Politics

The Lebanese army can confront Hezbollah. Here's how.

Lebanon's president and prime minister have a big decision to make: whether, and how, to use the army to disarm Hezbollah. Today's army can be trusted, but its task must be well thought through.

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A portrait of a soldier in Beirut, Lebanon.

The Lebanese army can confront Hezbollah. Here's how.

Bilal Saab

last update on 02 Sep 2025

In his inaugural speech in January, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun stated that the Lebanese state should regain its monopoly over the use of force, which was met with applause from lawmakers and international partners alike. A former Lebanese army commander, Aoun, repeated that pledge in April. A decision “has been taken,” he said.

Until it becomes clear when and how this goal will be achieved, everything in Lebanon will be put on hold. The United States, France, and Saudi Arabia will not help reboot Lebanon’s debt-stricken economy or wade into the reconstruction task in the south until Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam present a concrete blueprint for disarming Hezbollah.

Washington wants there to be a public commitment from Beirut. If this doesn't happen, US special envoy Tom Barrack could end his shuttle diplomacy, which could mean Israel feeling less pressure to end its airstrikes and pull its troops away from the five hilltops it is occupying in southern Lebanon.

Israel is believed to have destroyed most of Hezbollah's arms, but the Iran-backed group reportedly still has weapons stored north of the Litani River, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut, including armed drones and long-range precision-guided missiles. What it still has, it will keep, says leader Naim Qassem, who succeeded Hassan Nasrallah after Israel killed him in September 2024. “We will not surrender or give up to Israel,” he said in a video message on 18 July. “Israel will not take our weapons away from us.”

AFP — Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem in Tehran on July 31, 2024.

Qassem’s words should shock no one: Hezbollah was always unlikely to disarm voluntarily and transition to a ‘normal’ political party, since this would mean ‘throwing in the towel.’ Surrender is antithetical to the group’s philosophy of armed struggle and martyrdom. Without its guns, Hezbollah is just another sectarian group in Lebanon—only with less political acumen and experience than others.

Yet despite Qassem’s declarations, the Lebanese cabinet met on 5 August to discuss the issue of Hezbollah’s disarmament, with Salam saying after the meeting that ministers approved the “objectives” of a US proposal for “ensuring that the possession of weapons is restricted solely to the state”. Hezbollah ministers and Shiite allies in the Lebanese cabinet withdrew from the meeting in protest. They called the decision a “grave sin” and vowed to act “as if it did not exist.”

For his part, Head of Loyalty to Resistance bloc Member of Parliament Mohammad Raad stressed shortly after the meeting that the Lebanese government's decision to disarm Hezbollah was being imposed by foreign dictates and not in line with the spirit of the national pact and sovereignty. Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, added to Raad’s comments, saying on 9 August that Tehran is opposed to Hezbollah's disarmament. This prompted a response from the Lebanese government, which called Velayati’s comments a “flagrant and unacceptable interference” in the country’s internal affairs.

At the time, Barrack, the US special envoy, congratulated Lebanese leaders “for making the historic, bold, and correct decision to begin fully implementing” the ceasefire deal. “This week’s cabinet resolutions finally put into motion the ‘One Nation, One Army’ solution for Lebanon,” he said. “We stand behind the Lebanese people.”

REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir — US Ambassador to Türkiye Tom Barrack, also special envoy to Syria, fields questions from journalists after meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon, on August 18, 2025.

Given that Hezbollah has no intention of disarming unless forced to, and given that it may even seek to replenish its destroyed and depleted stockpiles, there seem to be two remaining options: either Israel finishes the job militarily, or else the Lebanese army steps in. Each comes with risks and complications.

The Israeli option

Israel has already carried out more than 500 airstrikes against Hezbollah targets since the November 2024 ceasefire to further degrade the group’s military capabilities and lower the chance of rearming. According to the Israeli military, it has killed at least 230 Hezbollah operatives and destroyed more than 90 rocket launchers and thousands of rockets, 20 command centres, 40 weapon depots, and five arms production sites, alongside other infrastructure.

Whether this continues or escalates remains to be seen. When asked, Barrack said a new Israeli war was not expected but cautioned that the US could not “compel” Israel to do anything. By sticking to its current formula, Israel can further dent Hezbollah’s remaining combat power but cannot eliminate it entirely. To do that would require another ground invasion.

The political and military costs of this may seem less tempting in Tel Aviv, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already under tremendous pressure for his disastrous handling of the war in Gaza. Invading Lebanon may divert attention from his problems temporarily, but it would also further isolate Israel at a time when states such as the UK, France, Canada, and Saudi Arabia are running out of patience.

The in-house option

The second option, then, is the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) helping to push Hezbollah to disarm. In a press conference following the 7 August cabinet meeting, Lebanese Information Minister Paul Morcos said that the decision to disarm Hezbollah would be implemented in accordance with a plan to be submitted by the Lebanese army by the end of August, which will include a timeline for disarmament by the end of 2025.

The plan has four phases. The first requires the Lebanese government to issue a decree within 15 days committing to Hezbollah’s full disarmament by 31 December 2025. In this phase, Israel would also cease ground, air and sea military operations.

