No ceasefire for Lebanon

0:00Israel and Lebanon met in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday to talk about peace. And before you get your hopes up, no ceasefire yet. But it was still a big historic moment because Lebanon and Israel hadn't met one-on-one to hash out their ish in decades. And as you may be aware, there's a lot of ish. Israeli tanks roll into southern Lebanon. The Israelis said they had to want home to root out once and for all Palestinian bases across the border from their northern settlements. Hezbollah says it's ready for what would be Israel's fourth invasion in 50 years. Notably absent from the peace talks was Hezbollah, who started this most recent war with Israel.

0:39Hezbollah draws most of its support from Shiites in Lebanon's south, not so much the rest of the country's Muslims, and even less so the country's Christians. All to say this is a complicated war, which will surely be followed by a fragile peace. And we're going to get into it on Today Explained.

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2:09You're listening to Today Explained. My name is Maya Jabeli, and I'm the Reuters Bureau Chief for Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. The United States and Israel went to war with Iran on February 28th. Days later, Hezbollah and Israel started their own war. And Maya has been covering it from Beirut ever since. So Lebanon was pulled into the regional conflict that was playing out on the morning, the very early hours of March 2nd. That was when Hezbollah launched a few rockets onto Israeli positions. The Associated Press reporting that Hezbollah launched some 200 rockets at Israel's north and deeper into the country overnight.

2:44That's according to the Israeli military. Lebanon's prime minister has condemned Hezbollah's rocket fire. And Israel very swiftly retaliated and started a very heavy bombing campaign, including on Beirut's southern suburbs and on the rest of the south. Overnight explosions in Beirut. The biggest Israeli assault on the Lebanese capital since a ceasefire in 2024, marking the opening of a new front in the Iran war still only hours old. The site of the strike was the children's grandparents' house, where they were playing when the bomb hit. It came without warning and wiped out almost the entire family.

3:21I think it's important to note here as well that, you know, this was 15 months on from the last conflict between the two of them, between Hezbollah and Israel. And Israel had continued to target what it was saying was Hezbollah installations during that time, during those 15 months, and kept troops within Lebanon during that time as well. And what did this conflict look like in Lebanon? Over the past six weeks, what it's looked like is, on the one hand, very heavy Israeli bombardment across Lebanon South, across the East, the Southern suburbs, and the central kind of the capital itself, not just its suburbs, but the densely populated kind of central parts of Beirut too.

3:57That's displaced over 1.2 million people across Lebanon. They're in displacement shelters, they're in schools, they're staying with loved ones. And some of them, the most vulnerable really are out in the streets, essentially in kind of camping tents, basically burning cardboard and plastic and stuff to stay warm. It's killed more than 2000 people. The deadliest day really was last Wednesday when 350 people were killed across Lebanon in that span, that 10-minute bombing spree across the country. Everybody woke up in Lebanon wondering whether or not the country was included in the ceasefire that the U.S.

4:31and Iran had begun. And so some people thought that Lebanon would be included. Some of them went back to their home villages. Some of them thought they would get at least two weeks of respite and of peace. But Israeli strikes actually continued throughout the late morning that day. And then in the early afternoon, there was this 10-minute barrage. More than 100 airstrikes all across Lebanon, including the central parts of the capital. And what it unleashed was basically complete chaos. Ambulances couldn't get to all the different areas that were struck. Roads were blocked off by rubble. Hospitals were completely flooded with wounded people.

5:11Children were crying, people were shouting, many people injured, running through the streets, trying to get to hospitals. Others abandoned their cars in the traffic. And those strikes came without evacuation warnings. So people really had no chance ahead of time to get out from the radius of a prospective target. And that's really what led to such a high toll of 350 plus people that were killed. There are people even today that are being pulled out from underneath the rubble, I mean, days later. and roughly 110 of them were either women, children or elderly. So a third were within kind of a non-combatant age range and we know of course of men, you know, military age men as well that were civilians that were killed in those strikes.

