As Israel intensifies its airstrikes on Lebanon and attempts a ground invasion of the southern part of the country, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have not yet reacted significantly. Echoing the dominant discourse in the US and Israel, some commentators continue to portray Hezbollah’s military operations against Israel as the root problem undermining Lebanon’s sovereignty. However, the question of sovereignty is fundamentally linked to Lebanon’s history and the issue of who protects Lebanon from external threats, particularly Israeli hegemony and expansionism.
On March 2 [2026], two days after the US and Israeli forces launched a war against Iran, Hezbollah fired projectiles from Lebanon at an Israeli radar system near Haifa. This strike marks the group’s first military operation since the signing of the ceasefire agreement between Lebanon and Israel in November 2024. Despite Hezbollah halting its operations and withdrawing to the north of the Litani River, the LAF was deployed throughout the South and had begun seizing and destroying Hezbollah’s weapons and dismantling its infrastructure. In parallel, Israel never adhered to the agreement, refusing to withdraw from its military outposts on Lebanese territory and continuing to launch strikes at will.
In November 2025, Israel had committed over 7,500 violations of Lebanese airspace, around 2,500 ground incursions, and at least 669 strikes on Lebanon. These attacks resulted in the deaths of at least 331 people, injuries to 945, and prevented 65,000 displaced people from returning to their homes in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese government proved incapable of effectively opposing these violations politically or militarily, much less significantly mitigating their impact on the affected civilians.
Over the past twenty years, especially since the November 2024 agreement, the Lebanese political scene has been dominated by fierce debates on the question of sovereignty: who holds the monopoly on the use of force? Who controls territory and the movement of people within it? Can and should Hezbollah be disarmed? These debates reached a tipping point on March 2 when Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s cabinet declared Hezbollah’s military activities “illegal” and urged the LAF to move forward with a plan approved last year to place all weapons under state authority. In this regard, LAF commander-in-chief Rodolphe Haykal resisted the use of force against Hezbollah, and there are indications that the Prime Minister’s office is considering replacing him—a move supported by the United States.
Since taking office in January 2025, Nawaf Salam’s stance towards Hezbollah reflects a convergence of two forces in Lebanon. On the domestic front, parties and personalities traditionally opposed to Hezbollah seek to exploit what they portray as the group’s weakness following the 2023-2024 war. They aim to politically isolate and militarily dismantle Hezbollah. On the external front, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leverages continuous strikes, occupation of Lebanese territory, and displacement of civilians to pressure the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah.
On March 13, Israel struck the Zrarieh Bridge over the Litani River, warning that such attacks reflected the increasing toll that the state and the Lebanese people would have to pay for not disarming Hezbollah. On the same day, Israeli planes dropped leaflets over Beirut, urging the Lebanese people to stand against Hezbollah and warning that Lebanon risked facing the same fate as Gaza. Faced with this mounting pressure, Haykal’s reluctance to oppose Hezbollah is widely perceived as an attempt to avoid direct conflict that could fracture the LAF or plunge the country into a new civil war.
Some evaluate Lebanon’s capacity and sovereignty based on the existence and role of Hezbollah’s military organization. This analysis is either mistakenly skewed or serves as propaganda. Hezbollah’s military confrontation with Israel emerged in reaction to the absence of any real state attempt to end Israeli occupation and deter Israeli aggression. Many who invoke sovereignty to justify disarming Hezbollah rarely, if ever, question Israeli military violations, US or Saudi political interference, or the entrenched power of the Lebanese banking elite.
Amid frequent debates on Hezbollah’s weapons and their implications for Lebanese sovereignty, external threats remain a daily reality, with Zionist territorial ambitions in Lebanon dating back to the 1920s and Israeli military interventions beginning in 1948. As the current situation shows, the LAF is structurally incapable of defending the country against persistent violations of its airspace and territorial integrity by the Israeli military and has failed to prevent the killing, injuries, and displacement of civilians.
This reality predates the creation of Hezbollah in the early 1980s. Since its inception, Hezbollah has assumed a defensive role that the LAF was never mandated or politically authorized to carry out, and has rarely attempted to implement.
Those who might cite the LAF’s operations against Fath al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (2007) or against the Islamic State in the northeastern Lebanese-Syrian border (2017) as examples of their combat effectiveness are, however, very different from one another. Military analysts still describe them as largely counterterrorism operations targeting specific “insurgent groups,” rather than conventional military operations against another state’s permanent armed force. In this sense, these two cases demonstrate that the LAF is being invested as an internal security force, rather than being geared towards defending the country against historical ambitions, invasions, and ongoing violations of its airspace by the Israeli military.
The Lebanese state officially established the LAF in 1945 following the 1943 uprising that led to political independence from France. Various political and social groups had called for the creation of a national army as a necessary corollary to sovereignty. However, from its inception, the development of the LAF has been shaped by the logic of creating an internal security force. Simultaneously, the LAF has served as a conduit for diplomatic, military, and economic relations with other states, primarily Western ones. Thus, territorial defense has always been subordinate to other considerations.
Successive presidents, governments, military commanders, and parliamentary majorities have understood this operational framework for the Lebanese army and acted accordingly. This has resulted in an army structurally focused on strengthening the state’s power internally, managing internal frictions in Lebanon, and maintaining international alliances, rather than being geared towards addressing Israeli violations of Lebanese territory. This historical dynamic lies at the heart of the current situation and the debate over sovereignty it has reignited.
