The Key Obstacles to Israel-Lebanon Talks Over Hezbollah

Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors are expected to meet in Washington, D.C., this week for direct negotiations aimed at ending an Israeli military campaign in Lebanon that has killed more than 2,000 people.

Israel says its campaign is targeted at Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and political party. Lebanon’s health ministry says around 250 women, 165 children, and 87 health workers are among the victims of Israeli bombing. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that negotiations “will focus on disarming Hezbollah and establishing peace between Israel and Lebanon.” 

Read more: Israel's War Against Lebanon, Explained

Lebanon’s President, Joseph Aoun, said in remarks on Thursday that “the only solution to the situation Lebanon is facing is a cease-fire with Israel that would lead to direct negotiations between the two countries.” 

Experts tell TIME that Hezbollah’s disarmament will likely also be top of mind for Lebanese officials, as well as seeking a guarantee of Lebanese sovereignty following Israel’s invasion of the country to create a so-called “buffer zone” along the border. 

Netanyahu’s announcement of the peace talks came a day after Israel launched its largest wave of strikes against Lebanon since the beginning of the war, killing over 350 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry. 

Israel’s invasion and ongoing attacks have become a point of contention in the fragile two-week cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran, the latter of which demanded that Lebanon be included in the cease-fire before Iranian and American officials begin their own peace talks.

Here’s what to know about the potential sticking points in negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, and how the talks could affect the U.S. and Iran’s efforts to reach a peace deal. 

Hezbollah disarmament

The condition Netanyahu indicated as Israel’s top priority—disarming Hezbollah—could prove to be a complicated hurdle in talks between Israel and Lebanon, experts tell TIME.

A previous cease-fire deal that Lebanon and Israel reached in 2024 included an agreement that the Lebanese government would prevent Hezbollah from carrying out operations against Israel, and for the enforcement of United Nations resolutions that called for the “disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon,” in return for a halt to Israeli bombing. 

Israel continued bombing Lebanon “almost daily” since that agreement was reached, according to United Nations Special Rapporteurs, and Israel has accused Lebanon of not upholding its part of the deal by ensuring that Hezbollah withdrew from the border and allowing the Lebanese army to take over. 

Hanin Ghaddar, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and an expert on Shi'ite politics in the Levant, suggests that a new agreement between the two countries could involve modifying the previous deal to include stronger assurances from Lebanon. 

But Ghaddar says that Hezbollah will never agree to disarm, as the group itself has pledged in the past. That, she explains, is ”something that is linked to their ideology, their existence.”

“The question is not with Hezbollah, the question is with the [Lebanese] army,” Ghaddar tells TIME, noting that the army will have to confront Hezbollah head-on if Israel's top condition is to be met. 

“Israel's at war with Hezbollah, and is negotiating with Lebanon. And there's a problem there,” says Daniel Byman, who served as a senior advisor to the State Department and is director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Byman tells TIME that there is “a very strong anti-Hezbollah faction in Lebanon that would very much like to see the group wither, and believes that Lebanon as a whole is suffering” because of the militant group. Even if peace talks are successful, he points out, Lebanon will need to act as a “bridge” in order to eliminate Hezbollah's military capability. 

Another factor is the extent to which Israel would work with Lebanon to achieve Hezbollah’s disarmament. 

“It's going to be very difficult for the Lebanese government to carry out that enterprise to its fullest if it looks like it's being dictated to by Israel, and even more so, if it looks like it's being done physically in cooperation with Israeli forces,” says Daniel Shapiro, who most recently served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East in the Biden Administration. He was also the U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017.

Shapiro describes Israel’s involvement as a “balance to be struck,” where “if it's too public, if it's too kinetic, it will actually cause more Lebanese to reject the cooperation necessary to carry it out.” He notes that Israel already provides intelligence to the Lebanese army in order to target Hezbollah strongholds. 

If the Lebanese government is committed to eradicating Hezbollah’s military swiftly, “negotiations could be quite efficient and…straightforward,” he adds.

Lebanese sovereignty

The other major sticking point in negotiations between Israel and Lebanon is the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.  

“Lebanon, of course, will seek a guarantee of its sovereignty, meaning no Israeli military presence in Lebanese territory,” Shapiro says. 

Hezbollah entered the war with Iran on March 2 when it responded to the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei by attacking Israel, which responded with a ground invasion on its southern border to create a “buffer zone” on the land leading to the Litani River, roughly 19 miles from the shared border.

Steven Heydemann, the Janet Wright Ketcham '53 Chair in Middle East Studies at Smith College, who held several leadership positions at the U.S. Institute of Peace, explains that “it is necessary for Israel to create conditions that will ensure security within its recognized borders,” and that Israel's impulse to control Lebanon’s southern territories “rests on a diagnosis of the failure of the…Lebanese Government to manage internal security.”

Byman adds that with Israel’s buffer zone, the logic is that “Israeli towns and cities along the border will be out of the range of short-range Hezbollah weapons … But from a Lebanese point  of view, Israel is now taking over part of your country.” 

How could Israel-Lebanon talks affect U.S.-Iran talks?

Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, who has advised every U.S. administration from President George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama, tells TIME that if the cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran falls apart, peace talks between Israel and Lebanon would “absolutely” crumble. 

“It is improbable to me to think that those negotiations in Lebanon and Israel will pay off without an agreement between Iran and the U.S.,” he says. 

Telhami says that Trump, who reportedly pressured Netanyahu to engage in peace talks, “will find a way to get the Israelis to back off Lebanon” in order to achieve peace with Iran. 

On Friday, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, Iran’s Parliament speaker, said negotiations would not take place with the U.S. without a cease-fire in Lebanon. The U.S. has denied Iran’s claims that its ceasefire included Lebanon. 

Heydemann warns that Israel’s ambitious military goals in Lebanon—to disarm Hezbollah and control southern territories—puts the fate of the war against Iran on shaky ground.  

“Israel's insistence on continuing its operations against Hezbollah is placing the U.S.-Iran track and the broader cease-fire as a whole in jeopardy,” he tells TIME. “It's very clear that Iran is treating the two as tightly connected.”