The Lebanese-Israeli Accord is War on The Resistance

CrossFireArabia
Opinion
June 28, 2026

Dr. Nassib Hateit

The announcement of the Lebanese-Israeli agreement, sponsored by the United States, constitutes a dangerous turning point in the war against the Lebanese resistance and its people. It is intended to compensate for the occupation army’s field failures in achieving its objectives of disarming and eliminating the resistance, after suffering significant moral and military losses and realizing its inability to achieve these illegitimate goals on its own.

The enemy’s impotence has driven it to resort to using the Lebanese government, whose legitimacy and constitutionality are still guaranteed by the resistance forces (in the dual alliance). This provides the government with a constitutional—albeit immoral—cover for cooperating with the enemy and legitimizing a comprehensive war against the resistance. It also involves assembling a US-led military coalition that includes Arab and international (multinational) parties, mirroring the “Desert Storm” coalition led by the United States against Iraq.

The aim is to support a beleaguered Israel and eliminate the resistance in all its cultural, economic, social, and health-related aspects, not just its military ones. This agreement confirms the beginning of a new phase of confrontation following the end of the “Hundred Days’ War,” in which Israel failed to achieve its objectives, despite the resistance suffering approximately 20,000 martyrs and wounded, the destruction of tens of thousands of homes, and the destruction and occupation of more than 50 villages and towns.

This shifts the war from a confrontation between Israel and the Lebanese resistance to a war between the resistance and an international coalition led by Washington, with the participation of Israel and the Lebanese government and opens the door for the involvement of Arab and foreign armies, most notably the new Syrian regime army, which US President Trump announced he would task with eliminating the resistance.

This will be facilitated by the Lebanese government’s initiative to formally request the support of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government for the Lebanese army and will force the resistance to fight on three fronts:

Against the Israeli enemy in the south

Against the US military, multinational forces, and the Lebanese army within Lebanon

Against the Syrian army and takfiri groups in the Bekaa Valley. The US has effectively nullified the first clause of the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran through the Lebanese-Israeli negotiations in Washington, placing the memorandum in a precarious position that threatens its collapse. According to its terms, violating the first clause invalidates the remaining clauses. This precariousness is further evidenced by the timing of the agreement’s announcement, coinciding with the US airstrikes in the Strait of Hormuz. It reinforces concerns that the 60-day period the US needs to reassess its position might be shortened or canceled, or that it could be exploited to forcibly separate the Lebanese and Iranian tracks through the Lebanese government. The aim would be to break the military and political alliance between the resistance and Tehran, and to further fragment the axis, isolating its members and preventing them from uniting their forces to compensate for the imbalance of power.

This agreement grants the Israeli enemy a clean bill of health by the Lebanese government, implicitly acknowledging that the invasion was a response to threats from the resistance. It also includes a pledge not to file any complaints or seek compensation before international institutions and courts—a clever preemptive move by the enemy to shield its military and political officials from accountability and represents a complete surrender by the Lebanese government, which has become something akin to the “12th Division” of the occupation army.

The initial response to this surrender document should be as follows:

Restraining this government and ceasing the sin of granting it legitimacy and constitutionality. It must abandon its hesitation, ambiguity, and incompetence in ministerial representation, the latest glaring example of which is passing the agreement’s presentation to the cabinet without objection from the resistance ministers, who merely issued a statement that condemns them more than it exonerates them.

The Islamic Republic of Iran should take the initiative to freeze the implementation of the MoU with the United States, given that Washington is responsible for this agreement, which contradicts the memorandum’s first clause. The Resistance Axis (Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen) has declared its complete readiness to engage in the new round of war, united and collectively, without delay, and to move from a state of “finger on trigger” to one of “fire.” Otherwise, the Axis’s fronts will fall one by one, as Israel and America plan.

The coming phase is the most dangerous since the outbreak of war in 2023 due to the expansion of the fronts and the multiplicity of parties participating against the Resistance. It comes after a war of attrition and exhaustion that has plagued the Resistance and its support base for three years, necessitating the formulation of a new defensive strategy. The Lebanese government must be considered an “unfriendly” entity, having made the Resistance a common enemy for itself and Israel. Participation in a government that collaborates with the enemy against the Resistance is unjustifiable, as experience has proven its futility.

