Delayed for a phone call that didn’t happen: US declares ceasefire in Lebanon

A ceasefire in the Israeli war on Lebanon was ready to be announced as of late Wednesday night, a regional diplomat informed of the talks to Mada Masr.  But pressed on when it would actually come into effect, the diplomat couldn’t give an exact timeframe.  Two other sources, another regional diplomat and an Egyptian official with knowledge of the talks in Islamabad and in Washington, DC gave similar accounts.  The reason for the delay became apparent early on Thursday morning.   United States President Donald Trump was trying to arrange a phone call between Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The move was consistent with US efforts to offer Netanyahu a symbolic victory in accepting a ceasefire. A former Arab official with inroads in Washington described the US’s recent moves as an attempt to “smooth the air” around Netanyahu to give him an excuse to suspend operations.  By Wednesday morning, the Egyptian official said, the US had already told Iran and mediators in the Islamabad talks that a ceasefire would happen.  Thus, what was ultimately a PR stunt with little chance for success was delaying a ceasefire. Israel, in the meantime continued to wage war on south Lebanon, where its forces faced intense pushback from Hezbollah well into the early hours of Thursday morning.    With Israel stymied on the ground and with no time to make any headway, the diplomatic toing-and-froing over the past 24 hours achieved little beyond raising tension in some Lebanese political quarters over the prospect of unconditional talks with Israel and pushing back the timeline for what sources previously told Mada Masr was an inevitable ceasefire — as long as Iran insists that the situation in Lebanon remains tied to the Islamabad talks on the conflict between Tehran and the US, expected to resume in the coming days.  Ultimately, the ceasefire was announced on Thursday evening. Aoun and Netanyahu did not speak. And the fate of Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon remains unclear. Mada Masr spoke to sources informed of the deliberations and of the fighting in southern Lebanon to understand the dynamics around the last 24 hours.  *** “Trying to get a little breathing room between Israel and Lebanon,” Trump wrote in a jocular post on his social media site in the early hours of Thursday. “It has been a long time since the two leaders have spoken, like 34 years. It will happen tomorrow. Nice!” But only hours later press reports citing Lebanese officials refuted the possibility of direct talks between Aoun and Netanyahu. Aoun held calls later in the day with both US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump instead. The Lebanese president renewed, according to official statements, his “thanks for the efforts made by Trump to reach a ceasefire in Lebanon,” hoping “that these efforts would continue to stop the fire as soon as possible.” Trump announced shortly afterward that a ceasefire would start at midnight.  For diplomatic sources following the ceasefire efforts — which have already dragged on for a week since Iran insisted Lebanon be included in its ceasefire with the US — Aoun’s refusal to enter into diplomatic niceties with the Israelis before a truce is reached was no surprise. “I never thought that Aoun would take Netanyahu’s call,” Ashraf Hamdy, a former Egyptian ambassador to Lebanon, told Mada Masr.  “To accept a call from Netanyahu” would have been “mad,” a former Arab diplomat informed of Lebanese affairs put it in conversation with Mada Masr on Thursday, given “the huge strikes the Israelis conducted today.”  “There was no way,” the source said.  It was impossible to establish the type of diplomatic “breathing room” Trump tried to depict on social media when Israeli forces were simultaneously launching strikes on multiple positions along the south Lebanese front. Throughout Wednesday and into the early hours of Thursday, Israeli warplanes targeted sites near the town of Khiam, a key strategic site in the eastern sector of the south Lebanese front — where Israeli forces have been engaged for weeks in an abortive bid to wrest control of the town from Hezbollah fighters.  A resident living near Khiam said the Israeli airstrikes targeting Dibbine on Wednesday night were the heaviest the area has ever seen, but that Hezbollah was promptly returning rocket fire against the attacks. Clashes also continued to rage early on Thursday in Bint Jbeil between Hezbollah fighters and invading Israeli battalions, with reports indicating the presence of Israeli warplanes and helicopters at the town, which has become the focal point of Israel’s attempted advances in recent weeks.  However, according to a source in contact with Hezbollah fighters in the town, Israeli forces were still struggling to advance in Bint Jbeil on Wednesday night, unable to make meaningful progress. The source said Israeli troops attempted in recent days to take control of the Bint Jbeil stadium but were unable to enter due to heavy anti-tank fire and direct clashes with Hezbollah fighters. “They couldn’t even get inside,” the source said, describing “a massacre” among Israeli forces. Israeli media reported the injury and evacuation of at least five members of its forces on Wednesday night.  