Matthew Levitt
Lebanon’s top general came to Washington last week to try to persuade US military officials, policymakers, and lawmakers that his country was getting serious about Hezbollah. Gen. Rodolphe Haykal’s pitch was simple: despite its “limited capabilities,” the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have raided Hezbollah weapons depots south of the Litani River, established “operational control” over southern Lebanon, and are largely completing the first phase of Lebanon’s “weapons consolidation plan,” which is a euphemism for disarming the Iran-backed militia.
The reality, as I recently saw firsthand standing on the Israel-Lebanon border, is that the LAF is working hard, but still falling far short of disarming Hezbollah. Israeli operations targeting Hezbollah decimated the group in the fall of 2024, with exploding pagers, airstrikes that targeted key Hezbollah personnel and weapons systems, and ground forces that swept the Lebanese side of the border for tunnels and underground bunkers. Now, however, the LAF’s disarmament of Hezbollah—required under the November 2024 ceasefire with Israel—is being outpaced by the militia’s determined rearmament. Assessing the LAF’s disarmament efforts requires taking a hard look not at the measures of the LAF’s performance that Gen. Haykal touted—the number of patrols, raids, or seized weapons—but rather at metrics of overall effectiveness seizing weapons stored on private property, targeting underground weapons storage and production facilities, stopping Hezbollah from smuggling weapons sent by Iran across the Lebanese-Syrian border, and transparently disposing of seized weapons.
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