Editor’s Note: Iason Athanasiadis, a former UN officer and longtime journalist covering the Middle East, has written for Stimson about the many unresolved conflicts in the region and the difficulties faced by UN bodies in trying to end wars and alleviate suffering.
By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives
Since its creation in 1978 following Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has struggled to fulfil its mandate of restoring peace and security to the country’s south. This mission appears to have become even more untenable since hostilities escalated between Israel and Hezbollah in recent months.
Israel, which invaded southern Lebanon for the fourth time on Oct. 1 following a year of tit-for-tat rocket attacks, has targeted UN peacekeepers and infrastructure in South Lebanon while pointing to discoveries of underground tunnels and weapons caches as evidence of neglect of UNIFIL’s mandate, ineptness or even collusion with Hezbollah. The UN, in turn, has reconfirmed its support of UNIFIL and the UN Security Council on Oct. 14 criticized a series of Israeli assaults that have injured two dozen peacekeepers including in an apparent phosphorus attack near their base.
The Israeli assaults elicited condemnation from the 48 countries that contribute forces to UNIFIL. Naim Qassem, recently selected as Hezbollah’s new leader, noted in a televised speech last month that “France and Britain tell us that you must be bound by international resolutions but Israel doesn’t respect any of them, does as it wants, and gives account to no one.”
After the last Israel-Hezbollah war, in 2006, UNIFIL’s original mandate was enhanced. Among its duties were to “monitor the cessation of hostilities; accompany and support the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) as they deploy throughout the South… help ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations and the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons; assist the LAF in taking steps towards the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani river free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL deployed in this area.” UNIFIL was also to assist the Lebanese government “in securing its borders and other entry points to prevent the entry in Lebanon without its consent of arms or related materiel.”
However, Hezbollah did not leave southern Lebanon as required by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and not only did not disarm, but continued to build a larger arsenal of missiles and rockets. The Lebanese Army has never achieved a monopoly of force in Lebanon or managed to supplant the militia in the south or elsewhere in the country.
As part of an Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance,” Hezbollah began targeting Israel with rocket strikes a day after Hamas stormed across the Gaza border and killed 1200 Israelis and kidnapped 200 others in southern Israel last year. The clashes on Israel’s northern border slowly escalated, forcing tens of thousands of Israelis and Lebanese to leave their homes. An apparently errant Hezbollah shell that killed 12 children on a soccer pitch in the Golan Heights in July was followed by an Israeli onslaught in Lebanon that included detonating booby-trapped pagers and ultimately assassinating Hezbollah’s top leadership, including its long-time secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut. Despite Israeli claims to have decimated Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group has continued to lethally engage Israeli soldiers inside Lebanon while sending missiles against a range of Israeli military and infrastructure targets.
The most recent UNIFIL report in 2024 covers a five-month period before the Israeli invasion, registering 4,572 trajectories of projectiles fired across the Blue Line, with those emanating from Israel double those coming from Lebanon. The Lebanese Army ceased publishing updates to the violations on Oct. 8, 2023 “because their frequency has surged. These are no longer mere violations but rather indicative of a state of war.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in mid-October called on UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to “remove UNIFIL from Hezbollah’s strongholds and war zones” or risk further casualties. “Get the UNIFIL forces out of harm’s way… right now, immediately,” Netanyahu said.
The spreading war – which on Oct. 25 ratcheted up further as Israel bombed military sites in Iran in retaliation for the Iranian Oct. 1 strikes on Israel – marginalized UNIFIL even more.
“We’re locked in our camps with minimum movements, which are mostly for resupply,” a UNIFIL staff member told this author on condition of anonymity. “Those civilians who can leave left and most villages are abandoned with few signs of life, mostly by Hezbollah members.”
Israel accuses UNIFIL of ignoring Hezbollah rocket launches and military tunnel construction occurring at UNIFIL observation posts’ very doorstep. A captured Hezbollah operative reportedly confessed that peacekeepers had been bribed to facilitate militia activity, Israel’s Hayom newspaper reported. The UN denies the charges.
