Explained | The Israel-Lebanon conflict, UNSC Resolution 1701 & current ceasefire pact

The recently signed (and allegedly broken) ceasefire draws on the provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed with the intention of ending the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. As the fate of the current Israel-Lebanon ceasefire hangs in the balance, here's a look at the resolution it draws from.

After prolonged hostilities, Israel and Lebanon on Wednesday (November 27) entered into a ceasefire, a day after the Israeli cabinet approved a US-backed proposal to end the conflict that saw a sharp escalation in September this year.

Barely a day later, on Thursday, Israel announced that ceasefire terms had been violated, despite US President Joe Biden's earlier assertion that the truce had been "designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities."

The recently signed (and allegedly broken) ceasefire draws on the provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which was passed with the intention of ending the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

While the Lebanese cabinet, then Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, and the Israeli cabinet all approved of the resolution in their own right in 2006, provisions of it remained unimplemented, up to this year.

As the fate (and the longevity) of the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire hangs in the balance, we take a look at the current ceasefire and the historic resolution it draws from.

Decades of conflict in hopes of peace

To understand how the current ceasefire came to be, it's important to briefly delve into the modern history of the region to grasp the political dynamics between Israel, Lebanon, and other Arabic nations.

Although Jews from Europe began settling in Palestine in the late 19th century, when the region was under the Ottoman empire, migration to Palestine picked up after the end of World War I, when Lebanon was being administered by the French and Palestine by the British.

As anti-semitic violence increased in Europe through the 1900s, peaking with the emergence of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, more and more Jews began settling in Palestine. Eventually, Zionists appealed to European nations for a separate Jewish state, which was subsequently granted.

Since the formation of Israel in 1947 — carved out of the state of Palestine by the United Nations to establish a Jewish nation — the region has been mired in conflict.

With the formation of Israel, tensions between Jewish communities and the Muslim countries that they were settling in escalated, with Arab leaders associating all Jews with Zionism and eventually expelling them across West Asia.

At the same time, fuelled by rising tensions, Jewish militias began ethnically cleansing many Palestinian villages and towns, and the increasing tensions eventually led to the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War in 1948.

Lebanon was among the group of allied nations fighting Israel in this war, and gave refuge to nearly a million Palestinians who had fled their homes in an exodus that is known as the Nakba. At the time, Lebanon had anticipated the presence of Palestinians in the country to be a temporary arrangement.

While Lebanon mostly welcomed these refugees, the country's political apparatus would lead to much internal strife over the years.

Simply put, Lebanon uses a confessional system of political power, wherein power is accorded to different political groups based on their population.

In and around 1948, the Maronites—a Catholic sect exclusive to Lebanon—were the dominant community, having enjoyed French patronage earlier, and thereby enjoyed considerable political power in the West Asian country.

Muslim Palestinians who were coming into Lebanon, however, would later upset this sectarian balance of power, leading to massive long-term consequences for the tiny nation.

Although Lebanon largely withdrew from the Arab-Israeli conflict following the Nakba, the nation was thrust back into the conflict in the Six-Day War of 1967 that saw Israel win a decisive victory over the allied forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq.

While Lebanon wasn’t directly involved in the conflict, the Six-Day War nonetheless had a massive impact on the tiny nation—according to Vox, the defeat of the Arab national armies signalled the end of the pan-Arab movement aimed at the liberation of Palestine. This effectively meant that the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon did not have any means of going back to their homeland. The defeat also signalled to Palestinian militant groups that they would have to fight on their own if they were to liberate their homeland.

With liberation of Palestine in their sights, these militant groups, most notably the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), made their headquarters in Beirut, and Lebanon would become a staging ground for future attacks against Israel.

And so, Lebanon became the home for Palestinian refugees and militant groups, which would generate significant tension in the country.

The Christian-Muslim divide exploded in 1975, after Christian nationalist militants attacked a bus carrying Palestinian fighters and allied Lebanese fighters through a Christian suburb in Beirut. The attack killed 22, sparking off serious confrontations between the two communities, which would mark the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War that would rage till 1990.

Israel, meanwhile, meddled in this conflict, in the hopes of pushing the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) out of Lebanon and propping up a friendly Maronite Christian government.

Initially, Israel directly supported the largest Maronite militia during the Lebanese Civil War, sometimes with help from the CIA. The events took place during the Cold War, and American interest centred around the elimination of communism and Arab nationalism in the region.

However, in 1978, Israel directly invaded Lebanon in response to an attack by a Palestinian militia group, and Tel Aviv’s invasion shifted the tide of the war and its relationship with the Christian Maronite forces.

Israel’s invasion and its support of the Maronites created further tension in the region by undermining Lebanon’s own sovereignty, exacerbating the Christian-Muslim divide in the tiny nation, and fuelling further Lebanese and Palestinian distrust in Tel Aviv.