The Lebanese army's mission would be to apply enough military pressure to bring Hezbollah to the negotiating table for disarmament to be thrashed out

In the second phase, Lebanon would then begin implementing the disarmament plan within 60 days, with the government approving "a detailed (Lebanese army) deployment plan to support the plan to bring all arms under the authority of the state." In the meantime, Israel would begin withdrawing from positions it holds in south Lebanon, and Lebanese prisoners held by Israel would be released in coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In the third phase, Israel would withdraw from the final two of the five points it holds within 90 days, and funding will be secured to initiate rubble removal in Lebanon and infrastructure rehabilitation, to prepare for reconstruction. The fourth, within 120 days, Hezbollah's remaining heavy weapons would be dismantled, including missiles and drones.

Lastly, the United States, Saudi Arabia, France, Qatar and other friendly states would organise an economic conference to support the Lebanese economy and reconstruction and to "implement President Trump's vision for the return of Lebanon as a prosperous and viable country."

Expanding role

Since the November ceasefire, the LAF has played a central role as part of the Cessation of Hostilities Implementation Mechanism—a reformulated version of the tripartite mechanism established following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Under the terms of the cessation-of-hostilities arrangement, the revised mechanism would be chaired by the United States and hosted by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL. It also includes the Israeli military and the LAF, as well as France.

The LAF has been praised by US generals for its role in helping to dismantle Hezbollah's military infrastructure in the southern part of the Litani. Israel, however, believes that the LAF is too slow and too hesitant to move north, but this hesitancy has nothing to do with the LAF. On the contrary, it comes from the Lebanese authorities. Like other national armies, the LAF takes its direction from the civilian leadership over which battles to fight and which responsibilities to assume.

ANWAR AMRO / AFP — President Joseph Aoun (R) chairs the first meeting of Lebanon's new government, along with Premier Nawaf Salam, at the Baabda presidential palace, east of Beirut, on February 11, 2025.

Aoun and Salam face a tough decision. Ordering the forcible removal of Hezbollah's weapons carries great risks. Even though Hezbollah answers to a foreign power (Iran), receives assistance from a foreign power and follows an ideology that is foreign to Lebanese culture, all its members are Lebanese, so an LAF-Hezbollah confrontation would most likely lead to the killing of Lebanese citizens and could lead to wider sectarian clashes. It is also unclear whether Shiites in the LAF would fight their own community members.

To illustrate the risks of an LAF operation to disarm Hezbollah, on 9 August, munitions in an arms depot in south Lebanon exploded as LAF experts were dismantling them, killing six of them and wounding several others. The blast took place south of the Litani River. Lebanese rumours immediately circulated that Hezbollah deliberately failed to warn the LAF about the risks of dismantling the arms depot.

Increasingly capable

Can the LAF implement the Lebanese government's plan? Many doubt its abilities. However, I am not one of them. I have spent the last decade studying the LAF and interacting with its personnel, including commanders. In 2017, as part of my duties in the Office of the Secretary of Defence in the first Trump administration, I oversaw the US military assistance programme with the LAF, liaising closely with the Office of Defence Cooperation in the US Embassy in Beirut and US Central Command (CENTCOM).

I witnessed first-hand the remarkable evolution of the LAF from a dilapidated force to a professional army, as evidenced in 2017 by its battle against the Islamic State (IS), another irregular army. This was while I was at the Pentagon, where I could observe it closely, and later helped produce the Department of Defence's evaluation of the LAF's performance. It scored very well.

Over several days, the LAF crushed IS in Operation Fajr al-Jouroud (Dawn of the Outskirts) in August, just five months after Gen. Joseph Aoun took over as army commander. IS had established a presence along Lebanon's north-eastern border four years earlier. It took the LAF just over a week to defeat its opponent and would do so with minimal casualties, impressing CENTCOM leaders and senior officials in the Pentagon.

A Lebanese soldier stands at the border in the town of Naqoura in front of an Israeli watchtower.

The LAF excelled in planning, rehearsing, deploying, moving, and fighting with determination, effectiveness, precision, speed, and ingenuity. It leveraged its extensive US training and successfully employed its US-made weaponry both from the air and the ground (often in a combined fashion, meeting NATO standards), giving IS no chance to fight back. Inspired by Sun Tzu's famous dictum, the LAF essentially defeated its enemy with little to no fighting. Its preparation and mastery of its own military strategy were such that IS—a radical entity not known for surrendering—quickly gave up and fled back to Syria.

Part of a political strategy

Of course, IS and Hezbollah are different propositions. An LAF confrontation with Hezbollah would likely not be as clean or decisive as Fajr al-Jouroud. Likewise, IS is not Lebanese, and there is a broad consensus in Lebanon against it. The same cannot be said for Hezbollah. Still, the LAF is more than capable of making serious contributions to the goal of Hezbollah's disarmament, should it be asked to. Its mission would not be to remove every Hezbollah gun, but to apply enough military pressure to bring it to the negotiating table for disarmament to be thrashed out.

Importantly, however, the LAF's remit would need to be integrated into a broader political strategy of the Lebanese government. What that political strategy would entail is up to the Lebanese people and the government to decide, but in making those decisions, the public and the government should stop discounting the LAF and recognise that it has undergone nothing short of a remarkable transformation, thanks in large part to US coaching and assistance over more than 18 years.

The LAF exists for a single purpose: to defend Lebanon from all threats, foreign and domestic. And under the right set of political circumstances, it should be the one leading efforts to disarm Hezbollah. While it was previously unable to play a meaningful role, it can—and should—now.

If not, Israeli attacks are likely to continue, and the prospect of another destructive war will become increasingly likely. That stark scenario—when compared with a local solution backed by international partners—should be part of Aoun and Salam's cost-benefit analysis.

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