5:57This is a crime, says this municipality official. The state has to do something. It's a residential area. There's nothing here. Why does it need to be damaged like this? What kind of life is this? We don't know what will happen in the next hour. The last thing we could imagine is this kind of attack occurring in the center of Beirut. So on Thursday, the day after this day of really heavy bombardment across Lebanon, I visited a hospital morgue where families were coming to identify their loved ones who had been killed the previous day. And it was really horrific for families who, for some of them, were still looking for another loved one that was still missing under the rubble while they were trying to identify, you know, someone they already had confirmed had died.

6:41So it was a really gruesome day for a lot of Lebanese and one that I think will unfortunately go down in Lebanon's very bloody history.

6:53There's been fighting between Israel and Lebanon since, I believe, the foundation of Israel in 1948. What feels different this time? The scale of displacement is massive. What the Israeli military has done for the past six weeks is issue these evacuation orders for entire towns. I mean, you'll look at the map and they'll kind of have an entire section of red all across parts of Lebanon. Cumulatively, it now covers about 15 % of Lebanese territory. So imagine 15 % of the country now essentially being forcefully displaced into other parts of the country where they're now even more densely populated.

7:27The Israeli military and defense ministers' statements that people from southern Lebanon will not be able to return to their villages until Hezbollah is disarmed, that trade-off is something that hasn't been explicitly laid out before. And what that means is there's the prospect of long-term displacement for people. We've seen the targeting of paramedics, hospitals, public infrastructure. And then we've seen the Israeli military also explicitly lay out this line, the Litani River, which runs about 30 kilometers north of Lebanon's border with Israel. But the Israeli military is saying that that's going to constitute the border of a new buffer zone that they're going to implement in southern Lebanon.

8:06So this idea that there's going to be some kind of prolonged Israeli military role in Lebanon to enforce this buffer zone, that's explicitly new as well. One thing that feels very different to me is these videos of mass detonations of entire neighborhoods. You're looking at these beautiful communities just being destroyed. There were some detonations that were happening like that in the 2024 war between Israel and Hezbollah. But this time around, we're seeing it as part of a bigger pattern. That pattern is essentially laid out, again, by the Israeli military and the defense minister, who are saying that there will be no homes in southern Lebanon along that border strip.

8:44So they've explicitly laid it out as a policy. Katz said, quote, the principle is clear. If there is terror and rockets, there will be no homes and residents, and the IDF will remain inside. And all the houses in the villages close to the border will be demolished, according to the model of Beit Hanoun and Rafa in the Gaza Strip, in order to remove, once and for all, the threats. But from the international humanitarian law perspective, it's a war crime to do this wholesale destruction. How is Hezbollah responding? So Hezbollah launched those initial rockets onto Israeli positions on March 2nd for what it says are a couple of different reasons.

9:23First of all, it says that it was in retaliation for the killing of Khamenei in Iran. It says that the group has basically depleted its patients after 15 months of continued Israeli strikes when there was supposed to be a ceasefire during that time. On Monday, Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Asim gave a rare televised address. We reject negotiations with the Israeli entity. These negotiations are futile and require Lebanese consensus to shift our approach from non-negotiation to direct negotiations. What is this humiliation that Lebanon is facing directly? They said the Lebanese government should have cancelled those talks and should not have gone ahead with them.

10:08Right. You and I are speaking on an historic day because Israel and Lebanon are having direct talks in Washington, D.C., which apparently hasn't happened since before I was born in the early 1980s. What are they talking about? Even the question of what the two sides are there to talk about is something that they don't agree on, which tells you how well we expect these talks to go and how much we expect them to actually produce. So Lebanon actually extended the hand first. They said about a week into this war, the Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun, said that he was willing to hold direct talks with Israel and he got no answer for over a month.