We are not weak… the proof is the global mobilization against us, which cannot be countered with motorcycles and statements!

Manage the power you possess wisely! Take advantage of the enemy’s motto against you (kill first) and kill the government “politically” and bring it down to prevent it from carrying out its plans!

Dr Hateit is a Lebanese writer. An architect by training from Nabatieh in south of Lebanon he teaches at the Institute of Fine Arts in the Lebanese University and is a political columnist contributing to different Lebanese newspapers. This article is published in the Arabic Al Rai Al Youm website and reprinted in crossfirearabia.com.

CrossFireArabia

Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

News Opinion

‘No Need For Your Crocodile Tears’

Heba
August 13, 2026

By Ismail Al Sharif

“I’ll say it frankly: We should have exerted more pressure on Israel to adopt a different approach in Gaza” – Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to ex-President Joe Biden.

A striking phenomenon is recurring in American politics: Some presidents, cabinet members, and senior officials become more outspoken in their stances toward the Israeli occupation entity after leaving office, expressing regret for decisions that contributed to the injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people.

This may be due to their liberation from diplomatic and partisan constraints, the pressures of Zionist lobbies, and the influence of tainted money, or perhaps their consciences awaken belatedly as they feel closer to death, realizing the enormity of the injustice they participated in or condoned.

Examples of this are numerous. Among the most prominent is former US President Jimmy Carter, who, after leaving office, shifted from a traditional pro-Zionist rhetoric to criticizing the Israeli occupation and its policies. Then there is Chuck Hagel, former US Secretary of Defense, who held the United States responsible for the Zionists’ continued aggression and described their practices as terrorism— but only after his retirement, of course.

Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, also criticized war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him ungrateful.

More recently, Jake Sullivan, former National Security Advisor, and Antony Blinken, Biden’s lackluster Secretary of State, joined the ranks of those who have expressed regret. Both men have blood on their hands from the blood of Palestinian children and played a shameful role in supporting the Israeli entity during one of the greatest acts of genocide in modern history.

This was revealed in a lengthy investigation published in The New Yorker magazine last 20th July, titled “How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Against Gaza – and Iran,” with the subtitle: “Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.”

However, this regret will not absolve them for they knew full well that the Zionists were committing genocide in Gaza. On 5 March, 2024, five months after the start of the genocide, Mirjana Spoljarić, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), sent a confidential letter to President Biden. The ICRC, in addition to its humanitarian mission, is obligated under the Geneva Conventions to provide states with information and advice to help them avoid committing war crimes.

In her letter, Spoljarić reminded President Biden that the organization had condemned the “horrific” massacre perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October 2023 and that it had continued to press the movement “tirelessly” for the release of the “hostages” it was holding.

However, this time she appealed to Biden with “grave concern,” warning that Israel, which had continued to bombard Gaza with heavy munitions since that October, was ignoring the ICRC in an unprecedented manner.

In her letter, she wrote: “The way Israel conducts hostilities is inconsistent with the laws of armed conflict, particularly the obligations to protect civilians, to distinguish between military objectives on the one hand and civilians and civilian infrastructure on the other, to ensure the humane treatment of detainees and the dead, to protect medical facilities and personnel, and to provide and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid.”

Despite these clear warnings, the United States remained a key partner in the genocide, providing weapons, money, and political and international cover to Israel. And now some of its officials come to shed crocodile tears for the children of Gaza!

I say to them: You have no right to repent now, after all these martyrs, after all these tragedies, to say: “We are sorry, we made a mistake.” You knew, and you had the power to pressure and prevent, but you chose to support, arm, and cover up. You bear the burden of what happened, and the blood of the children of Gaza will haunt you and pursue your names to the dustbin of history.

This piece by Ismail Al Sharif was originally published in the Arabic Addustour daily and reprinted in English in Crossfirearabia.com.

