The Lebanese Army Had a Year to Disarm Hezbollah. It Did Nothing. Why Would Tebnit Be Any Different?

When the November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah went into effect, it came with a clear mandate: the Lebanese Armed Forces would deploy south of the Litani River and ensure that Hezbollah could not re-establish a military presence in the area. UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the framework everyone cited, was unambiguous about what was required. The Lebanese army would move in. Hezbollah would move out. The international community would monitor compliance.

What actually happened was something else entirely.

In the months that followed, Hezbollah rebuilt with barely any interruption. Weapons were repositioned. Fighters returned to villages they had vacated. Underground infrastructure, including tunnel networks, command centers, and weapons depots, remained substantially intact in areas the IDF had not physically cleared. The Lebanese army deployed in numbers, conducted patrols, held press conferences, and issued statements. It did not confiscate a single meaningful Hezbollah weapons cache. It did not arrest a single Hezbollah commander. It did not demolish a single tunnel.

By March 2026, Israel had concluded that the ceasefire was a fiction and resumed full-scale military operations in Lebanon. The IDF is now fighting in Tebnit, sustaining casualties, including the death of Lt. Col. Dor Gedalia Ben Simhon, to take ground that should have been demilitarized over a year ago. The blood being shed there is, in part, the price of the Lebanese army's non-performance.

Against this backdrop, the report that Israeli security officials are now considering handing the captured Tebnit compound over to the Lebanese Armed Forces as a "test" of their willingness to confront Hezbollah deserves serious scrutiny. The framing is diplomatic and reasonable-sounding. In practice, it raises an obvious question: a test of what, exactly? The Lebanese army already had the test. It lasted fourteen months. It failed.

The structural reasons for that failure have not changed. The Lebanese army is an institution riddled with officers who are Hezbollah sympathizers, Hezbollah family members, or Hezbollah neighbors who will not act against the organization regardless of what Beirut's political leadership says. The Lebanese state does not control its own south. It never has. The idea that handing the Lebanese army a decommissioned Hezbollah tunnel compound, one the IDF has already stripped of its most significant military value, constitutes a meaningful test of Lebanese sovereignty is, at best, wishful thinking.

At worst, it is a way of laundering the appearance of a diplomatic solution onto a security problem that has no diplomatic solution.

There are serious people in Israel's defense establishment who understand this. The caveat buried in the N12 report is telling: Israeli security officials "note that the Lebanese army has in the past struggled to act against the terror organization." Struggled is a generous word. The Lebanese army watched Hezbollah dig over a kilometer of tunnels under Tebnit, operate a command center for the Badr Division from within a civilian village, and maintain rocket infrastructure in the area for years. It struggled so hard to act that it never acted at all.

None of this means Israel has good options. Maintaining indefinite IDF presence in southern Lebanon has its own costs, political, military, and diplomatic, particularly as Washington signals discomfort with Israeli operations there. The ceasefire dynamics tied to U.S.-Iran negotiations are real constraints. The pressure to demonstrate that there is a political path forward is understandable.

But a political path forward has to be grounded in something real. The Lebanese army handing a press conference at the entrance to a tunnel the IDF has already demolished is not a strategic achievement. It is theater, and Hezbollah knows it. The organization has survived every iteration of this arrangement for two decades, from 1701 in 2006 to the 2024 ceasefire to whatever framework gets negotiated next. It survives because the Lebanese army, whatever individual commanders might want, is not willing or able to do what disarming Hezbollah would actually require.

Israel paid in blood for the Tebnit compound. The question of what happens to it next is not an abstract diplomatic exercise. It is a test, yes, but the test is not of the Lebanese army. It is a test of whether Israel has learned anything from the last year.