When UNIFIL leaves, south Lebanon still needs an international presence
With the arrival of 2026, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has entered its final twelve months of operations after a presence of forty-eight years in this volatile sector of the Middle East. While UNIFIL is expected to draw down and depart within a twelve-month timeframe in 2027, much thought is being given toward what could serve as an alternative presence in south Lebanon. Lebanon is concerned that a lack of external support will place a huge burden on an already strained Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which are responsible for security in south Lebanon. In addition, the absence of an international eye on a volatile corner of the Middle East could encourage Hezbollah and Israel into actions that lead to renewed conflict.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam urged for the continuation of an international force in south Lebanon during a meeting last week in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron.
“We will always need an international presence in the south, and preferably a UN presence, given the impartiality and neutrality that only the UN can provide,” he told reporters a day after the meeting.
There is a general understanding that the international community cannot simply abandon south Lebanon once UNIFIL withdraws, especially given that the area remains highly volatile. Despite a November 2024 cease-fire, south Lebanon is subject to near-daily Israeli air strikes against alleged Hezbollah military infrastructure and militants. Nearly 65,000 Lebanese residents of the southern border district are unable to return to their homes in villages heavily damaged by the 2023-2024 war, and by a subsequent campaign of controlled demolitions by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The IDF has constructed five imposing Forward Operating Bases on hills in Lebanese territory and enforces a no-go buffer zone adjacent to the Blue Line, the UN’s term for Lebanon’s southern border.
Given this volatility, some European countries are mulling deploying a new military force to the South Litani Sector (SLS), the 1,057-square-kilometer area between the Blue Line and the Litani river that serves as UNIFIL’s Area of Operations (AO). No concrete proposals have yet emerged; it remains unclear whether the preference is to establish a formal European Union (EU) mission led out of Brussels, to mold an ad hoc coalition of willing countries that would operate under a bilateral agreement with the Lebanese government, or, indeed, to create some other formulation.
Either way, proponents of a new mission to south Lebanon should be modest in their expectations and goals. There is little point in replacing UNIFIL with another military mission that could face the same mandate constrictions and potential threats as experienced by UNIFIL over the past nineteen years since it expanded from two thousand armed observers to a force of more than ten thousand peacekeepers following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. UNIFIL was seen to have fundamentally failed in its mission, resulting last August in the UN Security Council (UNSC) agreeing to terminate the force at the end of 2026. UNIFIL was unable to halt Israel’s daily aerial violations of Lebanese air space, nor block Hezbollah’s accelerated military expansion in the UNIFIL AO from around 2020, which included erecting observation posts along the Blue Line and even building several firing ranges. If UNIFIL, with its ten thousand troops drawn from more than forty countries, backed by the moral and political weight of the UNSC, ended up impotent before the competing actions, objectives, and interests of Hezbollah and Israel, what makes anyone think that a new European-dominated military force in the SLS would fare any better?
Furthermore, if a proposal emerges for a new EU-dominated military force to deploy into south Lebanon, Hezbollah would vehemently oppose it. Even if the Lebanese government chose to ignore Hezbollah’s objections and approve the mission, the soldiers comprising the new force would be deploying into a hostile and potentially dangerous environment. As UNIFIL knows all too well, Hezbollah controls the public space in the SLS, and it has the proven ability to escalate or de-escalate hostile sentiment toward the peacekeepers according to its will.
That is not to say that the international community should abandon any notion of a military mission to the SLS once UNIFIL departs and simply wash its hands of south Lebanon. There are a number of important stabilizing elements that should be implemented during, and after, UNIFIL’s withdrawal.
The first is the necessity of the international community maintaining an eye on south Lebanon to ensure that the two main players, Hezbollah and Israel, cannot act with unseen impunity. To this extent, it may not be necessary to raise a new military force for south Lebanon. When UNIFIL departs Lebanon in 2027, it will leave in place another, albeit much smaller, UN mission, the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO).
UNTSO Observer Group Lebanon (OGL) has been patrolling the Lebanon-Israel border for nearly eight decades to monitor compliance with the 1949 Armistice Agreement. OGL consists of fifty officers (captains and majors), operates from two patrol bases, and since 2006 has been embedded logistically inside UNIFIL. Perhaps a realistic and suitable solution to the post-UNIFIL vacuum would be to boost OGL’s numbers as required and slightly adjust the mandate to allow it to monitor the cease-fire arrangement and UNSC Resolution 1701 (which in part called for a weapons-free zone between the Litani and Lebanon’s southern border with Israel) as well as its original mission of observing the Armistice Demarcation Line (the original UN name given to the border).
