The Israeli military is planning to continue occupying southern Lebanon past the deadline set forth in Israel’s ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said.
Under the terms of the deal, agreed to in November, Israel and Hezbollah were supposed to withdraw from southern Lebanon by this Sunday, January 26. They were to be replaced by troops from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), and then the Lebanese army in the region in order to help oversee implementation of the ceasefire. The U.S. is also in charge of helping to ensure implementation.
In a statement on Friday, however, Netanyahu’s office said that Israeli forces are going to remain in southern Lebanon past the deadline, claiming that the Lebanese army has not deployed quickly enough in the region.
“Since the cease-fire agreement has not yet been fully enforced by Lebanon, the gradual withdrawal process will continue under full cooperation with the United States,” the statement said.
Lebanese officials have said that they can only send their troops into the region when Israeli troops are gone.
The Israeli military has been suggesting for weeks now that it is going to maintain its presence in the area, as part of its long history of violating international agreements and law. In late December, Israeli authorities said they were satisfied with the implementation of the agreement until that point, but still signalled they were planning to stay in Lebanon.
The ceasefire agreement has already been imperiled as Israel has repeatedly violated the ceasefire, continuing to attack Lebanon even after hostilities were supposed to end under the agreement. In the first week alone, Israel reportedly violated the ceasefire at least 100 times, and has now violated the agreement hundreds of times, Lebanese sources say. Israel has killed numerous people amid these seeming violations.
Israeli soldiers have also prevented Lebanese people from returning to their homes in the south, reports say.
The ceasefire deal doesn’t specify consequences for violations of the ceasefire. In recent days, Israeli officials have been in talks with the U.S. to discuss staying in Lebanon past the deadline. Israeli media have reported that Israel has asked for 30 more days to withdraw, claiming that Hezbollah has also violated the ceasefire agreement.
Hezbollah has only carried out one strike since the ceasefire, dropping a bomb on a military base in retaliation to Israeli attacks. Israel retaliated to that strike by killing at least nine people in air raids on Lebanon.
Since October 2023, Israel has killed over 4,000 people in Lebanon, many of them civilians. A BBC investigation published on Friday found that on September 29, 2024, in the single deadliest attack of Israel’s war with Hezbollah, Israel killed at least 62 civilians in a strike on south Lebanon. The attack collapsed an entire apartment building, which Israel claimed it targeted because it was a Hezbollah “command center.”
Israel has invaded Lebanon six times in the past 50 years. The Israeli military’s longest occupation of Lebanon began in the 1980s, when it invaded and occupied southern Lebanon until it was forced to withdraw in 2000, largely due to resistance from Hezbollah, which had risen to prominence during the occupation.
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