What the Ceasefire Between Israel and Hezbollah Could Mean for the War in Gaza

In what might be his final achievement as president, Joe Biden, his diplomats, and their French counterparts have brokered a ceasefire in the increasingly brutal yearlong war between Israel and Hezbollah’s Islamist militia in Lebanon.

Under the deal, all fighting will cease for 60 days, during which time Israeli troops will pull out of Lebanon, Hezbollah will pull back to north of the Litani River (about 18 miles north of Israel’s border), and the Lebanese army—joined by U.N. peacekeepers and with supplies and training by the U.S. and France—will occupy the demilitarized zone of southern Lebanon. Also during this 60-day period, about 60,000 Israeli citizens and 1.2 million Lebanese citizens—who have been displaced by the fighting—will return to their homes in northern Israel and southern Lebanon respectively.

The accord, which Biden announced on Tuesday and which went into effect on Wednesday at 4 a.m. local time, raises several questions. What are the odds the ceasefire will hold for 60 days? What happens after then? And how will the peace—whether uneasy or enduring—affect Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, its relations with Iran, and the broad geopolitics of the region?

First, will the deal hold? The agreement, which the Israeli Cabinet endorsed with only one member dissenting (the far-right-wing Itamar Ben-Gvir), was negotiated with Lebanon’s largely ineffectual government, not with Hezbollah directly, but the head of the militia has said he would abide by it as long as Israel does.

Second, assuming all parties hold to their word, what happens next? Biden’s hope is that the fighting stops permanently. The 60-day span is seen as merely a transition—enough time for Israeli and Hezbollah troops to withdraw and for civilians to return to their homes. Israel explicitly reserves the right to resume fighting if Hezbollah breaks the agreement; Hezbollah claims an implicit right to do so if Israel violates its terms.

All this, of course, is easier said than done. Back in 2006, at the end of the last Israel–Hezbollah war, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution calling on both sides to do what this week’s deal hopes to do. Back then, Israel withdrew, but armed Hezbollah militias never pulled back to north of the Litani River. The Lebanese army was in shambles, as was the government (Hezbollah had murdered its prime minister), and U.N. peacekeepers lacked the resources to enforce the deal fully.

This week’s deal reestablishes a commission, which includes U.S. and French officials, that would adjudicate all complaints of violations. Another committee of seven countries will supposedly help rebuild the Lebanese army (though Biden stressed that no U.S. combat troops will be on the ground in southern Lebanon). Finally, those countries and others will do something they neglected to do in the last peace—they’ve promised anyway to spend lots of money trying to revitalize the Lebanese government, which hasn’t really controlled the country for 50 years.

Will this peace be more enduring than the last one? We shall see.

Assuming the peace does endure, at least for a while, how will it affect Israel’s war with Hamas? Biden said on Tuesday that he hoped that the deal would spur a peace accord in Gaza as well; in any case, his diplomats and their negotiating partners in Egypt and Qatar are trying to restart peace talks, which over the past year have veered between fruitless and dormant.

There is some cause for optimism. Hamas—which started the war on Oct. 7, 2023, with its cross-border invasion, killing 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians—has been battered by the fighting: Its militia is severely weakened; its charismatic leader, Yahya Sinwar, is dead; its ties with the region’s other anti-Israel forces—especially Iran and Hezbollah—are all but severed.

This last point is particularly important. Until this week, Hezbollah’s leaders had said they would keep firing rockets into Israel until there was a ceasefire in Gaza. Now they say they will abide by the deal signed with Lebanon, as long as Israel does as well—even though the fighting in Gaza persists. Meanwhile, the Iranians—who said they would respond with “crushing” force to Israel’s last missile attack—have refrained from doing so, mainly because they know Israel will retaliate with debilitating force if they do. (Israel’s attack, which was launched in response to an earlier Iranian strike, held back from hitting Iran’s energy and nuclear targets, but it destroyed the air-defense systems that would defend those targets from a subsequent attack. Biden, who pressured Israel to keep the attack confined to military targets, publicly said he would let the Israelis attack whatever they wanted if Iran escalated the punching match.)

