US plan to disarm Hezbollah put to test as Israel and Lebanon begin 'pilot zone' program

Israel and the Lebanese government carried out their first experiment in the “pilot zone” Hezbollah disarmament program, one the United States hopes will ultimately accomplish its plan of disarming the designated terrorist group using the Lebanese government.

The pilot zone program, laid out through several rounds of negotiations between Israel and the Lebanese government and mediated by Washington, will have the Israeli military withdraw from small amounts of Lebanese territory at a time, handing over control to reliable units of the Lebanese Armed Forces. The U.S. State Department, the Israel Defense Forces, and the LAF all confirmed the development in their own statements.

The beginning of the “pilot zone” scheme

Cognizant of domestic Israeli concerns about Lebanon, the U.S. and Israeli statements didn’t even use the term “withdraw,” only saying that “pilot zone operations” were underway.

“Today, pilot zone operations began in the villages of Froun, Srifa, and Zawtar Al-Gharbiya in accordance with the Trilateral Framework and under the auspices of the Military Coordination Group for Lebanon. This milestone is a direct outcome of last week’s discussions between Israel and Lebanon in Rome,” State Department spokesman Tommy Piggott said in a press release, adding that the U.S. would continue working closely with both parties to “implement the Framework to a successful conclusion.”

“In accordance with the directives from the political echelon, the 'Safe Zone' pilot program began today (Monday) in southern Lebanon, in cooperation with the U.S. military (CENTCOM) and the Lebanese Armed Forces,” the statement noted.

“As part of the pilot, teams from the IDF, the U.S. military, and the Lebanese Armed Forces are conducting coordination and planning for the continued implementation of the agreement,” it continued, adding that the IDF will respond “forcefully to any violation of the agreement.”

The LAF statement was much more direct, saying it initiated deployment “following the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces.”

In a Tuesday statement, the LAF said the IDF had opened fire in areas near the pilot zones, warning that this could delay the implementation of the program.

Abed Ezzeldine, mayor of Zawtar Al-Gharbiya, told the Associated Press that the town was uninhabitable.

“Once the army gives us permission to enter Zawtar Al-Gharbiya, we as civilians will go in, but only to check it out and see how things are, and then we will leave,” he said. "We can’t stay because the infrastructure is completely damaged, and houses have been leveled. They (the Israelis) have bulldozed the roads.”

Photos released by the LAF showed that the town of Zawtar Al-Gharbiya had largely been reduced to rubble. The town remains deserted, and the LAF told residents not to return until it issues the all-clear.

The pilot zone program is expected to be at the center stage of Lebanese President Joseph Aoun’s visit to the White House on Tuesday.

While the pilot zone program marks a notable breakthrough in negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, the issue of disarming Hezbollah has a long way to go. Many analysts doubt whether the U.S.’s preference for the Lebanese government itself to disarm the group is a realistic prospect at all.

“Left to its present devices, the Lebanese army remains incapable of disarming even the weakened and emasculated Hezbollah we now have after all the blows it has endured,” Habib Malik, son of the diplomat Charles Malik and retired associate professor at the Lebanese American University, told the Washington Examiner.

The only way this could change, he argued, was a substantial investment and overhaul by the U.S.

“The abilities of the LAF depend largely on how serious and operationally effective any rearming and training and beefing up by the U.S. of the LAF capabilities,” Malik said. "My sense is that there is a serious resolve on the part of Washington to move in this direction of equipping LAF with what will be needed for the task. How quickly can this happen is one of the unknowns — unknown at least to me."

The Washington Examiner reached out to the State Department for comment.

Lingering scars of a civil war

Lebanon, which has one of the most diverse populations of the Middle East, descended into a sectarian civil war in 1975 that dragged on until 1990, drawing in several foreign powers and pitting over a dozen different factions against each other in a series of shifting alliances. The war only ended with the country’s occupation by Syria and the disarmament of all ethnic and political militias except for the upstart Shia militant group Hezbollah, which had boosted its prestige through a long-running guerrilla campaign against Israel in the south.

Hezbollah spent the next 34 years since the end of the civil war using its Iranian patron to build up its arsenal, strategically designed to make up for its deficiencies as a paramilitary force and best counter the advantages of the IDF. Syria had kept the LAF small and weak, meaning by the time it withdrew in 2005, Hezbollah was already more powerful than it. In 2008, Hezbollah fighters seized West Beirut over a political dispute in just over a day while the LAF stood aside, signaling that the Iran-backed terrorist group controlled the country.

By the time of Oct. 7, 2023, Hezbollah had ballooned into the most powerful paramilitary group on Earth, firmly outmatching the LAF in terms of manpower and firepower by several times. The group served as Israel’s foremost concern, with the ability to overwhelm Israel’s missile defense systems with its own arsenal.

The situation changed dramatically in 2024, when a series of intelligence coups and an Israeli invasion of Lebanon wiped out the group’s leadership, destroyed much of its arsenal, and gutted its prestige. Israel’s second invasion in 2026 in response to Hezbollah's joining Iran's strikes against Israel further degraded the group, and during the war, its inability to halt the IDF advance or inflict any notable casualties tarnished the group's remaining reputation.

