Lebanon has vowed to place all weapons under state control and dismantle Hezbollah’s military arsenal, but political divisions, Israeli strikes and fears of internal unrest are complicating the push as international pressure grows.
Addressing the UN Security Council this week, Lebanon’s ambassador Ahmad Arafa said Beirut “will not accept a return to the past”, referring to decades in which armed groups operated independently of the state.
“In our modern history, no Lebanese government has demonstrated this level of courage and determination to reclaim the state authority, to restrict weapons to legitimate state institutions and to extend the state's control exclusively through its own forces over all Lebanese territory,” Mr Arafa said.
Hezbollah has long been the country’s most powerful armed group and political movement, with an arsenal far exceeding that of the state and deep influence across government institutions, security agencies and large parts of the Shiite community.
Calls for the Lebanese army to assert authority over all weapons have intensified both domestically and internationally as Israel’s war with Hezbollah continues to escalate and Western governments press Beirut to re-establish state control over security.
The Lebanese government issued a significant statement on March 2 banning military activities by Hezbollah after the group launched attacks on Israel following the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Under pressure from the US and Israel, Lebanese authorities had already taken an unprecedented step in August by instructing the army to extend its authority across the country and dismantle weapons held by non-state actors, including Hezbollah and Palestinian armed factions.
Karim Bitar, lecturer in Middle East Studies at Sciences Po Paris, said the move marked the first time since 1969 that the Lebanese state had attempted to assert such sweeping control over weapons.
That year, the Cairo Agreement allowed Palestinian armed groups to operate militarily from Lebanese territory, a precedent that eroded state authority and helped entrench the presence of armed factions outside government control.
After the end of Lebanese Civil War in 1990, militias were required to disarm, but Hezbollah was exempt because it was fighting Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon at the time.
Hanin Ghaddar, an expert on Shiite politics at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, said Lebanese authorities do not want to confront Hezbollah because “they are simply not confident this will end with Hezbollah eliminated”, she told The National.
“For the Lebanese Armed Forces and the political leadership, confronting Hezbollah also means a confrontation with the IRGC [Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], and this scares them,” she added.
Lebanon’s leaders must also balance the country’s fragile social fabric, avoid exacerbating tension and prevent the army itself from fracturing, Mr Bitar told The National.
“A worrying text appeared in a media outlet close to Hezbollah, the newspaper Al-Akhbar, recently where certain officers close to Hezbollah seemed to be sending a signal: ‘don’t go too far’. In Lebanon, this revives the fear of 1975, when the army split,” he explained.
Ghassan Salame, Lebanon’s minister of culture and a former UN special envoy, said on Thursday that delays in fully disarming Hezbollah were partly linked to slow Western support for the Lebanese army.
“The responsibility of lack of implementation is not exclusively in the hand of Lebanon; we did not get the kind of help we were expecting from the West and in particular from America,” he told Bloomberg. "And we did not get some kind of a pause in the Israeli attacks against Lebanon so that the army can reassess itself in all these areas."
Asked how much pressure Washington is placing on Lebanese authorities, Ms Ghaddar said the US is currently prioritising its confrontation with Iran.
“The US is focused on Iran, and they gave the Israelis the green light, basically, to do whatever they need to do,” she said. “Lebanon has been relegated to the Israelis by the Trump administration. After the war, probably when Israel has achieved its military goals in Lebanon, then the role of the US will become bigger.”
She said Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah may continue even if broader regional fighting ends.
“Even if [President Donald] Trump wraps the war in Iran soon, this does not mean that the Israelis are going to stop their war on Hezbollah,” she said.
“They [Israel] have the green light to do this. They actually had the green light at the beginning of the year but Trump asked them to wait so they could carry out a joint operation.
“But after that they were told they can do whatever they want, and Lebanon has been completely relegated by the US to Israel.”
