An expert on international negotiations recently gave me a blistering assessment of the ceasefire that some leading American newspapers have hailed as a significant step toward peace. The Western media has fostered hope that a similar agreement can be reached with the diminished Hamas leadership to bring the surviving October 7 hostages, if there are any, home from Gaza.
“It is a bizarre agreement,” the expert told me. “There are no signatory parties on behalf of Country A, Country B. It is not even an agreement. It’s an announcement by the US and France that they understand X, Y and Z. It’s all about what the US and France understand but not the obligations of the parties.”
The expert said that the ceasefire is in no way “legally binding and has no duration … but US officials have said it is designed to be permanent.” The peace, if it comes, will be monitored by soldiers of the reinvigorated Lebanese Armed Forces, whose formerly demoralized troops were recently described by the Economist as one of the few respected institutions left in a chronically fragmented country. Adding to the complications, the expert said, is the fact that most LAF soldiers “view Israel as the enemy, especially since Israel is burning one-third of the country to the ground. The army will never let itself be used against Hezbollah. LAF was always a force for internal security . . . just as [are] all Middle Eastern armies the US controls and arms and trains. . . . And if the US cares so much about the LAF then why is it letting the Israelis kill LAF soldiers and officers?”
The expert was referring to the fact that the Israeli military and air force have continued their attacks in southern Lebanon under the auspices of a side ceasefire agreement between the US and Israel that permits such attacks to take place up to fifteen miles north of the border with Israel, and sometimes miles beyond that limit if intelligence warrants them. The agreement also enabled those who had fled their homes in northern Israel and southern Lebanon to return. Roads on both sides of the border have been filled by those desperate to return home. Many of the returning Lebanese are Shia supporters of Hezbollah.
Reports in the Western media largely depict the near daily Israeli bombing in Lebanon as primarily aimed at Hezbollah targets. Not so, said the expert, who has been monitoring the Middle East for decades. “Israeli jets were not bombing Hezbollah positions throughout Lebanon,” he told me. “They were destroying every Shia village and neighborhood in the country. They were destroying hospitals, schools and mosques and social and financial institutions, and they were targeting ambulance drivers and emergency healthcare workers.”
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The Biden administration, he said, “has not been engaged in diplomacy. It has just been delivering Israeli ultimatums demanding that Hezbollah and Lebanon surrender.”
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What is to happen, I asked, to the two million or so Palestinians still being bombed and starved and deprived of clean drinking water or any semblance of decent housing and sanitation, with no sign of support from the Arab and Western world and no way to flee Gaza?
The answer, in essence, was a question: What happened to the American Indians in the plains of the Dakotas?
Seymour Hersh on the „ceasefire“ in which Israel destroys hospitals, schools and mosques and social and financial institutions and targets ambulance drivers and emergency healthcare workers
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