No one knows with any certainty what will become of the ceasefire agreement

ITis not hard to see why Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to a 60-day ceasefire with Hezbollah. The burden of over 400 days of warfare on the IDF, especially the reservists, has been enormous. They need a rest. And while they do so, there are plenty of enormous achievements to savor.

The achievements of the IDF since the Simchas Torah massacre are both remarkable and insufficiently celebrated in Israel. In addition, the last two months of fighting in southern Lebanon and beyond have revealed the amazing siyata d’Shmaya that the Jews of Israel have experienced. On Simchas Torah 5774, Hezbollah possessed huge stockpiles of weapons along the border with Israel, a network of tunnels leading into Israel, and a well-trained army. Had Hezbollah not held back from joining Hamas’s attack, for reasons not fully understood, Israel would have found itself fighting a war deep in its own territory on at least two fronts. The IDF was totally unprepared for such a war.

Instead, consider the situation in which Israel finds itself today. The IDF is in full control of Gaza’s borders. By destroying the tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor, the IDF has rendered Hamas incapable of rearming. At the same time, Israel has cleared a security zone along Gaza’s northern border, which makes a repeat of the Simchas Torah attack far less likely.

Hamas’s senior military leadership is decimated and much of its vast tunnel network under Gaza destroyed. Israel will not permit international funding to rebuild Gaza to be funneled through Hamas, which makes the reconstruction of that underground tunnel network impossible. And there are at least some signs that the population of Gaza is beginning to recognize the destruction that Hamas has brought upon them and seeks a future with some hope for better lives.

Meanwhile, a deal with Hezbollah means that the remnants of Hamas’s military wing are left to face the IDF alone, without hope of the IDF being distracted in the near term by the need to retain large forces in the north.

For its part, Hezbollah’s leadership, chief among them the charismatic and clever Hassan Nasrallah, has been thoroughly decapitated. The latest of Nasrallah’s would-be successors is rumored to have taken refuge in Iran, lest he join his predecessors at the receiving end of an Israeli bomb. The vast arsenal of rockets and missiles with which Hezbollah has terrorized Israel for more than a decade has been largely destroyed — 80% according to some news reports and including the majority of its long-range missiles. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Hezbollah fighters have been killed and many others maimed. Upon its withdrawal from Lebanon, the IDF will return with vast storehouses of weapons stockpiled by Hezbollah for a cross-border attack on Israel.

On the very eve of the agreement going to effect, the IAF destroyed Hezbollah’s major production site for precision missiles, built and operated with Iranian assistance, and the nearby central compound of Hezbollah’s Radwan Forces, killing dozens of Hezbollah fighters. In the days preceding that, Israel succeeded in eliminating all the senior commanders of Hezbollah’s drone division.

Here is a summary of Israel’s achievements by John Spencer, professor of modern urban warfare at West Point: “Once Israel decided to retaliate, it eliminated the complete enemy leadership hierarchy (cannot be replaced easily), destroyed massive amounts of their rocket launching capabilities (their key capability), seized and cleared critical terrain, demonstrated such superior capability (pager, dismantling operation) to put fear and consequences back in the enemy’s mind (aka deterrence), and measurably set the Islamic regime’s proxy back decades.”

In short, the most important element in the “ring of fire” laboriously built by Iran around Israel has been greatly weakened and no longer serves as a credible deterrent to an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installation.

And for its part, Iran too has been greatly weakened. One measure of Iran’s diminished position: It urged Hezbollah to accept the cease-fire with Israel. Iran’s antiaircraft defenses have been rendered useless by the IAF. And even absent any direct attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment and storage facilities, Israel has apparently destroyed its major research facility for the creation of nuclear warheads.

The shocking capture of Aleppo by anti-Assad forces in Syria is a direct reflection of the dramatic weakening of Assad’s three principal allies: Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. Hezbollah units were long viewed as the best-trained forces defending Aleppo. No longer.

OF COURSE, all the foregoing achievements have come at a horrible price. Over 800 soldiers, many of them reservists with wives and children, have been killed, and many times that number wounded, often grievously, since October 7, 2023. Even for combat soldiers who are physically intact, the war has inflicted serious traumas. Tens of thousands of reservists have served between 200 and 300 days since the Simchas Torah massacre.

In the case of reservists with families, their absence from home has created tensions for every family member and incredible strain on their wives. For those who are self-employed, the war has made it impossible for many to keep their businesses going. Employers have similarly been unable to rely on workers who are serving. As a consequence of the burdens on reservists, the rate of those showing up for service has dropped into the range of 75% to 80%, in contrast to the well over 100% reporting in the early days after the Simchas Torah massacre.

