The framework signed in Washington on June 26 is a genuine diplomatic achievement, cast by Ambassador Yechiel Leiter as a step toward peace.
The real story, however, was in what was not seen. The only handshake on record was Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s with the Lebanese envoy to the US, Nada Hamadeh Moawad; no direct contact between the two ambassadors was documented.
The Lebanese side mentioned neither Israel nor peace, only sovereignty, ending hostilities, and returning the displaced.
That asymmetry was not etiquette but three barriers Moawad sees clearly: the US-Iran memorandum, signed first, which strengthened Iran and with it Hezbollah; Hezbollah as both a military force and a powerful bloc in parliament; and the inability to actually disarm Hezbollah. So she frames sovereignty and withdrawal, not peace, conceding nothing, knowing that without outside help to build the missing capacity the deal fails.
Strategic paradox
For the Israeli ambassador, who backs normalization but knows it is far off, the significant diplomatic achievement is the counter move against Iran. Signed as the US-Iran memorandum tried to pull the Lebanese file toward Tehran, the framework sets the opposite: Lebanon faces Israel, not Iran, with withdrawal tied to disarming Hezbollah.
For Washington, it is a branding win, handing the US President Donald Trump the peacemaker’s title, despite Rubio’s caveat that this is only “the beginning of the beginning.” Beneath the branding, both recognize Iran as the problem in different language: Israel says security, Lebanon sovereignty.
While the regime stands, Iran will rebuild its proxies, missiles, and nuclear program, each attempt more sophisticated, so any deal must rest on an understanding of Iranian strategy and the export of the revolution. The mechanism floated alongside the framework to prevent friction with Iran is the illogic that alarms everyone: one cannot build a channel to avoid friction with the threat’s source. The Lebanon track names Iran as the source; the US-Iran memorandum risks treating it as the solution. That is the strategic mistake.
The agreement defines disarmament as weapons and infrastructure, treating the arm and ignoring the body. Hezbollah is not a militia inside a state but a parallel state: a de facto veto since 2008; a shadow bank, al-Qard al-Hasan, with some 300,000 clients and a scale of nearly $3 billion; hospitals; al-Mahdi schools; the Jihad al-Binaa reconstruction arm’s the al-Manar propaganda channel’s and a local intelligence network. This dependency legitimizes the weapon for parts of the Shi’ite community.
Parallel state
So who disarms it? By force, no one, without civil war. Not the Lebanese army, which stood aside in May 2008 when Hezbollah seized west Beirut, and failed to act in 2025 when Hezbollah was weakened and cut off from Iran. Its intelligence directorate has been penetrated: in January 2025 its southern intelligence chief, a Shi’ite in the joint operations room, warned Hezbollah of raids.
Most disarmament south of the Litani River proceeds in coordination with Hezbollah, not against it. Nor the vetted units Washington floats: raised by Rubio, never formally conveyed to Beirut, untested north of the Litani, never built to fire on Hezbollah. CENTCOM’s Adm. Brad Cooper called it a tall order that the $3 billion since 2006 has not achieved. The question was never capacity, but rather will and legitimacy.
Hezbollah’s fighters in the south are the Shi’ite villagers themselves; there is no military solution to identity.
So the agreement is an illusion: disarming by force is impossible in the pilot zones and beyond while the civilian system producing the weapon stands. Leave the parallel state in place, and Hezbollah refills the ground through society: reconstruction, compensation, clans, mosques, local intelligence.
A vetted force does not spearhead disarmament; it should hold areas the civilian process has already turned, not be asked to defeat Hezbollah. It is an umbrella, not a decisive force, and cannot compel the unwilling to disarm; disarmament follows the community’s detachment, not something a unit supplies.
Changing the equation
Hence two recommendations, under external backing. First, confront the organization where it is vulnerable, the parallel state, not where it is undefeated. Services, credit, and above all reconstruction and compensation must flow exclusively through the state and vetted actors, so Hezbollah cannot reenter the south through reconstruction; Arab and Western money is the leverage.
The campaign against al-Qard al-Hasan, the Hezbollah-affiliated financial institution, must continue, draining the system rather than fighting it by arms.
Second, let the south administer itself. A wholly Lebanese civil administration, under the oversight of the state and the United States but not Israel, built with Shi’ite civil society, municipal heads, clans, clergy, and the displaced, blocking Hezbollah’s return institutionally, in school, mosque, and municipality.
Vetting should be by proven action, not sect; many Shi’ites, citizens and imams alike, call for surrendering arms and loyalty to the state, not sect.
Sequence is decisive: secure a small area severed from dependence and the same day surge in administration, services, and reconstruction.
Alongside it, a media effort must show ordinary Lebanese, concretely, that a stable agreement with Israel will bring investment, technology, medical aid, and more, inoculating them against Hezbollah’s treason narrative.
Two conditions are non-negotiable: protection for participants, or they will be silenced as collaborators; and Lebanese ownership, not open Israeli sponsorship, which would otherwise die as the South Lebanon Army died in 2000.
The agreement is a real achievement, but it is not peace, and will not become peace while it treats the weapon and ignores the state that produces it. The signing was historic, but history will not be made in Washington. It will be made in the first southern village where Lebanese citizens, not Hezbollah, decide who governs their lives. Peace from the people, or no peace at all.■
Aviram Bellaishe, an expert in regional geopolitics, Middle Eastern affairs, and Arabic language and culture, who served for 27 years in Israel’s security apparatus, is vice president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.