“Disappointment over UNIFIL always existed but is much more pronounced now that it has 10,000 soldiers in dozens of posts,” said Orna Mizrachi, a senior researcher at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies and former deputy national security adviser for foreign policy. “But despite this, Hezbollah is all over South Lebanon with lots of ammunition, missiles and all they need to penetrate and accomplish their plans to conquer Galilee [northern Israel].”
The future of UNIFIL could be determined in ongoing discussions with Lebanese and Israeli officials by U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, who visited Lebanon again on Nov. 19. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have reportedly agreed to the terms of a cease-fire. Points of contention relate to whether Israel would be allowed to militarily retaliate in the event of Hezbollah rearming. The deal’s monitoring committee has reportedly been expanded to include Germany and Britain in addition to the U.S. and France. But it remains unclear whether a agreement can be reached before Donald Trump becomes president again next Jan. 20.
“It could be a UNIFIL with a renewed mandate, capabilities, UNSCO [the Jerusalem-based Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process] supervisors, or another international force entirely,” Mizrachi said. “But it must be effective and have some teeth: the ability to go in anywhere, check everything and report it. And Israel must have freedom of activity in South Lebanon whenever we see some threat there.”
At a conference in Paris Oct. 24, interim Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati announced that his government plans to recruit more Lebanese Army troops and possibly deploy 8,000 soldiers to southern Lebanon.
Israel has requested a more muscular interpretation of Resolution 1701, with an expanded geographical remit and the ability to carry out inspections across all of Lebanon’s borders. Israel wants international forces to also monitor eastern Bekaa province, another Hezbollah stronghold, and near the Syrian border to Lebanon’s east and north.
UN officials query how realistic this is. “No multinational force will deploy in southern Lebanon within a UN mandate,” said a former senior UNIFIL official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The last one in 1983 was deadly.”
He was referring to suicide bombings by the precursors to Hezbollah that killed hundreds of U.S. and French soldiers and diplomats attempting to restore order in Lebanon in the aftermath of Israel’s 1982 invasion.
Israel kept forces in southern Lebanon until 2000, when then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided to withdraw them following years of clashes with Hezbollah. The 2006 war erupted after Hezbollah abducted several soldiers from Israel.
Following the five-week war, UNIFIL’s troop commitment was expanded. Its rules of engagement specify that “all UNIFIL personnel have an inherent right to self-defense and to use force to ensure that their area of operations is not used for hostile activities.” They are also permitted to use force to protect humanitarian workers and civilians. In practice, however, they have not done so.
UNIFIL is reporting on violations that are occurring by both Israel and Hezbollah, but the force lacks enforcement powers since it is deployed under UN Charter Chapter VI, not Chapter VII.
Some Israelis believe UNIFIL still has a function as a convener of trilateral meetings with the Lebanese Army but needs to be reformed. “The new UNIFIL must have a new mandate and new capabilities to enforce the agreement about Hezbollah no longer being in South Lebanon,” Mizrachi said.
Reluctant to reoccupy South Lebanon again, Israel is considering other options, including a Shiite alternative to Hezbollah, such as Amal.
Netanyahu, for his part, has seemed to support a new civil war in a country long racked by sectarian divisions. He called on the Lebanese to “free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.”
“There are some elites in Israel and the U.S. who think this is an opportunity to create a ‘moderate’ Shi’ite alternative to Hezbollah, or a defanged Hezbollah, or even empower Hezbollah’s internal rivals against it, even if it means a civil war,” said a Beirut-based analyst whose organization does not permit on the record commentary to the media.
“The Israelis feel frustrated that UNIFIL cannot do more, but that was always the ‘fudge’ incorporated into Resolution 1701,” said the former senior UNIFIL officer. “There’s no question that if UNIFIL were to do Israel’s enforcement role, it would be attacked by Hezbollah.”
Iason Athanasiadis is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and former UN officer covering the Middle East.
What is UNIFIL’s Future Amidst A New Hezbollah-Israel War?
