Prime Minister Nawaf Salam announced an immediate ban on all Hezbollah security and military activities, declaring them illegal under Lebanese law. He ordered Hezbollah to surrender its weapons and directed security services to prevent further missile or drone launches from Lebanese territory and to detain those responsible.
No Lebanese leader has gone this far since the 1989 Taif Agreement, which ended the fifteen-year civil war and called for the disarmament of all militias. Every government since has either accommodated Hezbollah's arsenal — justified as "resistance" against Israeli occupation — or proved too weak to challenge it. UN Security Council Resolution 1559, passed in 2004, explicitly demanded the disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias. It was never enforced. In May 2008, when the government moved to shut down Hezbollah's private telecommunications network, the group seized west Beirut in a matter of hours — a demonstration that no Lebanese faction could match.
The enforcement gap is immediate. The Lebanese Armed Forces field roughly 80,000 troops with limited heavy armour and no combat air capability. Hezbollah maintains an estimated 30,000-plus fighters with extensive combat experience from Syria, an independent signals network, and a missile arsenal Israel has spent months trying to degrade. The LAF has never attempted direct confrontation with Hezbollah. Salam's order asks the army to do what it has avoided for a generation.
The political calculation may not depend on immediate enforcement. Israel has declared Hezbollah's attacks an "official declaration of war" and struck Beirut's southern suburbs, killing 31 and wounding 149. Mohammad Raad, head of Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc, was reportedly killed in those strikes. Hezbollah is absorbing sustained Israeli military pressure while its political infrastructure is being dismantled.
Salam's declaration positions Lebanon's government on the opposite side of the conflict from Hezbollah at the moment of the group's greatest vulnerability. If Hezbollah emerges from this war weakened — as it did not after 2006 — the declaration provides the legal framework for a post-war order that excludes it as an armed actor. If Hezbollah survives intact, the declaration is a document with no army behind it.
