The November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah set a clear, if fraught, sequence: Israeli forces were to withdraw from most positions in southern Lebanon while Hezbollah would remove its fighters and military infrastructure from south of the Litani River, with Lebanese state actors and international monitors responsible for verification. That architecture was designed to turn a frozen front into a managed transition from kinetic confrontation to state-led security, but execution has repeatedly faltered and left the core question unresolved: has Hezbollah actually withdrawn in a verifiable way, or has the group merely reshaped its presence to look compliant on paper?

From the earliest days of the implementation window, practical and political obstacles emerged. Israel signaled that its withdrawal would be conditional and delayed beyond the 60-day benchmark because it judged Lebanese state deployments and Hezbollah pullback to be incomplete. Those Israeli reservations translated into a phased pullback and continued operations in key positions along the border, complicating the sequencing the ceasefire envisioned and creating incentives for Hezbollah to retain latent capabilities while appearing to step back.

On the Lebanese side, the government and the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) were placed at the center of the disarmament task. Over 2025 the army reported substantial activity in southern sectors, including destruction of emplaced positions and removal of weapons caches that it attributed to Hezbollah’s military infrastructure. Those operations matter: if the LAF can hold and make transparent gains on the ground, the long-term balance could shift toward a monopoly of force under state control. Yet the army’s gains to date sit alongside important limits. The LAF lacks the independent intelligence reach, the logistics footprint, and the political cover to conduct intrusive searches across Hezbollah’s civilian entrenchments without triggering major internal political backlash.

Hezbollah’s public posture has reinforced doubts about compliance. Senior leaders have repeatedly framed disarmament demands as an external or Israeli-American design and conditioned cooperation on a full Israeli withdrawal and an end to strikes. That rhetorical line serves both domestic politics and operational security: it portrays any further concessions as a surrender in the face of occupation while giving the group plausible deniability about the disposition of weapons and personnel north of the Litani. In short, Hezbollah has signaled willingness to adjust visible deployments in the south while reserving deeper capabilities elsewhere and resisting any arrangement that would require handing over strategic assets.

Verification has been the weak link. UNIFIL and other international interlocutors can monitor movement and report violations, but they cannot — on their own — guarantee the absence of hidden caches, dispersed launchers, or embedded command nodes that can be reactivated quickly. The conditional Israeli withdrawal and the presence of foreign observers created a window for Hezbollah to reconfigure rather than surrender: move heavy infrastructure to positions just north of the Litani, transfer munitions into civilian warehouses, or rely on subterranean sites and dispersed logistics to retain an operational deterrent. Those are familiar patterns for an organization that has invested for years in concealment and redundancy. The consequence is a compliance claim that is brittle under scrutiny: the surface picture improves while strategic capabilities remain contested.

This gap between declared withdrawal and verifiable disarmament has three systemic drivers. First, sequencing problems create reciprocal incentives to delay. If Israel fears an unsecured border it will not complete its pullback; if Hezbollah fears a premature Israeli withdrawal it will not relinquish leverage. Second, the Lebanese state’s limited capacity and political fragmentation make intrusive searches costly and politically dangerous. Third, external patrons and regional rivalries mean that the logistical and financial networks supporting rearmament remain partially intact, undermining efforts to make disarmament irreversible. Each element amplifies the others and turns what should be a technical verification exercise into a geopolitical test.

What does this mean for policymakers? First, verification must be treated as an operational program not a declaratory milestone. Donors and the ceasefire guarantors should fund and equip a transparent, technically rigorous verification mechanism that combines UNIFIL observation with independent technical teams, clear yardsticks for weapons accounting, and a secure chain of custody for any seized materiel. Second, sequencing must be credibly reciprocal. Israel’s remaining positions and ongoing strikes undercut Lebanese political will to press disarmament north of the Litani. A calibrated timetable that ties phased Israeli withdrawal to demonstrable LAF deployments and verified reductions in specific weapon classes would reduce pretext-driven delays. Third, the Lebanese army needs both capacity and political insulation. Military assistance should prioritize intelligence, forensics, EOD, and logistics to locate and secure caches, alongside safeguards that minimize the perception of the LAF as a partisan instrument. Fourth, economic and governance measures must accompany security steps; cutting the social roots that fuel militia resilience is as necessary as destroying launchers.

Finally, prepare for asymmetric outcomes. Even with a robust verification program and international support, the most likely near-term outcome is partial compliance: visible infrastructure and some weapons removed from the south while strategic stocks remain dispersed elsewhere. That outcome is fragile. It will require long-term monitoring, contingency planning to prevent rapid remilitarization, and diplomatic channels that reduce incentives for external patrons to rearm proxies. Policymakers who treat the ceasefire as a discrete contract rather than a transitional architecture will find that the next crisis is already being seeded in the gaps between withdrawal language and operational reality.

In short, the Litani line can be the basis for managed stabilization only if the international community accepts three truths: verification must be hard and funded; sequencing must be reciprocal and credible; and stabilization will require state-building and economic measures beyond arms counting. Without that integrated approach, withdrawal claims will remain a political salve while the real capabilities that matter for deterrence and escalation control sit, quietly, just beyond the line of sight.