A framework agreement to wind down more than a year of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon has exposed deep divisions inside Lebanon, with the government hailing it as a path back to sovereignty and the armed movement Hezbollah condemning it — and its supporters taking to the streets of Beirut.
The deal
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the agreement after several days of talks in Washington, calling it "the beginning of the beginning," according to Al Jazeera. The framework establishes pilot zones in southern Lebanon where the Lebanese Armed Forces would take exclusive security control, displacing non-state armed groups, in exchange for a phased Israeli withdrawal from those areas. A US-facilitated coordination body would oversee implementation, and Washington pledged $100 million in humanitarian aid and $30 million to support the Lebanese army, Al Jazeera reported.
Notably absent from the table was Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group that remains the most powerful armed force in southern Lebanon — an exclusion that has become the deal's central fault line.
A government welcome, a Hezbollah rejection
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun welcomed the accord as a first step toward "restoring its sovereignty over all its territory" and a way to let displaced residents return home, a framing echoed by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. Hezbollah saw it very differently. Secretary-General Naim Qassem said "Israel must leave unconditionally," rejecting any arrangement that ties a withdrawal to the group's disarmament, and a Hezbollah lawmaker warned that attempts to enforce disarmament could push Lebanon "towards civil war," according to Al Jazeera.
Protests in Beirut
Within hours of the announcement, Hezbollah supporters mobilized in Beirut, with motorcycle convoys moving through central districts and near routes to the airport and parliament, AnewZ reported, citing Lebanon's state news agency and footage from the scene. The scale of the demonstrations could not be independently confirmed from available reporting, and the Herald could not verify the extent of any counter-demonstrations by supporters of the deal.
The sequencing deadlock
The agreement's core problem is the order of events. It asks Hezbollah to disarm, or at least withdraw from the pilot zones, before Israeli forces leave those areas — while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel "remains in the security zone in southern Lebanon," casting its presence as leverage. Hezbollah refuses to give up its weapons before a full Israeli departure, and analysts note the Lebanese army lacks the capacity to disarm the group by force, meaning its cooperation is essentially voluntary.
Israeli military operations did not immediately halt; Al Jazeera reported strikes in Lebanon on the day of signing, though casualty figures could not be independently verified. The deal builds on an earlier, partial Israeli pullback from two areas of Lebanon that the Herald reported on previously. Whether this broader framework can hold — without the party that controls most of the guns in the south at the table — remains the unresolved question that has Lebanon arguing with itself.