10:50Prime Minister Benjamin Anyahu responded last week and said, after repeated requests by Lebanon, we're willing to hold these direct talks and I've instructed my cabinet to prepare for them. But the difference is what each side thinks that they're there to talk about. Lebanon wants to have a ceasefire first. So Lebanon says, we're happy to talk about everything, put everything on the table, And we reported earlier in March that President Aung was even willing to talk about normalizing ties. But the first thing that we need as a precondition for these talks is a ceasefire. Now, when the negotiations started between the U.S.

11:19and Iran via Pakistan, and they announced essentially a ceasefire to allow for talks, Lebanon said, that's what we want. We want exactly that framework. We want the Pakistan model, even if it's a separate track. We want to have a ceasefire first so that we can actually start talking productively as opposed to having bombs flying every which way. What the Israelis are saying, actually, is that they want to discuss the full disarmament of Hezbollah, and they want to discuss peace relations. And they said, we're not there to talk about a ceasefire. So we're not having these talks in Washington over a ceasefire.

11:50And this is why there's a pretty pessimistic view in Lebanon around what this meeting is going to produce, because the two sides are coming at it with completely different agendas of what they're there to talk about. There is a lot of negotiating going down, whether or not it's going to make a meaningful difference or not in the immediate future. But I wonder just what is the best possible outcome from a Lebanon-Israel ceasefire, from a U.S.-Israel-Iran ceasefire? And then I guess what's the worst? I think there are much more negative and pessimistic scenarios than there are optimistic scenarios or things that we can be hopeful about.

12:38Really, in terms of the dynamic in Lebanon right now is one that there is a pretty serious fear that if the Lebanese army or Lebanese state security forces, whoever they may be, were to try to disarm Hezbollah by force, it would ignite a civil conflict. And that's based off of the idea that on the one hand, you know, Hezbollah draws most of its support predominantly from the Shiite Muslim community in Lebanon. And they're the ones that have borne the brunt of this conflict. And they're pointing to the south and they're saying, you know, the only armed actor right now that's defending my village and is pushing back Israeli troops from my village is Hezbollah.

13:18I would like for the Lebanese army to be the one doing that, but it's not. It's Hezbollah. And so what the Lebanese government is saying is we need time to be able to negotiate a decommissioning of these weapons, possibly the integration of these fighters into Lebanese security forces, whatever that picture might end up looking like. We need time to be able to do it peacefully without internal conflict that pits Lebanese against Lebanese. That's the worst case scenario. That is the worst case scenario. The Lebanese Civil War erupted on April 13th, 1975. A lot of people are talking about it now, 51 years later, where they're seeing a lot of the same dynamics.

14:00They're hearing a lot of the same rhetoric. They do sense that kind of intercommunal tension, the friction between Lebanon's diverse sectarian communities, the idea that the state is not doing enough for us. All of these sentiments were present in 1975 when the Civil War erupted, and they're feeling it present today as well.

14:30You can follow Maya's work at Reuters.com. We're going to ask if Lebanon could be the next Gaza when we're back on Today Explained.

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17:06Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. This is Today Explained. Today Explained is back. I'm Sean Ramos for I'm now joined by Nora Bustani. She teaches journalism at the American University of Beirut. Before that, she spent almost 30 years as a correspondent for The Washington Post, covering the Middle East and Lebanon.

17:49With Israel's latest invasion into southern Lebanon, we asked her what she's most afraid of right now. I think they're about eight kilometers into Lebanon, and they've really pulverized these villages. And the big fear after observing Gaza at very close range is that this is going to happen to Lebanon. But right now, the biggest fear is that like in 1978 and in 1982, when the Israelis invaded and stayed, claiming that they needed to have this buffer zone, that we'll have part of the country under occupation. Moshe Aarons, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, said that this operation would eliminate the problem.

18:36Well, the Israeli army has moved into southern Lebanon. It has a clear-cut single mission, namely pushing the PLO forces out of artillery range of Israeli settlements and towns in northern Israel. And this is what got the Iranians involved at the time. Hezbollah was created in 1982 on the heels of Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Of course, the government was very weak then. We had the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and their guerrillas. And driving them out took 20 ,000 lives at the time, mostly civilians. As the Israeli tanks rolled in, the villages greeted them with flowers. The Palestinians were getting to be too much for us, one told me.

