Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah functions as a state within a state. Supported by Iran, it maintains a military force that is better funded than the Lebanese government and has declared its own war against Israel. Photo courtesy of NNA Lebanon.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 2, 2026, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “The Lebanese government and the Israeli government could do a peace deal tomorrow. Israel has no territorial claims in Lebanon. Hezbollah has called for the overthrow of the current Lebanese government. The impediment in Lebanon is the fact that Hezbollah has embedded itself into that country.”

Israel’s situations in Gaza and Lebanon are fundamentally different, and conflating them obscures the path to any resolution. In Gaza, the core dispute is territorial and existential. Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, governs Gaza as its administrative authority, and frames the conflict as a struggle over the land itself. This is reflected in the slogan “from the river to the sea,” which means that a Palestinian state would occupy all of the land that is currently Israel.

In Lebanon, no such territorial logic applies. Israel has not claimed Lebanese sovereign territory, and the Lebanese government has not called for Israel’s destruction. The Lebanon conflict is not a war between two states. It is a war between Israel and an armed organization operating inside Lebanon beyond the Lebanese government’s control, using Lebanese territory as a launch pad while the Lebanese state and its people bear the consequences.

Rubio’s claim is supported by the record. In October 2022, the two countries, technically in a state of war since 1948, concluded a U.S.-brokered maritime boundary agreement dividing gas and oil exploration rights in the eastern Mediterranean. Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it “equally beneficial to both Israel and Lebanon.” Two governments nominally at war reached a negotiated settlement on a resource dispute. The reason broader peace remains out of reach has nothing to do with territorial claims. The problem has always been Hezbollah.

Lebanon is treated in international forums as a normal sovereign state, but that framing obscures what is actually operating inside its borders. Hezbollah is not just a political party that also has a militia wing. It is a parallel state. It runs hospitals and health centers, operates schools, and controls the satellite television network Al-Manar, which the U.S. Treasury designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity in 2006. It holds seats in the Lebanese parliament and has placed ministers in the cabinet. Its networks of institutions have built a distinct Shiite identity separate from the wider Lebanese population, creating a constituency that is politically and socially bound to the organization rather than to the Lebanese state.

Hezbollah did not emerge organically from Lebanese society. It was founded by people linked directly to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps following the 1979 revolution and formally took shape in 1982. It has since become Iran’s most powerful proxy, assessed by researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world. It maintains its own command structure, its own foreign policy, and receives its funding and weapons from Tehran independent of any Lebanese government decision. The Lebanese state does not control Hezbollah. Hezbollah operates alongside it, and in many respects above it.

The consequences of that arrangement became codified after the 2006 war, when the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1701. The resolution established that the area between the Blue Line and the Litani River was to be free of any armed personnel, assets, and weapons other than those of the Lebanese government and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the UN peacekeeping mission whose mandate was expanded by the resolution to monitor the cessation of hostilities, and called for full implementation of the Taif Accords requiring the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon so that there would be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the state. On paper, the framework was sound. In practice, it failed completely.

Rather than disarming, Hezbollah rebuilt, rearmed, and embedded itself more deeply into southern Lebanese society, turning the region into a military stronghold in direct violation of Resolution 1701. Its stockpile of missiles continued to grow. Before the outbreak of war in October 2023, Hezbollah had accumulated an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles, more than the arsenals of many governments around the world.

On October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Hezbollah opened fire from southern Lebanon into northern Israel. This was the execution of what Iran and its proxies call the “unity of arenas” doctrine: the deliberate coordination of simultaneous pressure on Israel across multiple fronts to stretch its military and prevent it from concentrating force in any one theater.

The doctrine had received explicit public expression as early as April 2023, six months before October 7, when Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah publicly warned that any Israeli attempt to isolate the different arenas would lead to war.

From October 8, 2023, Hezbollah launched over 17,000 rockets, missiles, and UAVs into Israel, killing dozens of civilians and forcing more than 60,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes, a displacement that lasted over a year. The Lebanese government issued no order. The Lebanese Armed Forces took no action. Hezbollah decided Lebanon was at war, and Lebanon was at war.

From October 8, 2023, Hezbollah launched over 17,000 rockets, missiles, and UAVs into Israel, killing dozens of civilians and forcing more than 60,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes, a displacement that lasted over a year. The Lebanese government issued no order. The Lebanese Armed Forces took no action. Hezbollah decided Lebanon was at war, and Lebanon was at war.

Lebanon’s government is constitutionally paralyzed by design. The 1989 Taif Agreement, which ended the civil war, formalized a confessional power-sharing system in which the presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian, the prime ministership for a Sunni Muslim, and the parliamentary speakership for a Shia. That system, meant to prevent political sectarianism, actually reaffirmed and consolidated it, creating a structure in which decision-making paralysis is a built-in feature rather than an aberration. Every significant political decision requires cross-sectarian consensus, which Hezbollah, as the dominant Shia political force, can block.

That paralysis, combined with the ongoing state of undeclared war with Israel, has contributed to Lebanon’s economic ruin. Since 2019, Lebanon has been in the grip of an economic and financial collapse that has left the banking sector insolvent, caused the Lebanese pound to lose 98 percent of its value, and pushed more than a third of the population into poverty.

The Lebanese Armed Forces, underfunded even before the collapse, are now structurally incapable of projecting force in the south, even if the political will existed. Confronting Hezbollah means risking civil conflict with a militia that is better armed, better funded, and more combat-experienced than the national army.

The result is an arrangement that has repeated itself for decades: Hezbollah fires from Lebanese territory, Israel responds against Lebanese territory, Lebanese civilians pay the price, the UN calls for restraint, and nothing changes. The Lebanese government complains. Hezbollah remains. The cycle resets.

The problem is not that Israel and Lebanon cannot reach agreements. They demonstrably can. The problem is that one armed-organization, answerable to Tehran rather than Beirut, has effectively stripped the Lebanese government of its sovereign authority to decide whether the country is at war.

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