With the nearly ۵۰-year United Nations peacekeeping mandate in southern Lebanon set to expire at the end of ۲۰۲۶, proposals for a European Union mission to fill some part of the vacuum have attracted attention.
Lebanon, still under almost daily Israeli bombardment with a fifth of its territory occupied and about ۳۳۵,۰۰۰ people still displaced, is expected to be on the agenda during an EU defence and foreign ministers meeting in Ireland this week.
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The European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic service, has circulated a proposal for a three-year military and civilian mission to advise and train the Lebanese armed forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF), Lebanon’s police, including in border and maritime security, an attempt, officials said, not to replace the UN peacekeeping force – known as UNIFIL – but to strengthen the Lebanese state.
But while the EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, told reporters in May that Europeans were willing to put together a mission to help the LAF, she questioned whether there was an appetite for an entirely new European mission to come in to fully replace UNIFIL’s mission.
A mandate with limitations
UNIFIL was created on March ۱۹, ۱۹۷۸, days after Israel invaded southern Lebanon. Its mandate has been expanded several times since, most consequentially after the ۲۰۰۶ war between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah when UN Security Council Resolution ۱۷۰۱ added the tasks of monitoring the ceasefire and supporting the LAF’s deployment in the south to UNIFIL’s mission.
However, UNIFIL was never given the power to enforce any of it. It could watch, report and accompany but not compel an Israeli withdrawal or disarm any armed group.
Yet it was Israel that was largely behind UNIFIL’s end after it accused the force of failing to prevent Hezbollah’s military build-up along the Israel-Lebanon border.
A new European force is unlikely to be tasked with confirming an Israeli withdrawal or disarming Hezbollah, said Raymond Murphy, a professor at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the University of Galway who served as a UN peacekeeper with UNIFIL.
Its role would more likely be to monitor, he said, but with “sufficient capacity to use military force to protect itself and to carry out its mandate. For example, it would have freedom of movement and [the ability] to prevent the movement of arms in its area.”
Europe is not the only option under discussion.
The UN is running its own succession planning: One proposal would hand a residual role to the UN Truce Supervision Organisation, and in June, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put three options to the Security Council with the number of soldiers ranging from ۹۰۰ to ۳,۰۰۰, compared with UNIFIL’s roughly ۷,۰۰۰ in June.
Israel could benefit from a power vacuum
The risk of a temporary vacuum is “quite serious”, Lebanese political scientist Imad Salamey told Al Jazeera, partly because Israel could benefit.
Without an international force, he argued, Israel could pursue an arrangement in which the LAF is “compelled to coordinate” more directly with Israeli forces as the United States acts as an “intermediary or guarantor”, shifting the architecture from internationally supervised monitoring towards bilateral coordination between a Lebanese army and an army occupying Lebanese territory.
“Once UNIFIL disappears, the alternative arrangements created in its absence could become permanent and make the establishment of a successor force considerably more difficult,” Salamey said.
The US has mediated talks between Israel and Lebanon for months, but critics said those talks have done little to force Israel to abandon its attacks and its occupation of Lebanese territory.
And if a European force is deployed, Murphy does not expect that to change Israel’s position or bring about a pullback. That would make “life very difficult” for any prospective European deployment, he said.
“In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would create the equivalent of a new Blue Line [the demarcation line between Israel and Lebanon], ۱۰km [۶ miles] or so north of the old armistice line,” he said.
The problem may be in the framework, not the force
Israel and Lebanon agreed a framework in late June establishing so-called pilot zones, areas from which Israeli forces would withdraw and into which the LAF would deploy to assume security responsibility, including barring Hezbollah’s return.
Talks in Rome in early August ended without agreement on expanding the pilot zone model.
That is the political process any European mission would depend on, which is why the identity of the peacekeepers matters less than the terms of their presence.
Any force deployed without a comprehensive political agreement and a mandate acceptable to both sides “risks facing the same limitations that confronted UNIFIL”, Salamey said.
If Israel continues operations and keeps forces inside Lebanon while Hezbollah rejects the framework, European personnel could “quickly find their neutrality questioned by one side or the other”.
Absent reciprocal commitments, agreed rules and a realistic enforcement mechanism, swapping UNIFIL for a European mission “may simply reproduce UNIFIL’s difficulties under a different name”, he said.
