Last week, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun announced that Beirut would not forcibly disarm the Iran-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah as part of its effort to gain a state monopoly on weapons. Instead, Aoun said Hezbollah would be convinced to give up its arms on its own, through dialogue and negotiations. Moreover, the president suggested the militia’s troops could then be integrated into the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). This approach, which avoids a potentially bloody face-off, will be unacceptable to both the US and Israel, and will ultimately undermine the hopeful progress Lebanon has made toward reasserting its sovereignty.
Undoubtedly, President Aoun is in a difficult position. In the December 2024 ceasefire that ended the Hezbollah-Israel war, the Lebanese government agreed to implement United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which require the disarmament of all militias in the country. For its part, Hezbollah agreed to move its military hardware and personnel to the area above the Litani River, but it has rejected demilitarisation elsewhere.
Since the ceasefire was signed in December, the LAF has largely fulfilled its obligations to seize the militia’s weapons and dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure along the frontier with Israel. Lacking sufficient numbers of troops and concerned about sparking a resumption of its sectarian civil war, however, Beirut has baulked at going after Hezbollah’s arsenal north of the Litani. Meanwhile, consistent with the terms of the ceasefire, Israel continues to target Hezbollah assets and personnel throughout the state.
Default approach
To square the circle while avoiding a seemingly inevitable confrontation with Hezbollah, Aoun has defaulted to Lebanon’s perennial preferred method of dealing with uncomfortable and insoluble problems: national dialogue. Aoun is calling for a “bilateral dialogue” with Hezbollah to reach an agreement on the organisation’s disarmament.
Since 2005, Hezbollah has periodically engaged with the Lebanese government and political factions in dialogues focused on designing a “national defence strategy.” These discussions proved sterile, largely because Hezbollah always refused to discuss ceding its weapons but also because the organisation routinely murdered Lebanese critics who had the temerity to suggest that Hezbollah surrender its arms. Accordingly, until 2025, successive Lebanese governments accepted and legitimated, in their ministerial statements, the militia’s possession of weapons and “resistance.”
For example, in 2010, Hezbollah participated in several rounds of talks. But Hezbollah maintained its position, and negotiations, unsurprisingly, made no progress. In 2012, then-President Michel Suleiman advocated for placing Hezbollah’s arms under the authority of the LAF, but the group swiftly rejected it. In 2016, President Michel Aoun endorsed Hezbollah’s arms as “complementary” to the LAF. After years of futile efforts, in 2018, negotiations finally broke down after the militia deployed to Syria to defend the Assad regime against a popular revolt.
