THE REAL SPOILER
This might look like a viable strategy to stabilise the current volatile situation, but that is not the same as stability. There are still significant risks, the most important among them being Lebanon.
The MOU explicitly includes Lebanon as part of the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” and states that the US and Iran also commit themselves to “ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon”.
Yet neither of the parties to that conflict – Israel and Hezbollah – is a signatory of the MOU. The extent to which Washington and Tehran exercise control over them is debatable.
This is not a sideshow to the main war, but a major arena in which a key part of the conflict over the future regional order of the Middle East will play out.
Israel and Lebanon reached a framework agreement for achieving “lasting peace and security” on Jun 26. But the ceasefire it calls for puts no real, and certainly no enforceable, obligations on Hezbollah but makes the group’s disarmament a condition for Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah immediately rejected the agreement to which it was not a party.
Ceasefire arrangements between Israel and Hezbollah have been running on an entirely separate track. Their most recent truce was agreed on Jun 19, mediated by Iran and Qatar, but leaving Lebanon out of the deal and preserving Iranian leverage.
Four thousand people killed and one million displaced in 2026 alone suggest that attempts to control the fighting in Lebanon are still far from effective. Agreements based on a logic of Hezbollah disarming and the Lebanese army assuming full control of southern Lebanon will continue to fail when there is nothing to suggest that Lebanon’s institutional capacity or Hezbollah’s attitude have changed enough to succeed.
If, or rather when, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah escalates anew, it could turn out to be the real spoiler of even the most optimistic American and Iranian plans.
Stefan Wolff is Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham and co-founder of Navigating the Vortex.