About 570 square kilometres of southern Lebanon, roughly 220 square miles, sit under Israeli military control this week. Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters in Jerusalem on Monday that his forces are not giving any of it back, and certainly not on a schedule that anyone else gets to set. He said this two days after Pakistan announced a ceasefire between the United States and Iran, a deal that, by the Pakistani prime minister's account, is meant to stop military operations across the region. Lebanon included. The distance between those two positions is the whole story.
Netanyahu did not soften it. Israel will hold the buffer zone in Lebanon for as long as he judges necessary, he said, and it will go on striking what he called Iran's proxies. His defence minister, Israel Katz, had gone further earlier in the day, saying the army would stay put in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza with no end date at all. Katz cast the policy as protecting Israeli towns from jihadist threats, and he was careful to add that the government opposes any withdrawal under pressure now or later. That last bit reads less like a message to Beirut than to Washington.
What the deal actually promises
The ceasefire was unveiled on Sunday by Pakistan's prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, who acted as mediator and broke the news first. By his telling, the memorandum of understanding calls for the immediate and permanent end of military operations on every front, with Lebanon named outright. It was signed Sunday night, although the formal ceremony between the US and Iran is not until Friday. Predictably, both sides declared victory. President Donald Trump described the arrangement as one that would deliver stability across the region and protect its people; Iran's deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, talked up his country's military achievements as he confirmed the memorandum was done.
Two concrete things are supposed to follow, according to the parties and the mediator. Under the terms described, Tehran is meant to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while Washington winds down the blockade it had imposed on Iranian ports. Neither is expected to happen overnight. Reopening the strait eases the global economic damage the closure has been doing, which suits Trump; lifting the port blockade gives an economy described as collapsing some room to breathe, which suits Tehran. As the BBC reported, Gulf states including the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia stand to feel some relief too, having spent weeks under threat of Iranian missiles, a threat serious enough to put their entire economic footing in question.
On the nuclear question, the thing both the US and Israel said this war was about, the text is murkier. Iranian state media has hinted that some mechanism to stop Tehran building a weapon is in there. The specifics are not public, though, and the BBC's reporting suggests they will be argued over in negotiations after Friday's ceremony. So the central justification for the entire campaign is, for now, unconfirmed. Netanyahu insisted Iran will never get the bomb, claiming Israel had decapitated the leadership of what he called the terror regime and wrecked its production sites.
A buffer zone that keeps growing
It helps to trace how Israel got here. The fighting with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group, dates to October 2023. A year later, in October 2024, Israel began cross-border raids that hardened into a full invasion. Its self-declared security zone was originally meant to stop at the Litani River, which runs across the south. It did not. Israeli forces now hold ground north of that line, beyond the boundary Israel itself had drawn. The conflict has killed more than 3,000 people, by the count in Al Jazeera's reporting.
Gaza and Syria add to the total. Israel occupies roughly 1,000 square kilometres, about 386 square miles, in Gaza, and it has held territory in Syria since 2023. Taken together, Katz's no-withdrawal line covers three separate occupations, all of them open-ended by design. Oddly, that is the part that unsettles Israel's own hardliners. The worry on the Israeli right, as the reporting describes it, is that ending the war with Iran pulls the rug out from under the case for staying anywhere. If the Iran threat recedes, the argument for the buffer zones weakens, and the pressure to leave builds. Netanyahu's defiance reads partly as an answer to that anxiety at home. He is telling his base the wars need not end just because the big one with Tehran might.
There is reason to be wary of taking the ceasefire at face value, and Lebanon is the clearest reason of all. Two earlier ceasefires there simply collapsed. They were announced, and the fighting carried on regardless. Verified footage during one supposed truce showed Israeli strikes hitting densely populated neighbourhoods in the south. A bombing raid on 8 April reportedly lasted ten minutes and ranked among the deadliest single episodes in Lebanon's recent history. Set against that record, a third agreement promising a permanent halt invites scepticism, and the people of southern Lebanon have earned the right to feel it. Residents of border towns like Khiam had tried going home during the last lull, only to find the guns had not actually fallen silent.
The strikes that nearly killed the deal
What makes Netanyahu's stance combustible is how close the violence came to wrecking the deal before the ink dried. On Sunday, Israeli aircraft struck the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing three people. The strike was read across the region as crossing one of Iran's stated red lines. By the available reporting it angered Trump, who feared it could detonate the diplomatic track he had been pushing. Beirut's southern suburbs had been hit twice in a week, each time framed by Israel as a response to Hezbollah rockets fired north. Each time, the process wobbled.
Iran, by the accounts on offer, came to the edge of answering Sunday's strike with another missile barrage and then held back, specifically to keep the deal alive. Sit with that detail and it is remarkable. The agreement survived not because the parties stopped fighting but because one of them swallowed a provocation it had publicly sworn it would not tolerate. The restraint was tactical, all of it aimed at reaching Friday. Whether it lasts through Friday is a separate question, and nobody involved seems willing to wager on it. The BBC's Sebastian Usher noted that, after so many false starts, no one can be confident the road to the signing will run smooth.
Behind the scenes, relations between Netanyahu and Trump have frayed. The Israeli leader has clashed with the US president in private, according to reports, and he is taking fire at home from both the opposition and his own right flank for failing to head off the US-Iran arrangement. At Monday's press conference he met the friction head on, granting that he and Trump do not always agree. "I am responsible for Israel's security interests," he said, casting himself as the man who must defend them even when Washington's calculations part ways with his own. He called the war with Iran a net victory for Israel. The framing matters: it lets him bank a win while shedding the obligation, an end to the occupations, that a regional peace would normally carry.
What happens after Friday
The signing ceremony is the next marker, and it is still days off. If it goes ahead, the first tests will be practical. Does Iran actually reopen the Strait of Hormuz? Does the US lift the port blockade? Does the fighting in Lebanon stop? The first two are measurable. The third rests on a man who just said, on the record, that he means to keep his troops where they are. Sharif's memorandum and Netanyahu's press conference cannot both be fully true at the same time. Either the deal forces Israel out of Lebanon, which Netanyahu has flatly rejected, or the language about ending operations on all fronts proves aspirational, which would eat away at the credibility of the whole thing for the Gulf states and Tehran alike.
The BBC's Jeremy Bowen has warned that the consequences of this war will be felt for generations, and that the architects of the campaign risk locking the region into permanent crisis rather than ending one. The buffer zones in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, held with no timetable, are exactly the sort of arrangement that hardens into permanence while everyone insists it is temporary. As the BBC's coverage put it, some Beirut residents are already trying to go home. Whether there is a home to return to, and whether the soldiers around it leave, is the thing to watch once the cameras at Friday's ceremony switch off.