Who Gets the Guns in Lebanon?

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In late February, Nawaf Salam, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, travelled to the country’s south to survey the devastation w

rought by the recent war between Hezbollah and Israel. It was Salam’s second day on the job. He pledged to rebuild the area, which had incurred billions of dollars’ worth of damage. Salam also promised to strengthen the Lebanese Armed Forces, as a means to assert the state’s authority in a place that for years had been under the sway of Hezbollah.

The people of the south had messages for the Prime Minister, too. During a walk through the city of Nabatieh, a man carrying a toddler pushed through Salam’s thick security cordon. “The first word that should be said is ‘thank you’ to the resistance,” he yelled, referring to Hezbollah. Salam had earlier lauded the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL, 

the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed along the border with Israel, the man noted approvingly, but not “the blood of the martyrs of the resistance. Are you afraid of America? Afraid that the U.S. Ambassador will be upset with you?” Salam did not respond.

In November, 2024, after thirteen months of war that killed more than four thousand Lebanese and a hundred and twenty Israelis, Hezbollah and Israel reached a ceasefire. (Decades-old hostilities between the two foes had reignited on October 8, 2023, when Hezbollah attacked Israel a day after Hamas’s surprise offensive from Gaza.) But Israeli forces continue to occupy five hilltops in southern Lebanon, in violation of the agreement. 

In the border village of Khiam, near Tallet al-Hamames, one of the hilltops, a man in a black baseball cap, standing inches from the Prime Minister, suggested that the state was powerless to recover the territory through negotiations, which “never produce results.” Instead, he said, “we will reclaim our land through resistance.”