By Iason Athanasiadis
Middle East & North Africa
Editor’s Note: Iason Athanasiadis, a former UN officer and longtime journalist covering the Middle East, has written for Stimson about the many unresolved conflicts in the region and the difficulties faced by UN bodies in trying to end wars and alleviate suffering.
By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives
Since its creation in 1978 following Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has struggled to fulfil its mandate of restoring peace and security to the country’s south. This mission appears to have become even more untenable since hostilities escalated between Israel and Hezbollah in recent months.
Israel, which invaded southern Lebanon for the fourth time on Oct. 1 following a year of tit-for-tat rocket attacks, has targeted UN peacekeepers and infrastructure in South Lebanon while pointing to discoveries of underground tunnels and weapons caches as evidence of neglect of UNIFIL’s mandate, ineptness or even collusion with Hezbollah. The UN, in turn, has reconfirmed its support of UNIFIL and the UN Security Council on Oct. 14 criticized a series of Israeli assaults that have injured two dozen peacekeepers including in an apparent phosphorus attack near their base.
The Israeli assaults elicited condemnation from the 48 countries that contribute forces to UNIFIL. Naim Qassem, recently selected as Hezbollah’s new leader, noted in a televised speech last month that “France and Britain tell us that you must be bound by international resolutions but Israel doesn’t respect any of them, does as it wants, and gives account to no one.”
After the last Israel-Hezbollah war, in 2006, UNIFIL’s original mandate was enhanced. Among its duties were to “monitor the cessation of hostilities; accompany and support the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) as they deploy throughout the South… help ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations and the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons; assist the LAF in taking steps towards the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani river free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL deployed in this area.” UNIFIL was also to assist the Lebanese government “in securing its borders and other entry points to prevent the entry in Lebanon without its consent of arms or related materiel.”
However, Hezbollah did not leave southern Lebanon as required by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and not only did not disarm, but continued to build a larger arsenal of missiles and rockets. The Lebanese Army has never achieved a monopoly of force in Lebanon or managed to supplant the militia in the south or elsewhere in the country.
As part of an Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance,” Hezbollah began targeting Israel with rocket strikes a day after Hamas stormed across the Gaza border and killed 1200 Israelis and kidnapped 200 others in southern Israel last year. The clashes on Israel’s northern border slowly escalated, forcing tens of thousands of Israelis and Lebanese to leave their homes. An apparently errant Hezbollah shell that killed 12 children on a soccer pitch in the Golan Heights in July was followed by an Israeli onslaught in Lebanon that included detonating booby-trapped pagers and ultimately assassinating Hezbollah’s top leadership, including its long-time secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut. Despite Israeli claims to have decimated Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group has continued to lethally engage Israeli soldiers inside Lebanon while sending missiles against a range of Israeli military and infrastructure targets.
The most recent UNIFIL report in 2024 covers a five-month period before the Israeli invasion, registering 4,572 trajectories of projectiles fired across the Blue Line, with those emanating from Israel double those coming from Lebanon. The Lebanese Army ceased publishing updates to the violations on Oct. 8, 2023 “because their frequency has surged. These are no longer mere violations but rather indicative of a state of war.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in mid-October called on UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to “remove UNIFIL from Hezbollah’s strongholds and war zones” or risk further casualties. “Get the UNIFIL forces out of harm’s way… right now, immediately,” Netanyahu said.
The spreading war – which on Oct. 25 ratcheted up further as Israel bombed military sites in Iran in retaliation for the Iranian Oct. 1 strikes on Israel – marginalized UNIFIL even more.
“We’re locked in our camps with minimum movements, which are mostly for resupply,” a UNIFIL staff member told this author on condition of anonymity. “Those civilians who can leave left and most villages are abandoned with few signs of life, mostly by Hezbollah members.”
Israel accuses UNIFIL of ignoring Hezbollah rocket launches and military tunnel construction occurring at UNIFIL observation posts’ very doorstep. A captured Hezbollah operative reportedly confessed that peacekeepers had been bribed to facilitate militia activity, Israel’s Hayom newspaper reported. The UN denies the charges.