Despite the escalation of their attacks on the town in recent days, Israeli troops have had to withdraw on the ground from positions in the north of Bint Jbeil, near Ishraq School and the Sadeq complex, the source said, as well as from the road leading southeast out of Bint Jbeil toward Maroun al-Ras and Aitaroun. The source attributed the failure of the Israeli advance in part to Bint Jbeil’s densely built neighborhoods. While Israeli forces had begun demolishing buildings in the town center in order to move from positions on its eastern outskirts near Aitaroun and to its south, near Yaroun, progress remained difficult, the source added.  In the clashes that have raged in the city in recent days as Israel has sought to push forward, Israeli media has reported multiple high-casualty incidents. Ten paratroopers injured in Bint Jbeil were evacuated on Tuesday, according to Israeli publication Ynet News, which compared the high number of casualties to scenes from Israel’s 1982 and 2006 wars on Lebanon that forced Israel’s withdrawal from the country. Hezbollah said it had carried out a pre-planned ambush on Tuesday at dawn targeting a unit from the 101st battalion of the Israeli Paratroopers Brigade as it moved from the border town of Maroun al-Ras toward the southwestern neighborhoods of Bint Jbeil. According to Hezbollah, fighters detonated an explosive device once the unit reached a “kill zone,” before engaging in direct clashes. On Wednesday, the group also announced a series of attacks on gatherings of Israeli troops and vehicles. It said it struck forces east of Bint Jbeil at 7 pm with rocket salvos and artillery shells, followed by additional attacks at 9:20 pm near the Moussa Abbas complex and at 10 pm in the vicinity of the Ishraq School, north of the village, both involving heavy rocket fire. “At the end of the day, the people of the land know the streets and narrow corners, so they are better prepared,” the source said. He added that Hezbollah fighters are relying on multiple tactics rather than a single approach, including close-range combat with light weapons, anti-tank missiles targeting Israeli vehicles — including Merkava tank, bulldozers and special vehicles Israel uses for surveillance-detection measures to identify sources of fire — and direct targeting of Israeli troop gatherings, resulting in casualties. Nevertheless, Netanyahu has sought to spin the costly battle as a success, announcing on Wednesday evening that Israeli forces are about to overcome Bint Jbeil. But the longer Israeli troops remain engaged on the ground, the more complex establishing a ceasefire becomes.  Speaking on Thursday afternoon, the Arab diplomat informed of Lebanese affairs described the complexity of achieving the ceasefire in practice given the state of clashes on the ground.  “After today’s strikes, Hezbollah will have to hit back,” the source told Mada Masr. “And Israel clearly will not suspend its strikes before Hezbollah first suspends its strikes.” Echoing the sense of brinkmanship that has become tied to the ceasefire’s completion, Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah told Reuters on Thursday afternoon that everything is tied to Israel stopping all forms of fighting. *** So why have eight days elapsed since Pakistan said a ceasefire in the region would also usher in a halt to hostilities in Lebanon, allowing Israel to entrench itself further in a costly battle on Lebanese territory?  Israel’s immediate response to the announcement of a ceasefire was to drastically escalate its operations against Lebanon, launching “Black Wednesday,” a 100-strike offensive that would kill more than 300 people across the country in the span of around 10 minutes, including dozens of children.  But aside from the violent onslaught against the Lebanese people, Tehran’s insistence that Lebanon be included in a broader regional ceasefire has prompted a flurry of diplomatic maneuvers aimed at cushioning the blow a truce would represent for Israel and bolstering the Lebanese government’s role away from the troublesome influence of Iran. Chief among these maneuvers is the initiation of a separate track for negotiations between Israel and Lebanon outside of the Islamabad forum. “The Israelis managed to get the Americans to agree that the Lebanese and Iranian tracks are not intertwined,” said an Egyptian official informed of the progress in the Islamabad talks, which Egypt is playing a role in mediating alongside Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.  This nominal separation paved the way for a White House event on Tuesday that brought together a stony-faced Lebanese ambassador to the US and the Israeli ambassador to Washington following talks hosted by the State Department. Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Lichter described “the excellent atmosphere” that permeated the talks, calling them “a crushing victory against Hezbollah,” even proclaiming that Lebanon and Israel, still warring in the south, “are on the same side.” But effectively, the separation of diplomatic decorum from the situation on the ground is out of touch  So far, proposals for negotiations between the two countries have come to nothing. An initial French proposal that was to convince Israel “to accept a gradual process that will not be too aggressive for Hezbollah” was refashioned into a hasty US plan.  America’s hijacking of the French initiative, a former Arab ambassador to Lebanon previously told Mada Masr, turned it into a “poison pill.” “With the original French proposal, it was only Hezbollah that was hesitant to go along with Lebanese-Israeli talks, but all other Lebanese players were engaged. Some were on board and some were in a listening mood,” the former ambassador said. “But once the Americans stepped in with their heavy handed approach, all the Shiites joined Hezbollah in rejecting the proposal. Walid Jumblatt said he was not on board. And the Sunnis of Tripoli said they are not on board.” Trump gestured mistakenly in his post on Thursday morning to talks between Lebanese and Israel leaders “34 years ago,” correcting course in a later post to note that those talks took place 43 years ago, in 1983.  But the notorious Israeli-Lebanese entente of that decade between right-wing Lebanese Forces party leader Bachir Gemayel and then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, famous for orchestrating the Israeli massacre of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese at Sabra and Shatila, is far from being a touchstone from which to read the Lebanese political scene of today. The former Arab diplomat with knowledge of Lebanese affairs said that even though some parties in the government, such as Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, may be keen to go ahead with the talks, “there are some in his government who say [negotiations] cannot be so unconditional.”  These include not only the Shia bloc represented by Hezbollah and Amal Movement leader Nabih Berri, but representatives of Sunni and Druze communities in the country as well, the source said. “There are those who say ‘we can not go forward with the Israelis saying that these talks are designed to liberate Lebanon from Hezbollah,’” the source explained.  For Hamdy, the attempt to separate a Lebanon ceasefire from the Islamabad talks ignores the reality of present day politics.  “I highly doubt that on the short to medium term these two tracks will be separated, because the Iranians are benefitting from having the Lebanese on board and because Hezbollah is not in a position to be forced to accept staying away from Iran at this point,” he told Mada Masr.  And, in practice, there is no clear track for what negotiations would entail. In statements on Thursday, Aoun said he had told British officials that Lebanon requires a ceasefire in order to begin negotiations, and that it would also require a complete withdrawal from Lebanese land.  Netanyahu came out hours later, according to the Israeli press, to insist that troops would remain in south Lebanon.  Even with a ceasefire set to come into place at midnight, as per Trump’s latest proclamation on Truth Social, Berri has warned families from south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut — over a million people displaced across the country — to wait for official notice before returning to their homes.  The ceasefire text published by the State Department on Thursday night granted Israel sweeping latitude to conduct “defensive” strikes on Lebanese territory. There was no specific language asserting an aim to disarm Hezbollah or any timeframe for doing so, noting instead that “all parties recognize Lebanon’s security forces as having exclusive responsibility for Lebanon’s sovereignty and national defense; no other country or group has claimed to be the guarantor of Lebanon’s sovereignty,” without mentioning Hezbollah by name. The agreement published was for an initial 10-day period, subject to renewal by mutual agreement if “Lebanon effectively demonstrates its ability to assert its sovereignty” and if “progress is demonstrated in the negotiations.”  While Trump was still pushing for conversation between Aoun and Netanyahu on Thursday afternoon, the matter remains under the auspices of the Islamabad discussions, the forum in which the US, according to the Egyptian official, has already informed Tehran there will be a Lebanon ceasefire.  Downplaying the prospect of anything meaningful to come out of the talks in Washington before they began on Tuesday, a source  previously said that “what is most important for Lebanon is not the talks that will take place in Washington between the Israelis and the Lebanese, but rather a conclusive end to the US-Israeli war on Iran.” As such, says the former Arab diplomat with knowledge of Lebanese affairs, if a conversation or a meeting between Aoun and Netanyahu does take place, it will be arranged as “a photo op to please Trump.” What it could mean for Lebanese politics, of course, is much more serious. The post Delayed for a phone call that didn’t happen: US declares ceasefire in Lebanon first appeared on Mada Masr.