The Lebanese Armed Forces withdrew from key border positions in southern Lebanon rather than contest Israel's ground advance. The LAF's roughly 80,000 active personnel lack the armour, air defence, and political mandate to confront the IDF. The decision preserved the army as an institution but ceded the territory it exists to defend.
The withdrawal places the LAF in a position defined by simultaneous and contradictory demands. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam declared all Hezbollah military operations illegal. The Justice Minister ordered prosecutors to arrest those who fired at Israel. Washington told Beirut the November 2024 ceasefire is over and the US will not intervene unless Lebanon designates Hezbollah a terrorist organisation. The government is being asked to confront Hezbollah while the army steps aside for the force Hezbollah was armed to oppose. That sequence asks Lebanese citizens to accept both Israeli military control of their southern border and the dismantling of the only armed force that has historically contested it.
The LAF stood aside in 2006 as well — it lacked the capacity to fight either Israel or Hezbollah and chose institutional survival over a battle it could not win. That precedent produced UNSCR 1701, which required that only the LAF and UNIFIL operate south of the Litani River. Twenty years later, neither condition has been met. Hezbollah never withdrew. The LAF never enforced the resolution. Israel's current advance is, in part, a consequence of that two-decade failure — and the army's withdrawal this week ensures the same dynamic will reassert itself whenever the current fighting stops: an army that cannot hold the border, a militia that will not leave it, and a population trapped between both.
