Lebanon, Israel and US sign Washington framework as Hezbollah rejects deal

WASHINGTON — Lebanon, Israel and the United States signed a trilateral framework agreement at the US State Department on Friday, a rare diplomatic opening on one of the Middle East's most combustible frontiers that Washington portrayed as the first step toward a formal peace between two long-standing adversaries. Within hours the optimism collided with reality: Hezbollah, the most powerful armed force on the Lebanese side and a party absent from the negotiations, rejected the deal outright.

The accord was signed by Israel's ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, and Lebanon's ambassador, Nada Hamadeh, in the presence of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It capped five rounds of US-mediated talks in Washington, the latest running about four days. The framework does not end the conflict; officials cast it instead as a road map for de-escalation after months of fighting that Lebanese authorities say has killed more than 4,200 people, and after a November 2024 ceasefire that repeatedly broke down.

What the framework commits the parties to do

According to American and Israeli statements, the agreement lays out a sequenced process rather than a settled peace. Its core provisions, as described by the parties, include:

• a “clear process” to restore Lebanese sovereignty, disarm Hezbollah and dismantle its military infrastructure;
• two pilot zones near the border, where the Lebanese Armed Forces would assume control and Hezbollah would be dismantled before reconstruction and the return of civilians;
• a trilateral Military Coordination Group for Lebanon, facilitated by the United States, to oversee implementation;
• a phased Israeli pullback — Israel says it will “return to its borders” only once the threat to its citizens is removed.

Lebanon's ambassador framed the signing as the opening of a long road, calling it “a first step on the road to restoring Lebanese sovereignty and territorial integrity, securing a permanent and final cessation of hostilities.” Rubio was more circumspect about how much had actually been achieved.

It's the beginning of the beginning. There's a lot of work ahead. — Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State

Hezbollah's rejection

The framework's central weakness is that the group it is designed to disarm never agreed to it. Hezbollah's leader, Naim Qassem, insisted that Israel must withdraw unconditionally and ruled out any normalisation of relations. The movement's lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah was blunter still, warning that Lebanon's government could not impose the deal without tearing the country apart.

“The course being pursued by Lebanese authorities amounts to unilateral, gratuitous concessions that will only undermine the country and serve the interests of the Israeli enemy,” Fadlallah said, adding that the accord could be enforced only “with American support” by plunging Lebanon into “civil war.”

That rejection matters because the deal's sequencing — disarmament first, full Israeli withdrawal later — rests on the Lebanese army confronting a better-armed movement it has historically been neither willing nor able to face down. Since the 2024 ceasefire, the army has deployed south of the Litani River alongside UN peacekeepers, but it remains heavily dependent on foreign funding and has not forced Hezbollah to give up its weapons.

A fragile sequence, and a wider realignment

On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that troops are not leaving soon. “Israel remains in the security zone in southern Lebanon. This is a major achievement,” he said, presenting the framework as a security win rather than a concession. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has signalled an open-ended presence, arguing Israel needs “defendable borders.” Israeli forces still hold roughly a fifth of Lebanese territory.

The agreement is also a marker of a shifting region. It followed the death of Iran's supreme leader earlier this year and a US-Iran memorandum reached on 17 June that called for an end to military operations “on all fronts, including in Lebanon” — the diplomatic backdrop that made a Lebanese-Israeli text conceivable. Leiter captured Israel's reading bluntly: “Iran is out, Hezbollah is out, and the road to peace between Israel and Lebanon is in.” Fadlallah, by contrast, cast the Washington signing as an attempt to derail Tehran's own negotiating track.

For Europe, the stakes are concrete. Lebanese stability bears directly on migration pressures and on the southern flank of EU and NATO members, and European contingents form a substantial part of the UN peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, that patrols the border. The European Union has long bankrolled Lebanon's army and its hosting of refugees, betting that a functioning Lebanese state is the cheapest insurance against another exodus across the Mediterranean. Whether this framework strengthens that state or merely papers over its central fracture will not be clear for months.

Rubio, for his part, conceded the obvious. The hard part — turning a signed page into disarmament on the ground — has not yet begun.