on the threat. Predictably, they have not done so.

The ceasefire agreement calls for Hezbollah’s disarmament to take place in four phases defined geographically: south of the Litani, from the Litani to the Awali river further north, Beirut and its environs (encompassing the Hezbollah stronghold of the Dahiyeh, in the southern part of the city) and finally the Beka’a.........

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