Direct talks have not stopped Israel’s war on Lebanon; they are testing whether a weakened state can be turned against the resistance under the cover of ‘stability.’
The Cradle
After two rounds of negotiations in Washington, that path has produced nothing on the ground. Israel has not withdrawn from the occupied points. Its daily violations have not stopped, nor have its assassinations. Even the truce sold to the Lebanese public as the gateway to stability has remained little more than a slogan.
Since Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam took office, the Lebanese state has moved more openly into the US–Israeli project for the region. What began as talk of containment, diplomacy, and buying time has hardened into a political and security course shaped in Washington to reorder Lebanon from within, tighten the siege around Hezbollah, and push toward the end of the resistance’s military role.
Negotiating under fire
The stated objectives have already revealed where this course is heading. The resistance is to be disarmed, weapons confined to the state, and the Lebanese army recast as the sole armed authority in a country still under occupation and attack.
This is why the authority appears to be negotiating from a position of surrender, not from one of defending Lebanese interests. Israel has offered no concession. Instead, it has escalated pressure, continued violations, and delivered firepower as a negotiating message. These are talks under fire.
The two rounds promoted in the media as diplomatic breakthroughs have, in practice, become a stage on which official Lebanon displays its readiness to provide the security guarantees demanded by Washington and Tel Aviv. The enemy, for its part, treats the Lebanese negotiator as the weaker side, anxious to reach a settlement at any price.
Clearly, the Lebanese government has no real leverage of its own. The actual elements of power remain with the party that carried the burden of confrontation: the resistance. What remains in the hands of the state is one dangerous card – internal confrontation with Hezbollah.
Under Washington’s ceiling
The growing role of the US embassy in Beirut is central to this track. Its 43-acre compound in Awkar, the second-largest US embassy compound in the world after Baghdad – has become a fitting symbol of Washington’s weight in the Lebanese file.
In recent months, Lebanese state institutions have appeared to move beneath the ceiling of direct American decision-making, whether in security or politics. Most of the files now raised internally follow a clear American list of conditions.
Some political and security meetings are no longer read in Lebanon as expressions of sovereign decision-making. They are seen instead as extensions of direct US management of the Lebanese file.
The danger is that the discussion has moved beyond field arrangements linked to the ceasefire. What is now being prepared is a security track under American sponsorship between Lebanon and the Israeli enemy. The aim is to push Beirut toward a security agreement with Tel Aviv, one that would produce intelligence exchange through an official communication mechanism supervised by Washington.
The declared track is already moving in that direction. Washington is preparing a security channel at the Pentagon, with Lebanese and Israeli military delegations brought into the room under the banner of “coordination” and “communication.” Tel Aviv has made Hezbollah’s disarmament a condition of any wider arrangement, while the US is working to turn that demand into a Lebanese obligation rather than an Israeli concession.
Informed Lebanese political and security sources tell The Cradle that the discussions go beyond the public language. According to these sources, Washington is examining mechanisms through which the Lebanese army would announce control over Hezbollah-linked facilities as part of the broader disarmament file – a formula that would move the confrontation with the resistance from Israeli firepower to Lebanese state institutions. Meanwhile, media reports suggest that a delegation of military and security officials is being assembled to head to Washington for a new round of negotiations with the enemy expected at the end of this month.
Sources familiar with Hezbollah’s position say the party views the authority’s move toward a security track with Israel as a step far beyond ceasefire arrangements or traditional understandings. Direct negotiations were unacceptable from the outset.
A security agreement with the enemy would be treated as a declaration of internal confrontation, and Hezbollah would act on that basis. According to these sources, Hezbollah sees any such agreement as an attempt to insert Lebanon into a security architecture that directly serves Israeli interests under US command. In practical terms, this would mark a transition from pressuring the resistance to encircling it from within.
For Hezbollah, this is an attempt to alter Lebanon’s role, identity, and position in the regional confrontation. Any effort to impose such a pact could open the door to a wide internal escalation – a scenario Washington has so far tried to avoid because it could bring down the very influence it has spent years building inside Lebanon.
Recent statements by Hezbollah officials belong to this confrontation over the security track. Speaking from the Bekaa town of Al-Ain, Loyalty to the Resistance bloc MP Hussein Hajj Hassan warned against “a security track being prepared at the Pentagon between Lebanon and Israel under American sponsorship,” recalling the 17 May 1983 Agreement, which collapsed in February 1984.
