As MP Hussein al-Hajj Hassan declared that “we have nothing to offer or to discuss north of the Litani River,” thereby reiterating Hezbollah’s insistence on its arms and “resistance,” in open defiance of the government’s decision to limit weapons throughout Lebanon to state forces, the Israeli enemy proceeded with its assault, turning vast regions north of the river into scorched earth with attacks clearly intended to impose a new wave of displacement.
According to Ambassador Simon Karam, Lebanon’s representative on the “Mechanism,” Hezbollah has not cooperated with the army, which nevertheless achieved tangible successes in disarming areas south of the Litani and establishing its operational control everywhere but the five occupied hills that grant the enemy control over important parts of the forward-edge areas.
This reality, confirmed by the ceasefire monitoring committee, is denied by Nawaf al-Moussawi, head of the “resources and borders” department in the party. “The army does not control the area south of the Litani, and talk of the completion of the first phase does not align with the facts on the ground,” he said.
Hezbollah statements that show no regard for Lebanese lives or their security continue to mount. This rhetoric threatens to entangle Lebanon, the South in particular, in a war that would bring further destruction and exhaust what remains of its capacities. The madness peaked with Sheikh Naim Qassem’s commitment to defend Iran and his assertion that Hezbollah would not remain neutral if the Islamic Republic were targeted!
On the ground, non-state arms weapons have failed every test. They preserved no dignity, protected none of the men who carry them, and safeguarded neither lives nor borders. Their confrontation with Israel has ended, and clinging to them provides the enemy with a justification to collectively punish the Lebanese, and consequently, to maintain and broaden occupation. This danger now looms over areas north of the Litani, which the enemy controls by fire.
Despite this, denial overrides all else. Daily developments in the South today reflect serious and alarming comprehensive escalation, for Hezbollah’s own constituency in particular. There is a plan for physical liquidation targeting elements tasked with organizational coordination in southern villages and towns. That is, the enemy’s bank of targets is not limited to the “Jihad Council” and its subsidiaries, which include leaderships, military elites, and field commanders. The plan also extends to dismantling the party’s popular arms with the aim of destroying the grassroots community supplying the “resistance” with new fighters. In recent days, the enemy has indeed eliminated many of these officials.
Despite its total helplessness in the face of Zionist violations and despite Qassem’s reassurances that the weapons would not target Israelis, accusations of treason have reached an unfathomable level of absurdity. Al-Akhbar claims that “what the president’s administration and its government are doing... is the establishment of a state that guards the security of the northern settlements.” This is an approach that requires breaking the silence, and not merely rejecting the discourse of treason and those behind it, those who consider everything that has befallen Lebanon to be nothing more than collateral damage sacrificed for Iran.
The authorities that intend to begin the second phase of the disarmament process, covering the region between the Litani and the Awali rivers, that is, the rest of the South, must brandish the sword of policy against non-state forces. It has been shown time and again that there is no way to pull the country out of this quagmire, protect lives, and prevent the deepening of defeat, without total disarmament across Lebanon.
The time has come to leave behind the era of illusions behind. This party is not capable of gradually arriving at a national awakening. “We are resistance first and a political party second, and this party works in the service of the resistance,” Moussawi tells us, leaving no room for nuance. Before him, Qassem had said that “the resistance does not exist because of circumstances, but because of principle, and principle does not end even if circumstances change.”
Accordingly, this military-security militia founded in Lebanon, as part of a strategy to protect the Iranian regime and arbitrarily given the name “resistance,” has built its existence around the defense of the Iranian imperial project, with no value or meaning to any other proposition, whether Lebanese or Palestinian. Since Qassem has eloquently voiced the centrality of Iranian objectives in this project, the ball is now in the Lebanese authority’s court. They must demonstrate in practice that legitimacy is capable of putting an end to this adventurism imposed on Lebanon.
