Israel’s success against Hezbollah provides a genuine opportunity for sustained peace

History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. With Israel and Lebanon having finalised a deal to end Israel-Hezbollah hostilities, the United States must ensure that any such deal does not repeat the errors of 1701, the ill-fated 2006 UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) that ended Israel and Hezbollah’s last major conflict.

This resolution entrusted enforcement to two risk-averse and unaccountable actors: the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, and the Lebanese Armed Forces, or LAF.

The result was Hezbollah’s vast military build-up and only the postponement — not the prevention — of the next major war.

The results speak for themselves. Hezbollah’s arsenal grew tenfold, incorporating increasingly sophisticated weaponry to precisely strike targets deep inside Israel, while also overwhelming its air defences with sheer numbers.

Hezbollah also systematically entrenched itself across Lebanon, including building vast terror infrastructure right up to the Israeli border.

This growing Hezbollah monstrosity, in many cases under the nose —literally — of UNIFIL and the LAF, faced no resistance.

The recent report published by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) documented numerous such examples, as well as dozens of Hezbollah projectile attacks against Israel in the prior two months, launched just meters from UNIFIL facilities.

This report, co-authored by the former head of the IDF’s international cooperation division, also documents how Israeli officials provided detailed evidence of Hezbollah’s terror activity to UNIFIL, the UN Department of Peace Operations (which oversees UNIFIL) and the LAF, and repeatedly requested they act to prevent Hezbollah’s slow but steady creation of a de facto terror state — to no avail.

At present, Israel’s sweeping success in deranging the Iran-backed terror group provides a window of opportunity for a fundamental reset in the approach to Hezbollah — and the broader Iranian terror axis.

The repeated failure of the past decade-and-a-half to confront, let alone rein in, Hezbollah means any resolution to the current hostilities should usher in a new security architecture altogether—one that allows the more than 60,000 Israeli evacuees to return to their homes and remain there in peace.

Israel can no longer rely primarily on its air defences to keep its people safe from Hezbollah rockets, as it did in years past, since Hezbollah likely retains thousands of projectiles even in its currently degraded state.

At the core of this revived framework must be a world in which Israel can act whenever it sees a credible or imminent threat, wherever across Lebanon and Syria — Hezbollah’s logistical lifeline to Iran — with the United States proactively buffeting Israel against international condemnation.

Inevitably, critics will accuse Israel of violating such a deal, even though the current ceasefire proposal reportedly enshrines Israel’s freedom of action against imminent threats. UNSCR 1701’s similar language was weaponised by Israel-bashers, including Lebanon itself, to accuse Israel of being the aggressor.

As with Israel’s war in Gaza, robust US support for Israel’s self-defence is irreplaceable and a crucial bulwark against a wave of attacks threatening to undermine Israel’s global legitimacy.

Recent media reports suggest that a US-led oversight committee will monitor the enforcement of the deal. However, the mere existence of such a body will not suffice to bring peace to Israel and Lebanon.

Rather, sustained and tough US leadership, including direct oversight of UNIFIL and LAF using cameras and sensors, will be required to prevent the committee from devolving into another ineffective bureaucracy mimicking UNIFIL’s dangerous ineffectiveness.

Moreover, UNIFIL’s annual mandate should no longer be a rubber-stamp renewal, and the United States should use its influence to have future mandates explicitly contradict the peacekeeping force’s dubious but long-held claim that it cannot access facilities on “private property,” even if they are Hezbollah installations.

The United States should also capitalise on the narrow window provided by Hezbollah’s military degradation to end LAF’s longtime risk aversion towards defending Lebanese sovereignty against this Iranian proxy.

America has useful leverage here in the form of long-stalled IMF agreements to strengthen Lebanon’s brittle economy and more than $3 billion in US defence assistance for Lebanon since 2006.

Finally, a ceasefire deal must not cut short Israel’s momentum against Iran-backed terror activity in Lebanon and the Iranian regime itself, particularly as Iran continues moving towards nuclear capability.

The last few months have flipped the script and back-footed Tehran, but Iran must not be permitted to use a ceasefire deal to wriggle out of its current predicament.

The United States must communicate unequivocally that Iran will face dire consequences for trying to sabotage any deal by rearming Hezbollah or other proxies.

In other words, a ceasefire deal should be the beginning, not the end, of a sustained pressure campaign to inflict a fatal US-Israel blow to Iran’s axis of resistance that threatens Israel and the United States alike.