Inside Lebanon’s Fraught Push to Disarm Hezbollah

The thud of Israeli air strikes shook Beirut’s military court as it worked through its docket one morning in early March. Inside a black metal cage at the courtroom’s edge, three men waited silently to face the chief judge, a burly brigadier general in the Lebanese Army. The procedure was ordinary. The defendants were not. They were Hezbollah fighters, members of the powerful Iran-backed group that has long held sway over Lebanon. Men like these were supposed to be untouchable.

Days earlier, Hezbollah had fired a volley of rockets into Israel, plunging Lebanon into a regional war that its leaders were desperate to avoid. In response, Lebanon’s government took the extraordinary step of outlawing Hezbollah’s military operations. As Israel began a large-scale bombing campaign, Nawaf Salam, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, demanded that Hezbollah hand over its weapons, and ordered security forces to take “immediate measures” to enforce the decision and arrest violators. It seemed an epochal moment. For decades, Hezbollah’s arsenal had been tolerated, even tacitly condoned—shielded by the group’s political power and by its status among supporters as a counterweight to Israel. The three Hezbollah fighters had been stopped at a checkpoint in the country’s south, caught ferrying Kalashnikov rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition toward the front line. After nearly a week in detention, they made no effort to hide what they had been doing. “We are trying to defend our land,” they said, according to two senior judicial officials present at the hearing that day. “Our place is not here in the court. Our place is in the south.”

The mere presence of Hezbollah fighters in the dock shattered the group’s long-standing aura of impunity in Lebanon. But, after a hearing that lasted barely five minutes, the men were released. Each paid a fine of nine hundred thousand Lebanese pounds—about ten dollars—according to internal court records obtained by The New Yorker. They had been convicted not of any national-security offense but of the misdemeanor charge of transporting unlicensed weapons. For many Lebanese, it felt less like a turning point than an anticlimax.

The landmark case—the first of around two dozen brought against Hezbollah members in recent weeks—offered a rare window into the fraught push to curb a militant group that has long eclipsed the country’s own Army. With disarmament now at the center of U.S.-brokered talks between Lebanon and Israel, Lebanon’s leaders have sought to present any criminal conviction as a step forward. “There has been tremendous change,” Adel Nassar, Lebanon’s justice minister, told me. “People have a short memory and forget where we were before.” But, as fighting has intensified, arrests have slowed, even as some penalties have grown tougher. The unevenness of the crackdown has revealed Lebanon’s dilemma. The state is trying to show the world that it can act against Hezbollah, but inside the country significant divisions persist regarding how, or even whether, the group should be disarmed.

After the previous war between Hezbollah and Israel ended in a tenuous ceasefire, in 2src24, Lebanon’s cash-strapped military was required to dismantle Hezbollah’s arsenal. By January, the Lebanese Army announced the completion of the first phase of a slow, cautious disarmament plan: clearing weapons depots, disabling tunnels and rocket positions, and taking over abandoned Hezbollah sites, often with the group’s acquiescence. Hezbollah’s leadership had been decimated by an Israeli assassination campaign, and much of its stockpile of weapons was destroyed during the war. (Israel also continued near-daily strikes during the ceasefire.) Then came the collapse of the Assad regime, in Syria, severing the land route long used by Hezbollah to transport rockets, antitank missiles, and precision-guidance systems from its Iranian patron. It was in no position to fight over what remained.

The United States and Israel nonetheless pushed the Army to move faster, warning that Hezbollah was attempting to reconstitute. But moving too aggressively risked internal strife. In 2srcsrc8, after the Lebanese government attempted to shut down Hezbollah’s telecommunications network and remove an airport-security chief seen as close to the group, Hezbollah fighters seized parts of Beirut within hours, forcing a humiliating climbdown. The memory of that episode—and of the country’s long and bloody civil war, fought from 1975 to 199src—still looms.

In the latest war, the second in just two years, more than three thousand people have been killed, and well over a million—around a fifth of Lebanon’s population—have been displaced. The painstaking work of clearing depots has ground to a halt, overtaken by a more volatile reality. Hezbollah, though battered, has used the conflict to remind its rivals at home that it remains a potent force. It has kept up attacks against Israel, rejected calls to disarm, and broadcast sleek propaganda videos of its rocket and drone strikes in open defiance of the March ban. Wafiq Safa, a senior Hezbollah official, proclaimed that the group would “force the government to backtrack” on the decision “regardless of the method.” Lebanon is now locked in a standoff over the future of one of the world’s most heavily armed militias, the crown jewel in Tehran’s network of proxies across the Middle East.