As for any force protection concerns, its unarmed status and lack of any mandate enforcement capacity mean Hezbollah should not object to its expansion and continued presence. Furthermore, UNTSO-OGL has an institutional experience of operating alone in a worsening security environment. In the mid-1970s, before UNIFIL arrived in March 1978, the Palestine Liberation Organization was deeply entrenched in south Lebanon from where it launched attacks into Israel. The IDF erected a security fence along the border, maintained day-time observation positions just inside Lebanese territory, and regularly staged cross-border air strikes and commando raids, a situation not greatly removed from the one that exists today. Through all that, UNTSO-OGL diligently patrolled, observed, and reported.
A second critical element of stability is the continued maintenance of a tactical liaison channel between the Lebanese and Israelis. UNIFIL has long served as a vital intermediary between Lebanon and Israel, providing a trusted tactical-level channel for communication, de-escalation, and incident management along the Blue Line that has helped contain crises that might otherwise have spiraled into wider confrontation. Currently, there is a group composed of delegates from Lebanon, Israel, France, the United States, and UNIFIL, known as the “Mechanism,” which was formed after the November 2024 cease-fire agreement. The Mechanism has been criticized for focusing more on the process of disarming Hezbollah rather than ensuring both sides adhere to the cease-fire. Nevertheless, in November, Lebanon and Israel added civilian diplomats to the Mechanism, allowing for a potential expansion of discussions away from purely military matters directly related to the SLS. In the absence of such a third-party interlocutor, routine incidents, misunderstandings, or localized clashes would carry a far higher risk of rapid escalation, miscalculation, and unintended conflict between two adversaries with no direct diplomatic or military liaison mechanisms.
The third imperative for prolonged stability in the SLS is to ensure continued international support for the LAF. The LAF is seriously overstretched with a required deployment of up to ten thousand troops into south Lebanon, while simultaneously reinforcing its presence along the potentially volatile border with Syria as well as its daily internal security taskings. This is where foreign military support to Lebanon could be more usefully employed. Instead of dispatching a new military mission to south Lebanon to emulate UNIFIL’s vague mandate of supporting a weapons-free zone south of the Litani, a small LAF support mission could focus on enabling a sustained LAF presence in the SLS through logistics, training, intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance sharing, mobility support, and joint planning, areas where the LAF’s constraints are structural rather than political. This would shift the optics and substance of enforcement away from foreign troops and toward the Lebanese state with the LAF at the center of security provision. This new mission could operate in coordination with, and alongside, an expanded UNTSO-OGL, leaving monitoring tasks to the latter while the former concentrates on supporting the LAF.
Additionally, indirect support for the LAF could be achieved by bolstering the capabilities of the Internal Security Forces (ISF), Lebanon’s police force. For decades, the LAF has had to compensate for the ISF’s weaknesses by engaging in public order operations and pursuit of criminals which should be the remit of the ISF. ISF capacity building would in time allow the LAF to divert its scant resources to its core tasks of maintaining security and protecting the borders.
The imminent departure of UNIFIL, after nearly five decades of presence in south Lebanon, offers opportunities to redress the failings of the UN mission by adopting realistic and focused alternatives. Those alternatives could combine a monitoring and reporting capacity, a third-party tactical liaison channel to allow communication between Lebanon and Israel, and strengthening support to the LAF. A failure by the international community to deliver the requisite support risks overstretching the LAF to a breaking point, paving the way for a potential resurgence of Hezbollah in the SLS and further aggressive behavior from the IDF, which could lead to the resumption of a broader conflict.
Nicholas Blanford is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, covering the politics and security affairs of Lebanon and Syria. He is an acknowledged expert on Lebanese Hezbollah. Blanford is a Beirut-based defense and security consultant.
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Image: A mural on a wall in Camp Shamrock, which is also known as UN base UNP 2-45, and is home to hundreds of Irish peacekeepers. United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Security Council mandate will expire at the end of 2026.
