Once again, there has been a cease-fire in Lebanon for weeks.
And, once again, the fighting has not stopped.
Israel is still bombarding much of the south and east of the country. Israeli drones are still buzzing low over the skies in Beirut, the capital. Hezbollah is still attacking Israeli troops occupying Lebanese territory, and firing rockets into Israel. The death toll is still rising.
And now — though a truce was declared in April, and there has been talk this week of a potential U.S. deal with Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor — resignation is setting in across Lebanon that a meaningful end to the war between Israel and Hezbollah is not coming anytime soon.
Instead, Israel has vowed to intensify its military campaign in Lebanon and pushed deeper into the country beyond the territory it already occupies, ordering sweeping evacuation orders for two southern cities.
“I have no trust in either Israel or the U.S.,” said Ghinwa Ftouni, 42, in Baisariyah, a village in southern Lebanon. “Just listen to the massive bombing,” she added, as the thuds of Israeli strikes echoed from a few miles away.
Her disillusionment reflects the past two years of war in Lebanon, but also decades of dysfunction in which the country has lurched from crisis to crisis — its fate often determined more by outside powers than its own fractured leadership.
In 2023, Hezbollah began firing at Israeli positions in support of its Palestinian ally, Hamas. Israel responded with artillery, airstrikes and, the following year, a ground invasion. Although a cease-fire was declared in Lebanon in November 2024, Israeli bombardment continued in large parts of the country.
Then, in March this year, days after the start of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, Hezbollah began firing at Israel in solidarity with Tehran, sparking another all-out war in Lebanon and opening a new front in the regional conflict.
The latest wars have devastated Lebanon, a country of 5.4 million people on the eastern Mediterranean. They have killed more than 7,000 Lebanese, displaced a million more and inflicted billions of dollars in damage, according to Lebanese authorities.
Israeli forces now occupy an area of southern Lebanon stretching as far as six miles into the country, with little sign they will leave anytime soon.
On Sunday, as the prospect began to emerge of a potential agreement to end the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran, there was a sense that Lebanon had little say in a deal that concerned its own future.
Instead, the country found itself once again at the mercy of outside powers — as it did when Syria intervened in the Lebanese civil war in 1976, and when Israel invaded in 1978 and again in 1982 to fight Palestinian armed groups, and when Iran subsequently funded and armed Hezbollah. In the decades since, Hezbollah has dragged Lebanon into three wars with Israel.
On Sunday few Lebanese believed that an agreement would deliver anything more than a temporary lull in the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Within hours, both Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah had raised the stakes, erasing even the faintest hope that calm was coming.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Tuesday to “increase the blows” against the group and over the next two days his forces launched more than 150 airstrikes across southern and eastern Lebanon — some of the heaviest bombardment in recent weeks. Israeli ground forces also pushed deeper into southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah, too, ratcheted up the pressure. On Sunday, Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, warned the Lebanese government against confronting Hezbollah, which has long been the most powerful political and military force within the country, and commands vast support among Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims. He also denounced the government’s rare diplomatic talks with Israeli officials in Washington.
“The people have the right to take to the streets and bring down the government in confronting the American-Israeli project,” Mr. Qassem said in a televised address.
The rhetoric from both Hezbollah and Israel offered a grim reminder of the fragility and failures of cease-fires in Lebanon.
The cease-fire in November 2024 that ended the last war offered little respite, with Israel continuing to bomb Lebanon near daily even as Hezbollah largely held its fire.
Since the most recent truce was declared last month, the Israeli bombardment has continued. And this time Hezbollah has continued to fight as well, launching daily attacks on Israeli troops that have killed at least 10 Israeli military personnel since the truce went into effect.
Now, the only real possibility for a genuine pause in fighting is if the United States can pressure Israel to halt its bombardment.
“Trump might want to declare peace on all fronts, as we’ve seen he likes to do,” said Paul Salem, a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Even then, there is no guarantee that the calm will last.
“The more likely scenario is that that happens for a few weeks,” Mr. Salem said, “then Netanyahu says we have to continue, and by then Trump has moved onto something else.”
Hwaida Saad and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