Compounding Hamas’ weakness, President-elect Donald Trump has said that Israel should “finish” the war in Gaza as quickly as possible, doing whatever it needs to do to “win.” He has criticized Biden for pressuring Israel to moderate its military offensive. In other words, Hamas might be mulling over two or three reasons to strike a deal—some sort of ceasefire and hostage-for-prisoner exchange—in the 55 days while Biden is still president.

However, this is speculation. Hamas’ leaders, who have never done much to protect ordinary Gazans (they built elaborate tunnels for themselves but no air-raid shelters for civilians), may double down on the fight, even if it means martyring themselves.

Or, if Hamas does agree to a quick deal, Benjamin Netanyahu might not. Any deal would likely call for at least the resumption of talks about a Palestinian state—a goal that Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition partners have rejected, even theoretically. Netanyahu still has a goal of “total victory” in Gaza—the wiping out of Hamas as a political or military entity, even though some of his military officers question this goal’s feasibility and think he should accept a less ambitious deal that would free the remaining hostages. However, the prime minister has reason to believe that, after Jan. 20, Trump will allow, even encourage, him to follow his maximalist instincts.

Biden also hopes to wrap up a deal in which Saudi Arabia “normalizes” relations with Israel. Saudi Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman certainly wants normalization; he was about to initiate such a deal the day before Hamas launched its attack against Israel. Hamas mounted the attack, at least in part, as a potent way to block the impending deal—which would have removed the Palestinian cause from the region’s politics. As one Hamas leader said at the time, the attack put that cause back on the table. The Saudi leader really doesn’t care much about Palestinians, and he detests Hamas, but much of the Saudi population passionately cares, to the point where he could face an uprising if he recognized Israel in the face of a war that has killed an estimated 44,000 Gazans. Bin Salman now insists that Israel must at least start talks toward a Palestinian state as a prerequisite to normalization. Again, Netanyahu is unlikely to do that. His coalition partners have threatened to quit the government if he did. That would force new elections, which he might lose. With Trump coming to power, Netanyahu may think he doesn’t need to compromise on this issue.

The Hezbollah ceasefire could conceivably be a prelude to some sort of peaceful coexistence—for the U.S. and for Israel—with Iran. The Iranian economy is in shambles; its “axis of resistance”—the group of militias that have fought on the front lines of battle against Israel—is in disarray; its new president was elected on a platform of reaching out to the West (though the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, holds ultimate power).

The prospects for reengagement depend, in part, on what happens after Jan. 20. During his first term, Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal, which Barack Obama and five other leaders had signed with Iran in 2015, and declared a policy of “maximum pressure” that he hoped would topple Tehran’s regime. It had no such effect, and now Iran is closer to building an atomic bomb than ever. Trump has said he wants to restart the maximum pressure policy, though some hope—with who knows what validity—that, if a deal seems in reach, Trump, who fancies himself the master of big deals, might find the prospect irresistible.

Meanwhile, there is the question of what Trump might do in the short term about the ceasefire in Hezbollah. The 60-day ceasefire would be almost over when he takes the oath of office. Will he let it stand and follow through on the commitment to help build a viable Lebanese government and civil society? A senior official told reporters on Tuesday that he had twice briefed the Trump transition’s national-security team on the deal and that they seemed supportive of its approach. Who knows if that’s true or what Trump himself thinks about it? Given the near-unanimous support of Israel’s Cabinet, he would probably go along.

For now, the effects are immediate. Just in recent weeks, Lebanon has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, killing 45 civilians. Israel has dropped bombs on buildings in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon’s once-thriving cosmopolitan capital, killing more than 3,700 people, though it’s unclear how many are civilians. Whatever happens in the Middle East in the coming months, a ceasefire in Lebanon is a significant thing itself—something that, amid an otherwise mixed record on foreign policy, Biden could tout as a remarkable achievement.