19:23They said that most of the terrorists had fled, leaving their dead behind. And they eventually sailed to Tunis and from there went on to Ramallah and Gaza. But the country has never quite stood on its feet since then. And Iran started spending money and resources to recruit young Shiite men from those border villages and from the suburbs of Beirut to kind of shield itself and to develop a foreign policy avenue where it could pressure the West. Of course, at the time, the Iran-Iraq war had started and the Iranians felt that the West at the time, the US, Great Britain, all these Western countries were helping arm Saddam Hussein as he was fighting Iran.

20:16And Lebanon was the ideal pressure point to bring pressure to bear. American hostages were kidnapped and kept for seven years by groups that were paid by Iran. And my big fear is that we're going to lapse back into that. because Hezbollah, being the people fighting, being the army or the militia fighting in South Lebanon, they are fighting for their political life and for legitimacy, and they may come up on top. And this is something the Lebanese government doesn't want. That's something at least two-thirds of the Lebanese population doesn't want because it means continuous instability, continuous warfare along our southern border with Israel, an increasing security zone, which the Israelis feel they have to establish to keep their northern settlements safe.

21:16And it's not an easy thing to deal with. You know, you live from day to day and you try to feel normal. And I try to teach online, but it's, you know, Lebanon is small. It can be swallowed in two weeks and it's pretty defenseless at the moment. You mentioned Gaza briefly. How much is what happened in Gaza plausible in Lebanon? You know, the Lebanese will not give up on their country easily. But what we saw, and I'll say that, and I don't mean to offend any Israelis, but what we saw in Gaza was on both sides, kind of depravity and also an appetite, a lust for land that the Israelis made no secret of, you know, with settlements and people wanting to sell plots even before that yellow line was established.

22:17And we were witnessing in real time because of social media and because of Palestinian photographers and videographers in Gaza and in the West Bank, what was happening. And it's scary. Now, Hezbollah is not as entrenched in civilian areas as Hamas was. It's not in control, but it's certainly fighting its corner and being defiant and very bellicose. and some of the Lebanese identify with it. And that's really scary. And Israel's conduct has not been encouraging either. I mean, they have, what they did on Wednesday in 10 minutes was unspeakable. And, you know, I don't see any difference between the Israelis and the Iranians in wanting to kind of use the Lebanese as human shields.

23:17And that is petrifying. That's not a nice scenario to look at. This is a country that likes to have fun. People like to go out, go to restaurants, go to the beach. There are many universities. And all that is in peril right now. Do you think there's a scenario in which the people stand up and say, we're sick of this. We don't want Hezbollah to be waging war on Israel anymore because it presents this risk that Lebanon, southern Lebanon, could turn into the next Gaza? Do you think there's a way out? People stand up and say it every single day on news platforms, podcasts, interviews. But it's very easy to settle the issue in Lebanon.

24:09strengthening the government, helping it take care of its population that feels deprived, mainly a majority of the Shiite population, not all of them. So Iran doesn't feel that it can come in and do what it wants. Lebanon needs help. And yes, the Lebanese government has been kind of bankrupt, financially having a very hard time standing on its feet. But we have a very honest president, maybe not the most creative or assertive president, but he was the chief of the army, the commander of the army. And the prime minister is a judge who headed the International Court of justice. So very clean, very aware of what international law demands, yet lacking the tools or the toolbox to accomplish what a strong central government ought to be doing.

25:12Saying history repeats itself feels like an understatement when it comes to Lebanon. How do you live with that day to day? Everyone lives with it differently. You know, I have cousins who live on the other, the Christian side of Beirut. I live in the western side, which is very mixed, very blended, close to the American university. I don't go out. I leave the house twice a week to do my Pilates class. And everything I read all day, I do a lot of hand-holding online with my students because they are petrified and pray that we are going to come out of this very, very dark tunnel.