With an aim to finally oust the PLO from Lebanon, Israel again invaded the West Asian nation in 1982, but things quickly took a different turn. With Israeli assistance, the biggest Maronite militia group—the Phalangist—carried out a massacre at two refugee camps in west Beirut, despite the PLO leaving Lebanon. The massacre left as many as 3,500 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians dead, sparking worldwide outrage.

Under pressure from the international community, in particular, the US and the UN, Israel agreed to a ceasefire adopted unanimously by all members of the UN Security Council in 1982, and withdrew to south Lebanon, which it continued to control via its ground troops and proxy militia up until 2000.

This would become an important point in time in this decades-long conflict. Southern Lebanon, at the time and even today, primarily has a Shia Muslim population, a sect that was historically disenfranchised by the Sunnis of Lebanon.

With the Shia population in southern Lebanon facing the brunt of Israeli aggression, a new organization rose up—the Hezbollah—which promised to protect the Shias from Tel Aviv’s atrocities, provide stronger political representation to the sect in Beirut, and provide access to health clinics and community centres to the embattled population.

Before long, Hezbollah garnered the support of Israel’s arch-nemesis, Iran, and grew into a powerful and well-equipped guerilla force that vowed to destroy Israel.

Indeed, after 1982, Hezbollah became the focus of Israel’s attention, as the PLO had withdrawn from Lebanon and had given up armed resistance as part of the Oslo accords. With the PLO taking up a more administrative role in the Palestinian freedom struggle, Israel’s main existential threat became Hezbollah.

As hostilities continued after the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, Israel launched two major military operations against Hezbollah in 1993 and 1999, before it withdrew from Lebanon in 2000.

Despite continuing hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, the scale of the conflict shrunk in the early 2000s, and exchanges of fire and military operations being mostly limited to the Lebanon-Israel border.

However, things escalated again in 2006 after a Hezbollah unit crossed into Israeli territory—the Hezbollah group not only killed several Israelis and took two soldiers hostage, but it also launched a rocket barrage into northern Israel, sparking a brutal response from Israel.

This intense conflict was marked not only by ground operations, but by intense bombardment of Lebanon by Israel. After 34 days of war, the UN intervened and the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1701, calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah, Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, and for the deployment of the Lebanese Armed forces in contested southern Lebanon. UNSCR 1701 also called for an expansion in the presence of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in southern Lebanon, and this resolution would go on to become the basis of the current ceasefire.

What were the provisions of UNSC Resolution 1701?

The 19-paragraph resolution from 2006, simply put, called for the full cessation of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, based on the creation of a buffer zone, and the expansion of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which had been deployed in the area since Israel's 1978 invasion.

As per the UN, the key principles of Resolution 1701 are as follows:

• full implementation of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords and of resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), requiring the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so there will be no weapons or authority in country other than that of the Lebanese State

• no foreign forces in Lebanon without the Government’s consent

• no sales or supply of arms and related materiel to Lebanon except as authorised by its Government

• provision to the UN of all remaining maps of landmines in Lebanon in Israel’s possession

• full respect by both parties for the Blue Line and security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Lebanese authorities and UNIFIL between the Blue Line and the Litani River

A key aspect of the resolution is the so-called Blue Line—a 120km stretch along Lebanon’s southern and Israel’s northern border—set up in 2000, of which the UNIFIL is the custodian.

The UNIFIL’s role is not only peacekeeping, but also keeping both sides informed of any activities that take place close to the Blue Line so as to reduce chances of misunderstandings and of tensions flaring again.

What is the current ceasefire proposal?

The US-backed November 27 ceasefire signed between Israel and Hezbollah falls within the framework of UNSCR 1701, and calls for a permanent cessation of hostilities between the two warring sides within a period of 60 days.

The 60-day period, in particular, has been kept to allow Hezbollah forces to retreat 40 km away from the Lebanon-Israel border, while Israeli forces are expected to withdraw from the Lebanese territories that it has occupied since October 2023, when a Hezbollah attack on Israel following Hamas' October 7 attack triggered full-scale war in the region.

The state of Lebanon, for its part, is expected to closely monitor Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the border and its subsequent movements, to prevent the regrouping of armed forces near southern Lebanon’s Litani river, where the Lebanese Army will be deployed.

These withdrawals will be monitored by the UN peacekeeping force, as well as by a multinational committee.

The new ceasefire also expands the area that is to be free of Hezbollah’s armed presence, labelled the ‘New 2024 Line’, that runs east to west across Lebanon and includes Beaufort Castle, a strategic Crusader-era fortress.

Further, while the 2006 resolution said that “no weapons without the consent of the Government of Lebanon” could be deployed in Lebanese territory, the new ceasefire stipulates that only official military and security forces are authorised to carry arms, specifying these forces as the Lebanese Armed Forces, the Internal Security Forces, General Security, State Security, Lebanese customs and the municipal police.