Israel will not withdraw from territory in Lebanon, defence minister says

Defence minister, Israel Katz, says military forces will not withdraw from territory seized in south Lebanon

Israeli military forces will not withdraw from a vast swathe of territory they have seized in southern Lebanon , the country’s defence minister has said, hours after Donald Trump and officials in Iran announced a new preliminary agreement between Washington and Tehran to end hostilities on “all fronts” in the Middle East pending a final settlement in about two months.

Israel Katz’s remarks were the first official Israeli comments after the announcement of the interim deal. Iranian and US officials are to meet on Friday in Geneva for a signature ceremony, diplomatic sources in Pakistan, the principal mediator, said.

The exact details of the agreement remain unclear but appear to explicitly include a ceasefire in Lebanon, where Israel launched a wide-ranging offensive after attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah at the beginning of the 15-week-long conflict.

The apparent terms of the agreement have prompted anger and concern among officials in Tel Aviv, who have fiercely resisted Iranian efforts to link its interim deal with the US to halting Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Headlines in Israeli media described the “abject failure” of these efforts.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, last week said he supported Trump’s efforts to end the war diplomatically but has not yet commented publicly. Amit Segal, a journalist close to Netanyahu, described the interim deal as “total surrender”.

Katz said Israel planned to stay “indefinitely” in lands it held in Lebanon, as well as territory seized in recent years in Syria and the Gaza Strip, and would strike Iran with “great force” if it attacked Israel in response to Israeli strikes in Lebanon.

There was relative calm in southern Lebanon on Monday. Hezbollah’s attacks on Israeli military targets, both in southern Lebanon ​and northern Israel, stopped just before midnight, and Israel also significantly reduced its attacks, although there were unconfirmed reports of explosions in some southern towns and at least one drone was heard circling above Beirut and its southern suburbs.

Military sources in Israel quoted by the Jerusalem Post said that if Hezbollah respected the new ceasefire, Israeli military forces would not attack anywhere in Lebanon .

Hezbollah, which has close links with Tehran, ‌has not commented on the deal but has ‌previously said it supported Iran’s efforts for a Lebanon ceasefire.

Officials and many commentators in Israel have claimed the deal will strengthen Hezbollah and other militant Islamist organisations around the region supported by Tehran.

However Israel, which depends on the US for vital military, diplomatic and other support, could not afford to alienate Trump, analysts said.

On Sunday, an Israeli strike on Hezbollah targets in Beirut earned Netanyahu a further expletive-laden reprimand from the US president. The announcement of the interim peace agreement may have averted a new barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles aimed at Israel.

Neil Quilliam, of the Chatham House thinktank in London, said: “The personal relationship between Trump and Netanyahu has taken a hit but … the whole debate around Israel in the US is changing so Israeli-US ties are under some strain at the moment, both at the political level and the societal level.”

Netanyahu was instrumental in convincing Trump to launch the war against Iran and Israeli military forces have coordinated closely with their US counterparts throughout the conflict. An Israeli military strike killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then Iran’s supreme leader, on the war’s first day.

However, any achievements in the war have fallen far short of Netanyahu’s promises of regime change in Tehran as well as the destruction of both Iran’s nuclear programme and its ballistic missile capability.

Opposition politicians in Israel have been quick to attack the deal. An election is due in Israel before October and there is likely to be a close fight for power.

Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, a centre-left party, said Netanyahu had allowed “military achievements won through the courage of [Israel’s armed forces] to be erased”.

“Trump signs an agreement that funnels billions to the ayatollahs’ regime, leaves the nuclear infrastructure intact, preserves the ballistic [missile] threat as it is, and throws a lifeline to the murderous regime in Tehran,” Golan said.

Naftali Bennet, a former prime minister and a leading challenger in the forthcoming polls, said Netanyahu was “incapable of achieving a decisive victory” and had led Israel into wars of “stagnation and attrition”.

Far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government called for Israel to ignore the terms of the deal, saying Israel had not been involved in negotiations and so was not bound by the agreement.

“We are not party to this agreement. It does not safeguard our security,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, said on his Telegram channel.

“We must not settle for anything less than the dismantling of Hezbollah. We must not withdraw from a single inch of territory that our soldiers have captured and cleared of terrorist infrastructure,” he said.

Israel has seized swathes of territory in Syria and has occupied more than 60% of Gaza since the Hamas surprise raid into Israel of 7 October 2023 that triggered the series of recent conflicts. Airstrikes have continued into Gaza since a ceasefire arranged by Trump last year, killing close to 1,000 Palestinians.

Danny Orbach, a military historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said if Trump forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon then Netanyahu’s political career would be over.

“To withdraw from the border would be a repudiation of the basic lesson of October 7 … which is that if there is an enemy who want to destroy you, you do not withdraw from the border.”

Dahlia Scheindlin, a leading Israeli electoral analyst, said the situation in the north was undoubtedly problematic for Netanyahu but many supporters of the prime minister would see only a “blip in a long list of what they consider to be his accomplishments”.

“I don’t know if any of them are going to change their minds because of the ceasefire,” Scheindlin said.