Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire on Friday afternoon, a US official said, after another flare-up in southern Lebanon that saw four Israeli soldiers and dozens of Lebanese casualties.
The renewed truce appeared as fragile as ever, as it didn’t see Israel pull out of the large buffer zone it established in southern Lebanon — one that Hezbollah has used to justify continued attacks on troops stationed there as well as on northern Israeli towns across the border.
The latest deal was brokered by the US and Qatar through talks with Israel and Iran respectively, a senior US official said in a statement to reporters. While Hezbollah sources confirmed the truce, Israel refrained from doing so publicly until Friday evening when its ambassador to the US declared that Jerusalem “remains firmly committed to an immediate ceasefire.”
“At 11:30 this morning, Israel halted all offensive operations; Hezbollah and Iranian claims to the contrary are bold lies,” Yechiel Leiter wrotes on X. “If Hezbollah honors the agreement and ceases its hostilities, they will be met with quiet.”
The US official who first announced the truce notably did not even try to hide the fact that mediators relied on Iran to secure the ceasefire — an admission of Tehran’s ability to influence events in Lebanon.
The US and Israel had previously stressed the importance of detaching Iran from events in Lebanon, even if they privately recognized Tehran’s control over its terror proxy.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has even brokered talks between Israel and the Lebanese government that have been used to announce previous ceasefires between Israel and Hezbollah, even if Beirut’s ability to influence the Iran-backed militia was limited at best.
It was that process Israel declared it was committed to when Ambassador to Israel Yechiel Leiter said Thursday night that Jerusalem would hold its fire in Lebanon if Hezbollah did the same.
But with Iran warning that Israel’s operations in southern Lebanon amount to a violation of the memorandum of understanding inked with the US this week, the US and Qatar apparently decided to go straight to Tehran to broker Friday’s agreement.
It’s unclear if or for how long Iran will accept the deal, given that the issue wasn’t just Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah but also the Israel Defense Forces’s presence in southern Lebanon that Tehran has argued violates the MOU, which stipulates “an immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.”
Iran has reportedly been citing Israel’s continued operations in Lebanon as its reason for holding back on sending a delegation to Switzerland for the first round of technical talks under the MOU, which a US official said was initially supposed to take place on Friday. A time has not yet been publicly announced.
While Israel’s continued operations have also sparked unprecedented public criticism from the Trump administration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Friday that the IDF would remain in southern Lebanon, arguing that the buffer zone is necessary to protect its citizens in the north from Hezbollah attacks. Israel established a similar buffer zone decades ago in 1985, but pulled out in 2000 due to persistent IDF casualties of the kind it is now facing in south Lebanon on a near-daily basis.
Earlier Friday, the IDF announced that four of its soldiers had been killed overnight after a suspected drone or anti-tank missile struck their tank in the southern Lebanese village of Kfar Tebnit.
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