Hezbollah, which emerged in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, has long cast itself as the country’s defender. To its supporters, it is often simply called al-muqawama, meaning “the resistance.” Its weapons are not incidental to that identity. Its flag encodes armed struggle: a raised fist gripping an assault rifle, paired with a Quranic promise of victory. Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s longtime leader who was assassinated by Israel in 2src24, once called resistance “a condition of existence.” The cost of that resistance has been borne, repeatedly, by the Lebanese people. In April, President Joseph Aoun put the grievance plainly: “How long will the people of the south continue to pay the price for others’ wars on our land?” Despite a ceasefire deal signed last month, Israel once again occupies much of southern Lebanon, where it continues to lay waste to border towns and strike at will. It is a difficult moment to ask a movement built on resistance to give up its guns.

This past month, I visited Abbas Ibrahim, Lebanon’s former national-security chief, at his apartment complex in a well-heeled neighborhood on Beirut’s southern outskirts. The area had been heavily bombarded in recent weeks, and an Israeli drone buzzed overhead, looping around the cleaved remains of nearby buildings. Ibrahim, who retired in 2src23, was once one of Washington’s most valuable back channels in the region, a trusted interlocutor with access to the highest echelons of power in Hezbollah and in Tehran. His office was stuffed with books—“The Invention of the Jewish People” (Shlomo Sand), “World Order” (Henry Kissinger), “The Shia Revival” (Vali Nasr)—which formed a kind of syllabus on the region’s unsettled questions. Many were spread open on desks and tables, as if he were busy moving between them all at once. In one meeting room was a worn copy of Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” which Ibrahim insisted I take with me. It was not a book he admired, but he had read it when Trump returned to office, hoping that it would provide some insight into the man now trying to exercise control over Lebanon’s most intractable problem. I asked Ibrahim whether Hezbollah could be disarmed, particularly now, with Israel occupying so much of the country’s south. “Forget about it,” he said. “By force, it’s impossible.”

Since 2srcsrc6, the U.S. has poured more than three billion dollars into the Lebanese military, hoping that it could be made powerful enough to counter Hezbollah. But this aid always came with an implicit ceiling. It helped build an army largely for counterterrorism and border control, not one capable of fighting Israel, the enemy Hezbollah invokes to justify its arms. The state’s arsenal comprises a patchwork of older and secondhand equipment, with no advanced air-defense system fit to challenge Israeli warplanes. Its soldiers have had to contend with other shortcomings. Lebanon’s economy began to collapse in 2src19, causing salaries to plummet; many enlistees were forced to take second jobs, and others to desert altogether. In Beirut, I have more than once found myself in a servees—one of the shared taxis that ferry passengers across the city—driven by a moonlighting Army sniper. Other soldiers wait tables, deliver food, or guard buildings after hours. At one point, the military even started offering helicopter rides to tourists to raise cash.

Hezbollah’s case for keeping its munitions draws strength from this vacuum, especially in southern Lebanon, which Israel has invaded repeatedly and where many Shiites see the group as the only force willing to protect them. “Are those Western countries ready to give us the weapons and equipment we need to defend the country if Israel tries to invade us?” Ibrahim asked. “The answer is no.” At the onset of the current war, the Lebanese military withdrew from the border region, citing operational concerns: it had to reposition units that risked being encircled by Israel. But the pullback reflected a broader strategic predicament. Lebanon had not started the war, and any confrontation between two U.S.-backed forces would have been politically explosive. It only lent credence to Hezbollah’s argument. The state had ceded the front line just as it was asking the group to lay down its arms. Ibrahim said, “How can you ask people to be disarmed when you don’t have an alternative?”

Beyond the issue of brute capability, there is a deeper, internal danger. Rudolph Haykal, Lebanon’s Army commander, has been wary of any disarmament campaign that could turn the military into Hezbollah’s direct antagonist—and, by extension, set it against a large part of the country’s Shiite community, roughly a third of the population. In Lebanon’s fragile political system, power is divided among religious communities, and the Army’s cross-sectarian legitimacy depends on being seen as an institution—one of the few—that can stand above those divides. During the civil war, the Army splintered along sectarian lines, and, for a time, that consensus collapsed. The state lost control of roads, ports, and entire neighborhoods, as the country devolved into a patchwork of militia-held zones. Ibrahim warned that ordering the military into a direct confrontation with Hezbollah could reopen those fractures. The question, as he saw it, was not only whether the Army had the means to disarm the group. It was whether Lebanon could survive the attempt. “We passed through this experience before,” he said. “Why do we want to drink from this bitter glass again?”

