Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun has called for historic direct talks with longtime foe Israel since war erupted a month ago – a month in which Israel’s military has forced more than a million Lebanese to flee, levelled parts of Beirut and triggered sectarian friction.
Now that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has finally answered the call to talk peace, Lebanon is in its weakest position to deliver it, experts said.
Armed group Hizbollah, which is locked in clashes with invading Israeli troops in south Lebanon, is opposed to direct negotiations – throwing into question whether it would abide by any ceasefire agreed by the state.
“The talks that will take place between Lebanon and Israel are frankly pointless, because those conducting them in the name of Lebanon have no leverage to negotiate,” a Lebanese official close to the group told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Israel intensified air attacks on Lebanon after Hizbollah fired missiles into Israel on March 2, three days into the US-Israeli war on Iran. It has since widened a ground offensive.
Netanyahu’s instructions to his cabinet to prepare for direct talks came a day after Israeli strikes across Lebanon killed more than 300 people, one of the bloodiest days for Lebanon since its civil war ended in 1990. Rescuers were still pulling mangled bodies out of the wreckage of pulverised buildings yesterday as families held funerals across Lebanon.
Israeli bombardment has destroyed public infrastructure across southern Lebanon and killed several Lebanese state security forces yesterday.
“Israel’s brutality does not distinguish between one civilian and another, nor between Muslim and Christian, in this country. We must all stand together to confront this barbarity and this aggression,” said Hassan Saleh, a Lebanese man attending a funeral in the southern city of Tyre.
Many Lebanese, including two officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said they saw Netanyahu’s belated acceptance of talks as a fig leaf, aimed at generating goodwill in Washington as the US begins talks with Iran this weekend, while ultimately keeping the war in Lebanon going.
“Just because Israel agreed to negotiate with us doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. The problem is that we don’t have any other option,” said Nabil Boumonsef, deputy editor-in-chief of Lebanon’s Annahar newspaper.
Lebanon’s state has historically been weak, hamstrung by corruption, a sectarian powersharing system that is frequently deadlocked and cycles of internal fighting and wars between Hizbollah and Israel.
Lebanese have repeated the refrain of ‘there is no state’ for decades, but recent crises have degraded the government’s standing even further.
Lebanon’s financial system collapsed in 2019 and a 2020 chemical explosion at the Beirut port killed more than 200 people.
No one has been held to account for either. In September 2024, an Arab Barometer survey found that 76pc of Lebanese had no trust at all in their government.
After Hizbollah entered the regional war on March 2, Lebanon outlawed its military activities.
But the army did not stop the group’s missile launches, with officials again citing the risk of internal conflict.
Netanyahu has said talks would focus on Hizbollah’s disarmament and a historic peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, who have technically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948.
But both are hard to imagine after such a deadly week.
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