Lebanon's emergency cabinet formally banned all Hezbollah military and security activities on Tuesday. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam confirmed the decision: "The Lebanese state declares its absolute and unequivocal rejection of any military or security actions launched from Lebanese territory outside the framework of its legitimate institutions." The cabinet demanded Hezbollah surrender its weapons to the state.
No Lebanese government has taken this step before. Under the 1989 Taif Agreement that ended the fifteen-year civil war, all militias were required to disarm. Hezbollah was exempted as "national resistance" against Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon — an exemption that survived Israel's withdrawal in 2000, the 2006 war, the Syrian civil war's spillover, and Hezbollah's expansion into a force with an estimated 130,000 rockets embedded across southern communities. The cabinet's declaration revokes that exemption in law.
The timing traces directly to Washington's ultimatum. The United States told Lebanon the November 2024 ceasefire was formally over and it would not intervene to stop Israeli operations unless Beirut designated Hezbollah a terrorist organisation. Salam's ban falls short of that demand — it prohibits military activity without designating the organisation itself — but it creates the legal architecture Washington sought. It is a compromise: enough to claim compliance, insufficient to satisfy maximalists on either side. The justice minister had already ordered the public prosecutor to arrest those who fired at Israel, and Salam himself had declared Hezbollah's operations illegal days earlier. Tuesday's cabinet vote elevated those individual acts into formal state policy.
The enforcement gap is immediate and total. The Lebanese Armed Forces withdrew from key border positions rather than contest the Israeli ground advance. A military that cannot hold its own borders cannot disarm a militia with 130,000 rockets. Al Jazeera's analysis described the ban as "bold but difficult to implement." The ban's weight is structural, not operational. Hezbollah will not disarm because a cabinet voted. But the declaration places the question squarely within Lebanese domestic law and gives every subsequent actor — the UN Security Council, international donors, future Lebanese governments — a domestic legal baseline to invoke. What was politically impossible a week ago, as Mada Masr reported when the proposal was still under review, is now official policy. What remains impossible is making it real.