That fear has weighed on even the most determined state officials. When I visited Nassar, Lebanon’s justice minister, he alluded to potential legal action that could reach all the way up to Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s leader—the kind of step that would have been unthinkable only months earlier. But Nassar was also wary of exposing the gap between the state’s authority and its actual power. “It will be tough,” he said, of disarmament. “But it is existential for Lebanon. Our fundamental effort is to get there without a civil war.”

Current conditions make getting there at all seem a long way off. Hezbollah says it will not discuss the future of its weapons until Israel halts its attacks and withdraws from southern Lebanon. Israel says it will not withdraw until Hezbollah is disarmed. Lebanon’s government, which has pledged to bring all weapons under state control, is caught between these irreconcilable demands.

For now, Lebanon’s leaders have tried to press Hezbollah to lay down its arms with new assertiveness while insisting that the state will not be dragged into an internal war to impose it. “We are not seeking confrontation with Hezbollah,” Salam said, in April, at a press conference in Paris with President Emmanuel Macron. “But, believe me, we will not be intimidated by Hezbollah.” The United States, meanwhile, has been pushing Lebanon to adopt a more bellicose posture. President Donald Trump pledged to help Lebanon “protect itself” from Hezbollah, which his Administration is keen to portray as primarily a foreign interloper. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, spoke of training and equipping “vetted units” inside the Lebanese military to “go after elements of Hezbollah and dismantle them so Israel doesn’t have to do it.”

“It’s a good recipe to put the country on fire,” Ibrahim said. “It’s a very good recipe.”

The southern port city of Tyre juts into the Mediterranean on land that was once an island. In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great, unable to take the Phoenician city by sea, built a causeway across the water and turned it into a peninsula. More than two millennia later, another invading army is again visible from its shore.

When I visited, in April, Israeli forces were positioned just across the bay, occupying the area around Ras al-Bayada, a coastal town about five miles inside Lebanese territory. It was part of what Israel calls its “forward defense line,” a depopulated buffer zone that Israeli officials say they will maintain until Hezbollah is disarmed, and perhaps in perpetuity. In total, Prime Minister Salam has said, sixty-eight towns and villages are now under Israeli occupation. The ceasefire had done little to stem the war. Fighter jets roared overhead, and air strikes pounded the surrounding hillsides, sending up thick plumes of acrid smoke. On a rocky outcrop, Ali Moussa, a thirty-six-year-old school-bus driver, cast his fishing rod into the sea. “Ceasefire? What ceasefire?” he said, gesturing toward the explosions.

On paper, the Lebanese state has a mandate for disarmament. According to a Gallup survey conducted last summer, seventy-nine per cent of Lebanese believe that only the country’s military should possess weapons. But that consensus was thinner than it appeared. The poll excluded areas where Hezbollah is most entrenched, and among Lebanese Shiites—the community that forms the bedrock of the group’s support and has borne much of the cost of the war—only a minority agreed. In Tyre, long held up by locals as a model of coexistence among Lebanon’s various sects, Israeli occupation and bombardment were not weakening Hezbollah’s case for its weapons. They were giving it new life.

Sometimes, that national fracture ran through a single household. In the winding alleys of Tyre’s Christian quarter, I found my way to the courtyard of Thereze Alawwi, where pictures of the Virgin Mary hung on walls blackened by mold and damp. Her daughter, Soraya, had taken refuge there with her three children, Christina, Charbel, and Elias, after fleeing Debl, a Christian border village now encircled by Israeli troops. After weeks of bombardment, the family had only managed to escape under the cover of a U.N. convoy. “We were living in a horror movie,” Soraya said, her face drawn with exhaustion.

Charbel wheeled Christina, barely eighteen months old, in a stroller over the cracked concrete of their new home. Their father, Elie, a soldier in the Lebanese military, had stayed behind in Debl. He wasn’t on duty but had refused to leave. I had first met the family after the last ceasefire, at a Christmas Mass in Tyre, when Christina was still in her bassinet. One war had marked her birth; another was marking her childhood. For Soraya, that was reason enough to want Hezbollah disarmed. “We learned the hard way that wars do not get us results,” she said.

Her brother Hanna was more conflicted. He is a municipal policeman who has a face tattoo and a mischievous energy. I had run into him earlier that day while searching for the family home, and he led me there through a tangle of backstreets on a rickety moped. Though he was an officer of the state, he understood the appeal of an armed movement outside it. Still, he suggested that Hezbollah had pulled Lebanon into a war at Iran’s behest, which he resented. “Why are we always paying someone else’s bill?”