What ended Israel’s last invasion of Lebanon in 2006—and made the latest incursion all but inevitable—is a once-heralded U.N. resolution honored more in the breach than the observance. The sad saga and uncertain future of Resolution 1701 act as a mirror to nearly everything that has happened between Israel and Lebanon in the 18 years since it was passed.
In the summer of 2006, U.N. Resolution 1701 became that vanishingly rare creature—a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution on the Middle East—that put an end to Israel’s unsuccessful 34-day invasion of Lebanon, which had been intended to oust Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group. The resolution, heartily welcomed in Tel Aviv and Beirut, seemed to point the way toward a lasting peace by obliging Lebanon to rein in Hezbollah and Israel to respect Lebanon’s sovereign frontiers.
For both drafters and diplomats at the time, the agreement seemed to give both countries something that they deeply craved. Lebanon, just emerging from the shadow of Syrian occupation, would see a chance to enforce its shaky writ over the entirety of its own territory and get a promise from the U.N. to perhaps, one day, look into the territorial disputes around the Shebaa Farms area that have vexed the region for decades. Israel would gain a security cushion along its northern border, with the troublesome Hezbollah pushed back at least as far as the Litani River, if not disarmed nationwide.
None of that, alas, came to pass. Hezbollah not only remained in southern Lebanon, south of the Litani River, but also grew and rearmed itself exponentially in the wake of the 2006 war. Lebanon never did get satisfaction for the simmering land dispute on the border with Syria in areas currently occupied by Israel. The large U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon had no remit to take on Hezbollah, which was the only way to actually keep the peace. And the Blue Line marking the border between Lebanon and Israel became not an inviolable frontier, but rather a trip wire for nearly two decades of provocations, threats, and attacks.
That is why on Tuesday, as Israel launched its renewed ground incursion into Lebanon, Israeli security officials pointed to the failures of U.N. Resolution 1701 as a casus belli.
“There is a U.N. resolution, still valid, that requires Hezbollah not to be deployed south of the Litani River, and the Israelis can point at that all day, every day,” said Matthew Levitt, an expert on Hezbollah and terrorism at the Washington Institute.
It’s not that the diplomatic end to the 2006 war was a bad idea; it’s that the optimistic assumptions rooted in the resolution never came close to becoming reality.
The resolution is “a great benchmark. Both Israel and Lebanon could benefit. But there is no credible enforcement mechanism,” said David Daoud, an expert on Lebanon and Hezbollah at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The fundamental problem with the resolution is that its core premise was that the Lebanese state (and military) would at least keep Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, if not move to disarm the group entirely and reclaim the monopoly on armed violence that is the hallmark of actual sovereign states. That plan never came close to realization, and despite optimistic visions in 2006 of Lebanon’s future, likely never could have.
Hezbollah is not just a militia, or part of the anti-Israel “axis of resistance,” or an Iranian proxy, or a terrorist group. It is all of those things, but it is also, as Levitt has written, a shadow state within Lebanon. It is part of the government without being the government. It snared more votes in the last legislative elections than any other formation and has a de facto veto on every governmental decision in the country. It runs social services, finds jobs for supporters, and is wildly popular among the large and growing Shiite community. It is also the most heavily armed and combat-capable organization in the country.
“The implementation of Resolution 1701, because it depends for implementation on the Lebanese state, would require Hezbollah’s prior consent, and Hezbollah is not in the business of destroying itself,” Daoud said. The combination of its strong public support and armed might means that any effort by the government to disarm or neuter the group would lead to another Lebanese civil war, he added. “And Hezbollah would win. So it is a combination of the Lebanese government being both unwilling and unable” to fully implement the resolution after all these years, he said.
Earlier this year, the Lebanese government balked at implementing the bits of the resolution that carried obligations for it (dealing with Hezbollah) by noting that the parts of the resolution that carried a prize for it (resolution of the land dispute) were still nowhere to be seen. Lebanon, said Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib, “will not accept half-solutions.”
As the drums of war beat louder, the Lebanese government said earlier this week that it was ready to finally implement Resolution 1701 by deploying the Lebanese army to the border region in southern Lebanon. But it never tackled head-on the resolution’s requirements to defang Hezbollah, which continued, as it had since the opening of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, launching thousands of cross-border attacks on Israel and displacing tens of thousands of Israeli citizens from the northern part of the country.
That is what Israel meant when it invoked Resolution 1701 in launching the latest incursion: If the Lebanese government is unable or unwilling to keep Hezbollah away from Israel’s border as it is required to do, then Israel will do that itself.
The tricky part, as the U.N. mission in southern Lebanon helpfully noted in the early hours of the latest invasion, is that Israel’s cross-border incursion of Lebanon is itself a violation of the terms of Resolution 1701. On the surface, violating a key U.N. resolution seems an odd way to go about enforcing it.
In reality, under international law, a state that is the victim of a terrorist group has the right of reprisal if, after years of fruitless efforts, the state harboring that terrorist group refuses to act. The United States deployed just that logic in dealing with terror threats in places such as Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The bigger question is whether Israel’s latest invasion is ultimately an effort to resuscitate Resolution 1701 and all its promises, or rather a bid to demonstrate once and for all that no scrap of paper, if backed only by the will and reach of the government of Lebanon, will bring security to Israel’s northern border.
“I think the Israelis are thinking: ‘We want to get our citizens back home. We can’t have Hezbollah sitting across the border planning Oct. 7-style attacks, so here is this resolution that was never implemented; it’s designed to guarantee peace and security on both sides of the border, so let’s implement it,’” Daoud said. In that vision, Israel might impose a buffer zone in southern Lebanon and essentially push Hezbollah closer to the Litani River, as the resolution was meant to do.
France and the United States spent recent weeks working to craft a diplomatic solution to the looming conflict, trying to delink Israel’s tensions with Hezbollah from its ongoing fight with Hamas further south in Gaza. But, as France’s foreign minister told the United Nations last week, any real solution must begin with a full implementation of Resolution 1701. And the lack of Hezbollah buy-in on the latest diplomatic overtures may have doomed them from the start. Even after the Biden administration, which had been searching for a solution for months, threw its weight last week behind a 21-day cease-fire proposal, Israel’s foreign minister rejected it less than 12 hours later.
Having contended with an escalating tempo of rocket and missile attacks from Hezbollah for almost a year, Israel appears unlikely to agree to any diplomatic solution that would see a return to the status quo that existed before the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
“Israel cannot be put in a position where we cannot enforce those agreements in Lebanon ourselves,” said Eyal Hulata, Israel’s former national security advisor. “It must be clear that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] has the ability to interdict violations of the agreement, particularly in southern Lebanon.”
Or, after nearly two decades of failed promises and expanding Iranian support for its prodigal proxy group, Israel (and its allies and partners) may conclude that the heart of the matter lies not a few miles north or south of the Litani River, but in Tehran.
“What will be required to prevent Iran from resupplying and funding Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and Hamas?” Levitt asked. “So the lesson this time may be: A nicely worded document is not going to do it.”
Amy Mackinnon contributed reporting for this story.
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