Hezbollah is the Obstacle for Peace
When Israeli and Lebanese officials signed a US-brokered framework in Washington on June 26, recognizing each other’s sovereignty for the first time in decades, I felt something I rarely allow myself in this region: hope. As a Palestinian refugee who has spent a lifetime watching armed factions devour the people they claim to defend, I understood at once what this moment could become. And I understood, just as quickly, who would try to strangle it in the cradle.
I was born in the Old City of Jerusalem when it sat under Jordanian rule, and I was eight years old when the Jordanian government, not Israel, moved my family into the Shuafat refugee camp. Since then, I have learned one lesson over and over: the deadliest enemy of an ordinary Arab is almost never the soldier across the border. It is the armed man on his own street who insists he is fighting for you while he decides whether you eat, whether you speak, and whether you live. I have watched Hamas do this to Palestinians in Gaza. I am watching Hezbollah do the same to the people of Lebanon.
The framework is real and serious. Israel and Lebanon affirmed the right of each state to exist in peace and committed to a sequenced process in which the Lebanese army restores authority over all Lebanese territory. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it a first step toward peace.
Peace is only now becoming a reality because the Lebanese government has finally decided to make real efforts to remove Hezbollah from power and retake their country. Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam banned Hezbollah’s military activities, and the Lebanese army declared it had completed the first phase of disarmament south of the Litani River, asserting the state’s monopoly on arms there. For the first time in decades, a Lebanese state is trying to reclaim that monopoly from the militia that stole it.
Hezbollah was built by Iran in the wreckage of Lebanon’s civil war, and its history is a chronology of murder. In 1983, it drove truck bombs into the barracks that killed 241 American servicemen in Beirut. In 2005, a Hezbollah operative assassinated Prime Minister Rafik Hariri with a blast that killed 21 others, a crime for which a UN-backed tribunal convicted him. It pulled Lebanon into a ruinous war in 2006, and it pulled Lebanon into another one this spring, which has killed some 4,000 Lebanese and displaced more than a million.
None of this ever served Lebanon; it served Tehran. A US official has estimated Iran’s funding of Hezbollah at upwards of 700 million dollars a year. Hezbollah is not a Lebanese resistance; it is a foreign garrison stationed on Lebanese soil. When Lebanon’s elected leaders signed a document meant to end the killing, Hezbollah’s Naim Qassem pronounced it “null,” a “humiliation,” and a surrender of sovereignty, and made clear his fighters would keep their weapons.
A government elected by the Lebanese people chose peace. An Iran-backed militia declared that peace was forbidden. The Hezbollah-aligned speaker of parliament announced flatly that the deal will not be implemented. This is the tragedy of the modern Arab world compressed into a single week: the people want to live in peace with their neighbors, and those who refuse to make peace with Israel will not let them. I have seen this story before, and the ending is always written in the blood of ordinary people, never in the blood of the leaders who profit from the war.
Imagine the alternative. A Lebanon whose army, not a militia, guards its southern border. Beirut is trading with Haifa instead of taking orders from Tehran. Israelis in the Galilee are sleeping without sirens, and Lebanese in the south are rebuilding villages instead of burying their loved ones. That is not a fantasy; it is the plain meaning of the framework, available the moment Hezbollah’s arsenal is gone. The obstacle to peace between Israel and Lebanon is not a border dispute or an ancient grievance. It is an arsenal of rockets held by a terrorist group that willingly sacrifices Lebanese civilians to try to kill Israelis.
Hezbollah must be disarmed, and if it refuses, it must be removed. Israel has already shown it can break Hezbollah’s command, killing Hassan Nasrallah in 2024. But Israeli firepower alone cannot build a Lebanese peace. The Lebanese army, which has begun the work, must finish it, and the United States, which brokered the framework and tied the IDF withdrawal to Hezbollah disarmament, must hold every party to the sequence. If the world blinks, the deal will do nothing but freeze the war in place.
To the people of Lebanon, I say what I have long said to my own: the militia that claims to defend you is the reason you are not free. You did not choose Hezbollah’s war, and you should not have to die in it. Peace is finally on the table, signed by your own government and recognized by your neighbor. Do not let those who answer to Tehran tell you that reclaiming your country is surrender. Disarming Hezbollah is not surrender; it is the first morning you wake up in a state that is finally your own.
