Lebanon's government is actively reviewing a proposal to formally ban Hezbollah's military activity inside Lebanese territory, according to Mada Masr. The measure would extend Prime Minister Nawaf Salam's declaration that all Hezbollah security and military operations are illegal and the Justice Minister's subsequent order to prosecutors to arrest those who fired at Israel. A week ago, the proposal would have been politically impossible. Hezbollah and its allies held enough parliamentary seats and institutional leverage to block any such initiative.
What changed is not Lebanese politics but Israeli ordnance and American ultimatums. The strikes that killed 52 Lebanese, the ground advance displacing 30,000 civilians, and Washington's explicit demand — designate Hezbollah a terrorist organisation or the US makes no distinction between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state — compressed years of political evolution into days. Salam's initial condemnation of Hezbollah's attack as "irresponsible and suspicious" was a rhetorical break with decades of official ambiguity. The arrest order was a legal escalation. A formal ban would redefine the Lebanese state's relationship with its most powerful non-state actor.
The 1989 Taif Agreement that ended Lebanon's civil war required the disarmament of all militias. Hezbollah was the sole exception, retaining its arsenal under a "national resistance" framework that successive governments lacked the will or the capacity to challenge. That framework has now been repudiated in principle by every branch of the Lebanese government in four days. Whether it can be repudiated in practice is a separate question. The Lebanese Armed Forces — the only institution that could enforce a ban — have just withdrawn from the border rather than engage Israel. A state that cannot project authority over its own southern territory cannot disarm the organisation that controls it, particularly while that organisation is in active combat. The ban, if passed, may function less as an operational directive than as a political signal to Washington and Jerusalem — a declaration of intent by a government that lacks the means to follow through.