“Whoever thinks he can give the American what he wants, and behind him the Israeli, is delusional, has not read history well, and does not know the present well,” he said.
Special sources point to an advanced level of compliance with US directives inside parts of Lebanon’s security apparatus. Certain officers are viewed as nodes in Washington’s influence network inside official institutions.
According to the sources, this is no longer limited to conventional cooperation tied to aid or training. Over recent years, it has developed into an attempt to steer the priorities of some agencies toward files that serve the American–Israeli agenda against the resistance.
Several incidents over the past period have raised serious questions in political and security circles, particularly over leaks and field measures. This explains Hezbollah’s heightened sensitivity toward any expansion of security roles connected to the current negotiating track.
The party is convinced that Washington is not merely trying to regulate the border with occupied Palestine, but trying to reshape Lebanon’s security doctrine itself around Israeli security priorities.
That is where Lebanese memory returns to the 17 May Agreement, even if the instruments today are softer and the language more polished. Then, the Israeli enemy entered Lebanon through the gate of an agreement meant to remove the country from the equation of conflict and turn it into a controlled security space for Israel.
Today, the same logic is being revived through the marketing of direct negotiations and security arrangements as the only road to stability.
Stability as surrender
Economic collapse, the financial siege, and the obstruction of reconstruction are being used as political weapons. Washington does not hide the link between any future support, aid, or reconstruction package and conditions tied directly to the balance of power inside Lebanon.
Yet the Lebanese government still leans on what it calls “American guarantees” to justify the negotiating track. This is despite the fact that Washington is not a mediator in this war. It is a direct political, military, and intelligence partner in it. The same US administration that gives Israel full cover and blocks any serious international pressure on Tel Aviv is being presented in Beirut as a guarantor of stability.
Lebanese experience has shown the opposite: the US guarantees only Israeli interests.
A parallel political media campaign has prepared the ground for this shift. The debate is steered away from Israel’s daily violations of the truce and toward a narrower choice: direct talks or national suicide.
In that framing, any objection to negotiations becomes a call for war, the resistance is made responsible for every crisis, and the occupation state is treated as a force that must be placated in the name of ‘realism.’
A central fact is being deliberately buried in official discourse. Beirut has not been targeted so far, not because Lebanese diplomacy succeeded, but because keeping the capital outside the direct line of fire remains tied to regional balances that exceed the capacity of the current authority.
Tehran’s linkage of this file to wider negotiation tracks in Islamabad is what has prevented a full explosion so far, not the state’s ability to impose deterrence or sovereign protection.
In other words, what protects Lebanon today is not the internal negotiating track. It is the regional equation that still holds.
The border as Israel’s next frontier
The Lebanese file cannot be separated from the wider regional project Washington is advancing: the political and security remaking of West Asia. Tel Aviv and Washington are not treating the current negotiations as a narrow border file. They see them as part of a broader effort to redraw the balance of power in the region.
Alongside talk of a “buffer zone” in the south, political and security circles increasingly believe that Israel wants far more than a traditional security belt or the removal of resistance fighters from the border.
The Israeli project is effectively to turn the first line of southern villages into an advanced settlement–security belt. Its purpose would be to protect the northern settlements, secure the depth of the Galilee, and impose new demographic and military facts on the border.
Under this reading, Israel treats Lebanon’s border villages as part of the security equation of its own north.
This echoes an older Zionist practice in the Galilee of using settlement outposts to impose new demographic facts, secure territorial continuity, and turn Palestinian geography into the outer layer of Israel’s security architecture.
The Israeli insistence on emptying certain villages, coupled with the systematic targeting of social and environmental structures in the first-line area, suggests that the objective is a gradual transformation of the area itself – its population, its function, and its strategic meaning.
In the end, the direct negotiating track has not stopped the aggression or altered the field reality. It has only managed time in Israel’s favor, giving the enemy more space to entrench its conditions on the ground while violations and assaults continue.
By separating the negotiating track from Islamabad, Beirut handed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a lifeline. Israel gained time, the regional equation was diluted, and the pressure that had narrowed Tel Aviv’s room for maneuver began to ease.
Behind the language of security, diplomacy, and stability, a more dangerous project is taking shape – one that draws Lebanon’s state institutions into the confrontation with the resistance from within.
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