“Disappointment over UNIFIL always existed but is much more pronounced now that it has 10,000 soldiers in dozens of posts,” said Orna Mizrachi, a senior researcher at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies and former deputy national security adviser for foreign policy. “But despite this, Hezbollah is all over South Lebanon with lots of ammunition, missiles and all they need to penetrate and accomplish their plans to conquer Galilee [northern Israel].”
The future of UNIFIL could be determined in ongoing discussions with Lebanese and Israeli officials by U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, who visited Lebanon again on Nov. 19. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have reportedly agreed to the terms of a cease-fire. Points of contention relate to whether Israel would be allowed to militarily retaliate in the event of Hezbollah rearming. The deal’s monitoring committee has reportedly been expanded to include Germany and Britain in addition to the U.S. and France. But it remains unclear whether a agreement can be reached before Donald Trump becomes president again next Jan. 20.
“It could be a UNIFIL with a renewed mandate, capabilities, UNSCO [the Jerusalem-based Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process] supervisors, or another international force entirely,” Mizrachi said. “But it must be effective and have some teeth: the ability to go in anywhere, check everything and report it. And Israel must have freedom of activity in South Lebanon whenever we see some threat there.”
At a conference in Paris Oct. 24, interim Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati announced that his government plans to recruit more Lebanese Army troops and possibly deploy 8,000 soldiers to southern Lebanon.
Israel has requested a more muscular interpretation of Resolution 1701, with an expanded geographical remit and the ability to carry out inspections across all of Lebanon’s borders. Israel wants international forces to also monitor eastern Bekaa province, another Hezbollah stronghold, and near the Syrian border to Lebanon’s east and north.
UN officials query how realistic this is. “No multinational force will deploy in southern Lebanon within a UN mandate,” said a former senior UNIFIL official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The last one in 1983 was deadly.”
He was referring to suicide bombings by the precursors to Hezbollah that killed hundreds of U.S. and French soldiers and diplomats attempting to restore order in Lebanon in the aftermath of Israel’s 1982 invasion.
Israel kept forces in southern Lebanon until 2000, when then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided to withdraw them following years of clashes with Hezbollah. The 2006 war erupted after Hezbollah abducted several soldiers from Israel.
Following the five-week war, UNIFIL’s troop commitment was expanded. Its rules of engagement specify that “all UNIFIL personnel have an inherent right to self-defense and to use force to ensure that their area of operations is not used for hostile activities.” They are also permitted to use force to protect humanitarian workers and civilians. In practice, however, they have not done so.
UNIFIL is reporting on violations that are occurring by both Israel and Hezbollah, but the force lacks enforcement powers since it is deployed under UN Charter Chapter VI, not Chapter VII.
Some Israelis believe UNIFIL still has a function as a convener of trilateral meetings with the Lebanese Army but needs to be reformed. “The new UNIFIL must have a new mandate and new capabilities to enforce the agreement about Hezbollah no longer being in South Lebanon,” Mizrachi said.
Reluctant to reoccupy South Lebanon again, Israel is considering other options, including a Shiite alternative to Hezbollah, such as Amal.
Netanyahu, for his part, has seemed to support a new civil war in a country long racked by sectarian divisions. He called on the Lebanese to “free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.”
“There are some elites in Israel and the U.S. who think this is an opportunity to create a ‘moderate’ Shi’ite alternative to Hezbollah, or a defanged Hezbollah, or even empower Hezbollah’s internal rivals against it, even if it means a civil war,” said a Beirut-based analyst whose organization does not permit on the record commentary to the media.
“The Israelis feel frustrated that UNIFIL cannot do more, but that was always the ‘fudge’ incorporated into Resolution 1701,” said the former senior UNIFIL officer. “There’s no question that if UNIFIL were to do Israel’s enforcement role, it would be attacked by Hezbollah.”
Iason Athanasiadis is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and former UN officer covering the Middle East.
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