At least 60,000 residents of the North have abandoned their homes to live in makeshift quarters, with limited privacy. Many of those commute hours daily back to their places of employment or to their fields. The cost of the war and support for uprooted families has been a heavy burden on the economy, at a time when tax revenues are lower due to reduced economic activity.

And finally, the war has reshaped Israel’s image in the world in a highly negative fashion, however unfairly. The ICC warrants for the arrest of the prime minister and former defense minister for war crimes, for instance, will be cited ad nauseum by haters of Israel.

Nor is it clear what more is to be gained by continued war with Hezbollah. With respect to Gaza, a relatively small area, it is possible to formulate concrete goals and metrics. But what would be the goal of continued fighting with Hezbollah? It is impossible to kill every Hezbollah fighter, at least without conquering all of Lebanon, something for which Israel has neither the resources nor the desire.

OPINION IS DIVIDED on the terms of the agreement. Northern mayors in Israel, by and large, criticized the agreement for failing to create a security cordon several kilometers deep on the Lebanese side of the border and are urging their citizens not to return home as of yet. They pointed out that too many Jews have been killed over the years by anti-tank missiles and the like fired from just across the border.

The ceasefire agreement is not self-enforcing, and on its face, the enforcement mechanism — namely, UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army Forces (LAF) — appears unpromising in the extreme. UNIFIL has been responsible since UN Security Council Resolution 1701, concluding the second Lebanon War in 2006, for ensuring the demilitarization of southern Lebanon. It has not performed its job since day one. Tony Badran, in Tablet, charges that its nonfeasance is actually malfeasance, as UNIFIL launders funds to Hezbollah by hiring Hezbollah operatives and supporters to act as contractors and provide other services. Furthermore, it serves as a human shield for Hezbollah by locating its bases close to or within Hezbollah infrastructure.

Primary responsibility for keeping Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon will fall to the US-subsidized Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). But the Lebanese government is largely a fiction — it has been without a president for two years — and is dominated by Hezbollah. Yet it is the LAF that is charged with responsibility for destroying any remaining Hezbollah infrastructure and military sites south of the Litani River, and preventing Hezbollah from reestablishing itself in the south.

The latter will prove an especially difficult task, as the distinction between Hezbollah operatives and civilians, in the largely Shiite south, is blurred. IDF soldiers operating along Lebanon’s southern border over the last three months found that almost every home harbored Hezbollah arms.

Supervising the handover of security control of southern Lebanon to the LAF will be a monitoring group headed by the United States. How exactly the monitoring group will act is far from clear. A senior US administration official told Israeli reporter Barack Ravid, “There are restrictions on the military activity that Israel can carry out. It is impossible to sign a ceasefire agreement if Israel can shoot afterwards at whatever it wants and whenever it wants.”

But in his press conference announcing the agreement, Netanyahu insisted that Israel retains under the agreement the right of self-defense, and is thus free to act if Hezbollah seeks to rebuild its terrorist infrastructure or attempts to bring in trucks laden with missiles. And in the first days of the ceasefire, the IDF has taken action several times.

Badran argues that Israel will find itself passing complaints to the monitoring committee and awaiting permission to act. And he fears that given the large US investment in the LAF, the monitoring committee will treat complaints about the LAF’s performance with little sympathy. The entire arrangement, he argues, is a victory for “Obama’s decade-old policy of leveraging American power to secure both Iran’s continuing regional influence and direct control over Israel’s borders.”

There is evidence that Netanyahu himself is well aware of the hidden traps in the deal. Part of his pitch to the cabinet was that the US was threatening a UN Security Council resolution, with sanctions against Israel, including a possible arms embargo, unless Israel agreed. (Shades of the Obama administration’s orchestration of a UNSCR against Israel in its waning days in 2016.) Once in place, such resolutions are almost impossible to remove, as doing so requires unanimity from the five permanent Security Council members.

My own guess is that Netanyahu decided to avoid a confrontation with the Biden administration on its way out and to await a more sympathetic Trump administration. If, as expected, Trump reinstates his maximum pressure on Iran, in the form of sanctions on its oil exports, the Islamic regime will have far less money to finance rebuilding Hezbollah or rebuilding southern Lebanon, which may cause Hezbollah to lose the support of its Shiite base.

In sum, no one knows with any certainty what will become of the ceasefire agreement. The key determinant will ultimately be whether Israeli residents of the north feel comfortable returning to their homes.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1039. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)