Opinion

Is There a New Regional Order Emerging?

marwan
August 10, 2026

By Mohammad Abu Rumman

The trilateral Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani agreement, signed in Mecca last Friday and already being referred to as the “Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement,” should not be seen as just another diplomatic event in the region’s long history of security arrangements. What took place at Al-Safa Palace—where Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif agreed that an armed attack against any one of their countries would be considered an attack against all three—may signal the beginning of a new phase in Middle Eastern politics: one that could reshape regional alliances and, more importantly, the region’s relationship with the major powers.

The immediate context is clear. The agreement comes amid renewed US-Iranian tensions and escalating Houthi threats. But interpreting it simply as an attempt to “protect Saudi Arabia from Iran” misses the larger strategic picture. What is emerging goes beyond the immediate Iranian question. It points toward an effort to construct a regional order that is less dependent on the binary that has dominated Middle Eastern geopolitics for years: the US-Israeli axis on one side and Iran and its network of allies on the other.

There is another important dimension. The agreement effectively redraws the geopolitical boundaries of the Middle East by bringing Pakistan more directly into its security architecture while consolidating Turkey’s role as a central regional actor. This represents a departure from the conventional understanding of the regional system as primarily comprising the Arab states, Iran, Israel and Turkey. It comes, moreover, at a moment of profound transformation following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the weakening of the old division between the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” and the traditional Arab “moderate camp.

In practical terms, the new arrangement offers a different model—one that could provide regional powers with greater strategic and security autonomy. In that sense, it differs fundamentally from the regional vision advanced by President Donald Trump through the Abraham Accords, in which Israel occupies a central position in a US-backed regional security architecture. After the Gaza war, that model increasingly raises another question: whether integration with Israel means accepting not only normalization, but also an Israeli claim to military primacy in the region.

Seen from this perspective, the trilateral alliance may be less about confronting Iran than about challenging the underlying logic of the Abraham Accords.This may also explain Benjamin Netanyahu’s warnings several months ago about the emergence of what he described as a “radical Sunni axis.” Israel, meanwhile, has been pursuing its own countervailing network of partnerships. India—Pakistan’s historic rival—has become increasingly important in this calculus, alongside Israel’s strategic relationships with Greece and Cyprus and, more recently, Argentina. These relationships serve strategic purposes of their own, but they also help Israel counter the growing perception of regional isolation in the aftermath of the Gaza war.

Nor should the Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani framework necessarily be viewed as a closed alliance. It has the potential to evolve into a broader regional umbrella centred on the Middle East’s increasingly influential middle powers. Other Arab states could eventually find a place within such a framework, including Jordan, Qatar and Egypt, and perhaps even Syria, which now faces Israeli military encroachment and the occupation of additional territory in its south following the collapse of the Assad regime.

Barry Buzan’s theory of regional security complexes provides a useful lens through which to understand the significance of this development. From this perspective, the emerging alignment represents change on three interconnected levels.

First, it expands the geopolitical boundaries of the Middle Eastern regional security complex, particularly by integrating Pakistan more directly into its strategic calculations. Second, it intensifies competition over the hierarchy of regional power: which states will emerge as the principal poles of influence within this enlarged security system? And third, it forces a reconsideration of the familiar categories of alliance, rivalry and cooperation that have shaped our understanding of Middle Eastern politics for decades.

The significance of the Mecca Agreement, therefore, lies not only in what the three countries have formally committed themselves to, but in what the agreement potentially represents: the search for a regional security architecture that is neither entirely dependent on Washington nor organized around Israel, while at the same time avoiding subordination to an Iranian-led regional order.

Yet this is precisely where the real questions begin. The agreement faces three major tests. The first is whether it can move beyond political declarations towards credible institutional and military mechanisms. The second is whether Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan can develop a sufficiently coherent strategic agenda despite their different interests, alliances and regional priorities. The third—and ultimately decisive—test will come when one of the three countries faces an actual security crisis and collective commitments collide with the national calculations of the other two.

The Mecca Agreement may indeed mark an important turning point in the architecture of Middle Eastern security. But regional orders are not created by communiqués alone. Between declaring an alliance and proving that it exists lies the most difficult test of all: what its members are prepared to do when their commitments carry a real political and strategic cost.

By Mohammad Abu Rumman is a columnist in The Jordan Times