Lebanon Sees an Opportunity, but It Is Fraught With Danger

The wreckage still held the signatures of everyday life: a bottle of washing-up liquid, a packet of cucumber and vitamin E wax strips, baby talc, a tube of La Roche-Posay face wash.

This was one of the buildings hit in central Beirut on a Wednesday at lunchtime, without warning.

It was among the targets of 100 Israeli strikes launched in just 10 minutes, part of what became the deadliest day of the conflict in Lebanon so far.

But even amid those intimate traces of lives interrupted, something else stayed with me more powerfully.

Hariri, Lebanon’s five-time prime minister, was the man who rebuilt Beirut from the devastation of civil war. He remains the towering figure of the country’s modern era.

And there he was again, gazing out from the ruins as the city around him was torn apart once more.

Nearly 20 years after his assassination, his story does not feel consigned to the past.

On Valentine’s Day in 2005, a van packed with explosives blew up as his convoy drove past the St George Hotel in downtown Beirut.

Everyday items such as washing-up liquid and wax strips lie scattered in the rubble in Beirut

Hariri and 21 others died instantly. A UN tribunal later convicted Hezbollah operatives over the killing.

The man convicted has never been arrested and remains under Hezbollah’s protection.

In Lebanon, no story is ever straightforward – and this one least of all.

Still, Hariri had come to embody a challenge to the forces that had long dominated the country. He stood for the idea of a Lebanon accountable to itself, not to outside powers in Iran or Syria.

That made him a danger, and Lebanon has long known the fate of politicians who try to break that order – a pattern marked repeatedly by bloodshed.

Today, that history feels uncomfortably near.

Lebanon’s government has made a series of moves that Hezbollah sees as existentially threatening – banning its military activities, expelling Iran’s ambassador, and agreeing to direct talks with Israel.

Hezbollah, in turn, has issued a succession of warnings that have left many in the country deeply unsettled.

Last month, Mahmoud Qamati, deputy head of Hezbollah’s political council, said the group was “capable of turning the country and government upside down”, branding the government “traitors”, “complicit” and likening it to the Vichy regime.

The prime minister himself then publicly warned of the danger of civil war.

Yet Nawaf Salam’s government has not retreated. For the first time in years, the forces behind that old order are weaker than at any point in a generation.

Syria’s Assad regime – for decades Iran’s partner in shaping Lebanon – has fallen. Iran is struggling for its own survival. And Hezbollah, for the first time since its founding, has been seriously weakened – more than 1,000 fighters killed, its senior leadership decimated, its southern strongholds occupied and destroyed.

Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun won election in January 2025

Against that backdrop, Lebanon last year chose a president and a prime minister and formed a government that does not take its orders from Damascus or Tehran.

It was not imposed by foreign capitals. It is not beholden to them.

“It represented a great opportunity for Lebanon,” Paul Salem, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told me.

“The state was gradually rebuilding its control, and extending its authority gradually.”

Then came the war with Iran.

On 2 March, Hezbollah launched rockets into northern Israel in solidarity with Iran. Israel answered with overwhelming force – a ground invasion, hundreds of airstrikes, more than 2,000 dead, over a million displaced, and entire southern villages reduced to ruins.

Yet for all the destruction, the war also opened space for the Lebanese government to act.

As the US and Iran negotiated a ceasefire that excluded Lebanon, Beirut moved to secure its own deal, entering direct negotiations with Israel.

“At the end of the day, the state wants sovereignty,” Mr Salem said.

“It wants all foreign forces out of the country, and it wants peaceful relations with all countries in its neighbourhood. It has no enmity towards Israel as a state. And, hence, direct negotiations are one way to try to move that goal forward.”

I spoke to Mr Salem on Tuesday as the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors prepared to meet in Washington – the first such encounter in more than 40 years.

He was speaking from his family home in Koura, a village north of Beirut where terraced hills, olive groves and distant snow-capped mountains briefly gave the impression of a Lebanon untouched by war.

The terraced hills of Koura, north of Beirut

The negotiations carry an explicit objective – not merely a ceasefire, but the normalisation of relations between Lebanon and Israel as part of a broader peace agreement.

For Hezbollah, that poses an existential threat, and not just in rhetorical terms.

The movement was founded in the early 1980s by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards during Israel’s occupation of Lebanon.

Its original purpose was resistance to that occupation, and more than anything else, that mission has underpinned its legitimacy and support among Lebanon’s Shia community, which accounts for roughly a third of the population.

For 40 years, Hezbollah has defined itself through conflict with Israel. Occupation, resistance and liberation are not simply political slogans for the group. They are the basis of its existence.

If Lebanon and Israel were to normalise ties – if the conflict were formally closed, borders settled and occupation ended through negotiation rather than force – Hezbollah would lose the core argument for its continued role.

It would be weakened not only politically, but at the level of identity itself – an armed militia without a war to wage and without an enemy to invoke.

Israeli army paratroopers in the southern quarters of Beirut in 1982

In that sense, Hezbollah’s furious reaction to this week’s talks is not hard to understand. Nor is the dark tone of its warnings to the Lebanese government.

“Iran and Hezbollah have killed former prime ministers, former officials in Lebanon, or serving officials, and they are raising these threats again,” Mr Salem said.

He speaks with an unusually personal understanding of the country’s past.

His father, Elie Salem, was Lebanon’s foreign minister in the 1980s – the same years Hezbollah was formed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards amid the chaos of Israel’s occupation.

“I take those threats seriously,” Mr Salem told me. “But I don’t think Iran and Hezbollah can turn the tide in Lebanon like they could before.

“Iran and Hezbollah are still dangerous – and they can kill people. But they cannot prevail.”

Rafik Hariri, too, believed Lebanon could break free – that the grip of those controlling it was loosening, and that its chance would come.

Two decades after his death, there is a reason his portrait still surfaces in the rubble.