The cease-fire between Lebanon and Israel may be holding, but its weakest point is obvious from the outset: one of the war’s central actors is only loosely contained by the agreement. The Lebanese state can endorse a pause, conduct negotiations and reassure foreign partners that calm will hold. But it does not possess the key that truly determines whether silence lasts beyond a few days. That key has long ceased to rest fully in Beirut.
This is why the question of whether Lebanon can curb Hezbollah only appears technical on the surface. In reality, it is a question about the nature of the Lebanese state itself. In a country where civil war left behind a deep fear of internal rupture, any attempt to alter the balance of force too abruptly carries the risk of setting off another domestic explosion. It is on that fear that Lebanon’s fragile equilibrium has rested for decades, allowing Hezbollah not merely to coexist with the state, but in many arenas to overshadow it.
Hezbollah emerged in the 1980s with Iranian backing and quickly became more than a Shiite militia. It built itself into a parallel system of influence, legitimacy and power. It derived authority from its war with Israel, from its social-service networks, from its protection of Shiite communities and from the image of a force capable of doing what the weak Lebanese state could not.
According to Daycom’s earlier analysis, it is precisely this dual character — military and socio-political — that has made Hezbollah so resistant to ordinary state tools. For its supporters, it is not simply an Iranian proxy with weapons. It is also a structure that provided protection, representation and a sense of dignity in a country where sectarian balance has always been the central nerve of politics. That is why Western capitals may see Hezbollah primarily as a terrorist organization, while part of Lebanon sees it as an instrument of survival and leverage. As long as those two visions coexist, the idea of rapid disarmament looks less like an administrative act than an attempt to redraw the country’s internal architecture by force.
The paradox of the present moment is that Hezbollah has become weaker without becoming weak. The war with Israel after October 2023 inflicted serious damage: commanders were eliminated, infrastructure was degraded, parts of its arsenal were consumed, and the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria further eroded its logistical depth and regional reach. From the outside, this created the impression that the balance of power had decisively shifted toward Beirut and its Western backers.
But the latest escalation suggested something else. The scale and intensity of Hezbollah’s renewed attacks indicated that the group had retained a substantial stock of rockets and drones, along with the capacity to produce at least part of its weaponry locally. In other words, even after being badly weakened, it remains too powerful to be solved by decree. The Lebanese government can condemn its actions and formally declare them illegal. Between that legal formula and actual disarmament, however, lies a gulf.
This is where Beirut meets its central trap. If the state moves sharply against Hezbollah, it risks igniting internal tensions in a country where the memory of civil war is still politically alive. If it does not move, it leaves Israel with a standing political and strategic argument for continued pressure: that Lebanon cannot control its own south or secure its own frontier. In that sense, the government has no good option. It has only less dangerous ways of postponing the worst one.
Israel, for its part, has made no secret of its position. For Jerusalem, Hezbollah’s disarmament is not a diplomatic embellishment but a core security demand. Yet Israel is asking Lebanon to deliver something Lebanon still does not possess: full sovereign control over all organized force on its territory. This is where external pressure and internal weakness collapse into the same knot, one that cannot be cut quickly.
The difficulty is compounded by the fact that Beirut has already tried to push back more forcefully against Iranian influence and received a response that bordered on open defiance. Veiled threats of renewed domestic unrest, along with the Iranian ambassador’s refusal to comply with official pressure, underlined the real problem. In Lebanon, this is not merely a disagreement over policy. It is a struggle over who actually defines the limits of state authority.
That is the central weakness of the current truce. It may buy the Lebanese leadership a narrow space for maneuver, but it does not resolve the deeper issue of who ultimately decides questions of war and peace inside the country. As long as the answer remains divided, every pause will be only an interval before the next crisis. The state may gain days, improve its negotiating position, or recover a measure of control. It cannot, in ten days, rewrite a balance of force that took decades to build.
This leads to the harder conclusion. Lebanon may try to constrain Hezbollah, but so long as there is no national consensus on how to do so — and on what price the country is willing to pay for it — every step forward will remain dangerous. That is why the current pause does not open a path to quick peace. It merely makes clearer that Lebanon’s deepest crisis lies not in one cease-fire or one war, but in the chronic inability of the state to become decisively stronger than those who fight in its name, beside it, or in spite of it.