Seeking return on Washington’s investment

Washington views the situation in Lebanon as what the U.S. has been waiting for 20 years, since it began its modern partnership with the LAF. After the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, the U.S. sought to establish an institutional counterweight to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Washington found this in the LAF, which it began funding, arming, and training. To date, the U.S. has provided over $3 billion to the military, and over 80% of its hardware comes from the U.S. The force has been an effective partner in countering Sunni terrorism, but has refused to directly confront Hezbollah.

Despite the U.S. investment, the LAF has long been crippled by sectarian and financial issues. Hezbollah draws its support from the country’s large Shia population, which also makes up a sizable contingent of the LAF. While the military is overwhelmingly popular across society, an attempt to use it to disarm Hezbollah, especially if viewed as doing so at the behest of Israel or the U.S., could be a severe blow to its legitimacy.

Then there’s the issue of pay: Lebanon has been mired in a catastrophic economic crisis since 2019, made worse by the 2024 and 2026 invasions and bombings by Israel. The crisis has affected the LAF as badly as other institutions, hurting morale and bringing into question the military's reliability. Hezbollah, in contrast, has long been able to rely on a stable financial stream from Tehran. Hezbollah fighters have always been reliably paid, while Lebanese soldiers have been reduced to schemes such as offering helicopter joyrides to tourists to make ends meet.

The LAF’s reliability to take over southern Lebanon was brought under severe scrutiny last year, when the Sunday Times revealed an intelligence report finding that dozens of LAF officers had leaked sensitive information to Hezbollah. 

This infiltration goes up to the highest ranks of the LAF — Suhil Bahij Gharb, the LAF’s chief of military intelligence for Southern Lebanon, was discovered to have given the terrorist group sensitive information from inside a command and control center jointly run by the U.S., France, and UNIFIL.

While Israeli analysts are near unanimous in believing the LAF is in no position to disarm Hezbollah at the current moment, Reserve Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, former chief of the research division for the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence and current head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told the Washington Examiner that there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic.

“At this point, this is not realistic,” he said of the LAF disarming Hezbollah. “But even at this point, it's much more realistic than it was on Oct. 7, 2023, or at any time since then. So, the direction is positive; Hezbollah is getting weaker every day.”

Kuperwasser viewed the agreements struck between the U.S., Israel, and the Lebanese government as highly positive developments that provide international legitimacy for disarming the terrorist group.

“What needs to be done now is to further strengthen the supporters of disarming Hezbollah within the Lebanese population, including the Shiite community, strengthen the LAF, and move forward according to the pilot process. It is also important to increase the pressure on Iran and not allow Hezbollah to deploy in south Lebanon,” he said.

Syrian wild card

One proposal favored by Trump has been to transfer the job of dealing with Hezbollah to the new Syrian government of Ahmed al Sharaa, a devoted foe of the group after it played a key role in propping up the former government of Bashar Assad.

Trump floated the idea once again during Aoun’s visit on Tuesday.

“Well, it's a concept, you know. We get along very well with the president of Syria. He's done a very good job. I wouldn't be surprised if this gentleman's going to do a job just like that. He's done a very good job. He's pulled Syria together,” he said. 

“He would like to come in and do something with Hezbollah. You know, they've been fighting. He's been fighting Hezbollah for a long time. I think it'd be very effective,” Trump added.

The proposal hasn’t been as well-received by outside observers, particularly the two main parties, Israel and Lebanon. Israel views Damascus as an enemy and clashed militarily with it last year in response to its massacre of Druze in the southwest. The Jewish nation maintains an occupation of parts of southwest Syria, while providing cover for the Druze area as a de facto protectorate.

Lebanon is even less eager to see Syria return. The 15-year occupation isn’t remembered fondly and was only removed amid popular outcry. A new occupation could be even worse, as much of Syria’s military is made up of jihadis who fought with Sharaa under the guise of a holy war against Assad’s Alawite government. Sharaa, while going to great lengths to project a moderate image to the world, has struggled to rein in these radical elements of the military, and every major deployment since taking power has devolved into mass killings and abuses against minority populations, worst of all those against the Druze and Alawites.

Most importantly, the deployment of Syrian forces into Lebanon is popular least of all in Damascus itself.

In a briefing earlier this month, Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and the director of its Syria Initiative, as well as one of the most well-connected Westerners to the current Syrian government, said there was essentially no chance that the intervention could take place.

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“Damascus is in a very difficult position,” he said. “I mean, let’s state it as bluntly as possible: The idea that Syria could or should militarily intervene in Lebanon is an absolute nonstarter in Damascus.”

“There is zero interest in doing this, zero interest in the military, zero interest in the security and intelligence apparatus, and zero interest in the presidency and the foreign ministry,” Lister said. “This is still a country that can barely pay its own public sector salaries. This is not a country that is prepared to go across a nation-state border, and particularly one with such complexity and sensitivity as Lebanon.”