The Washington summit between President Donald Trump and President Joseph Aoun reaffirmed Lebanon’s path toward independence after decades of occupation and subordination to an axis of destruction that exacted a staggering toll: mass killing, systematic devastation on the scale of more than one Gaza, collective displacement, economic collapse, aggravating poverty, and the loss of a generation of skilled professionals and gifted youths.
The summit opened the door to a genuine restoration of the Lebanese state. It placed the recovery of national territory at the center of the agenda: land came under direct Israeli occupation, towns erased from the map, and the region south of the Litani River emptied of its residents and rendered uninhabitable. It also confronted the other source of Lebanon’s ruin: Iranian domination through Hezbollah that is embodied above all in an illegal arsenal which turned villages and homes into military sites, reducing their residents to human shields in the service of Iran.
The summit strengthened the case for direct negotiations. The premise is clear: the real threats are occupation and Hezbollah’s grip on the country, not negotiation itself. Direct talks offer Lebanon a path toward a stronger relationship with the United States and the other international partnerships it urgently needs.
At the same time, the launch of the “pilot zones” sets Israel’s withdrawal in motion. It may be gradual, but it represents a break with open-ended occupation and the destruction of property. The process also underscored the existence of American guarantees for withdrawal, regardless of Israel’s maneuvering or the political and electoral pressures facing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The summit further raised the question of what Tehran may still try to do through its proxy, even after the collapse of the “memorandum of understanding” that had tied Lebanon’s fate to the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s investment in Hezbollah is among its largest anywhere, in both funding and weaponry. The network of tunnels built for missiles and drones in southern Lebanon, an area transformed into a private Iranian sphere of influence, is said to have cost more than $3 billion. None of that prevented its crushing defeat: towns split apart, others were erased entirely, and tunnels destroyed one after another.
This reality places an enormous responsibility on the Lebanese government. Lebanon must recover its south, and the devastated communities of the south must be able to return home. Those residents have every right to expect the state - and the state alone - to guarantee their security and stability. The alternative is the continuation of occupation. There is no sustainable middle ground.
The “framework agreement” makes Lebanon responsible for controlling its territory and ending every parallel, illegitimate armed presence. Washington has requested detailed disarmament plans and clear mechanisms of accountability.
The summit therefore put Lebanon’s commitments to the test: the government’s own decisions, the ministerial statement that preceded them, the Taif Agreement, constitution, and international resolutions requiring the surrender of illegal weapons and the dismantling of the statelet’s parallel military, economic, and financial structures.
David Schenker, a former US official, has warned that responsibility for verifying whether the Lebanese Armed Forces fulfill their role in the “pilot zones” will fall to US Central Command. Its task will be to ensure that the army “imposes its authority over the areas Israel will evacuate, clearing them of Hezbollah and its infrastructure.”
In Beirut, and especially among the displaced, serious questions are now being asked about the danger of Lebanon being dragged into another “support war” on behalf of the Iranian regime. Those concerns are growing amid the possibility of a wider US-Israeli confrontation with Iran, after Tehran violated the memorandum of understanding by keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed and extending its coercive strategy through the Houthi militias at Bab el-Mandeb.
Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar declared, “We will not leave Iran alone.” His colleague Hassan Fadlallah claimed that the group now possesses “a regional equation extending from Hormuz to Bab el-Mandeb and all the way to Ali al-Taher.” Ali al-Taher is the commanding hill in southern Lebanon where Israeli forces are reportedly trapping a number of Quds Force members - Lebanese and Iranian alike - inside tunnels. More alarming still was the threat issued by former MP Nawaf Moussawi: “Our young men are present in the field throughout all areas of the south, and they are only waiting for the signal.”
Against this backdrop, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s visit to the liberated town of Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh was met with the same tired refrains that belong to an earlier era of sectarian and factional rule by force in the south. Some of the statements made during the visit were particularly troubling because they revived a claim that has already proved hollow: that Hezbollah’s weapons are an internal matter to be resolved through dialogue.
Reality says otherwise. Hezbollah continues to refuse to hand its weapons to the army, while directing increasingly inventive accusations of treason against the state, suggesting that there is little, if any, common national ground between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state. Hezbollah does not merely support Iran’s regional project. It amounts to an extension of the Quds Force, organically tied to that project.
The duty not to squander this opportunity to restore the state became even more urgent after the startling admission by Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem: “We do not make decisions of war and peace ourselves. We refer them to the supreme leader, who determines when confrontation becomes a religious duty.”
No force in Lebanon today can rival the legitimacy of the state. In addition to considerable Arab, American, and broader Western support, constitutional authority enjoys wide popular backing across regions and sects.
Everyone understands that Hezbollah remains capable of provoking security disturbances. But the likely result would be the group’s complete isolation, particularly after the state has prohibited its military and security activities.
What Lebanon needs now is resolve and a willingness to move beyond the usual political playbook. The state must work with independent Shiite leaders and communities in the south to put the Nabatieh and Tyre appeals into practice. These declarations reject Hezbollah’s weapons and its so-called “resistance,” and place responsibility for recovering the land and protecting its people exclusively in the hands of the state. They also insist on a fundamental principle: the voices of the victims must come first.
Lebanon can no longer afford reckless gambles that invite occupation, displacement, and uprooting. Those gambles brought the south its worst catastrophe, town by town, until whole communities were reduced to a landscape of open graves.
