Majdal Zoun

Majdal Zoun is a village in the Tyre District of southern Lebanon, situated close to the Mediterranean coast and a short distance south of the Litani River. Like much of the region between the Litani and the Blue Line demarcated after the 2000 Israeli withdrawal, the area has been contested territory under multiple cycles of Israeli-Hezbollah confrontation. The village lies within the zone that UN Resolution 1701 designated for exclusive Lebanese Armed Forces and UNIFIL deployment following the 2006 war.

In June 2026, during the fifth Washington round of Israeli-Lebanese Ceasefire negotiations, the Israeli military reported capturing a Hezbollah tunnel system at Majdal Zoun. The discovery formed part of Israel's public justification for maintaining ground forces south of the Litani despite a US-brokered framework that called for IDF withdrawal and transfer of exclusive control to the Lebanese Armed Forces. Tunnel infrastructure in southern Lebanon has been a persistent point of contention: Hezbollah spent years constructing cross-border tunnels that the IDF identified in 2018-2019 and has continued to find and destroy in the 2024-2026 campaign.

The village sits within the area covered by the pilot-zone framework under discussion at the Washington round: IDF withdrawal from a defined strip south of the Litani in exchange for LAF deployment and Hezbollah disarmament. The tunnel find at Majdal Zoun illustrates why Israel has made verifiable disarmament a precondition for any troop withdrawal, and why Iran has demanded a full Ceasefire across all fronts as the price of returning to nuclear sub-talks.