Last Updated on 11 minutes ago by TodayWhy Editorial
The memorandum that Presidents Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian signed on June 17 is unambiguous on one point: the war is over “on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Within 48 hours, Israel’s military announced four soldiers killed in a Hezbollah attack, Israeli forces were filmed crossing back into northern Israel from the south, and a sitting Israeli cabinet minister was telling reporters that “all of Lebanon must burn.” The text of the deal and the reality on the border are pointing in opposite directions — and the reason comes down to who actually signed it.
The MOU says Lebanon’s war is over. Hezbollah never signed anything.
The US-Iran memorandum is, structurally, an agreement between Washington and Tehran. Its text, read aloud to reporters and later published by CBS News, commits “the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war” to permanently end military operations on every front, Lebanon included, and to respect Lebanon’s territorial integrity going forward.
That phrasing assumes Iran can speak for its allies. Hezbollah is the obvious test case — Iran’s most significant non-state partner, and the armed group actually doing the fighting on Lebanese soil. But Hezbollah wasn’t in the room in Versailles, and it wasn’t a party to the separate Israel-Lebanon ceasefire negotiated in Washington two weeks earlier. When Israel and Lebanon agreed to a conditional ceasefire on June 3 — one requiring a “complete cessation” of fire by Hezbollah in exchange for Lebanese army control of designated pilot zones — Hezbollah’s leader Naim Qassem rejected it outright within a day, saying the group was “concerned only with a comprehensive cessation of aggression… and the withdrawal of Israel.”
A pattern that predates the MOU by weeks
The Lebanon front has effectively been ignoring ceasefire paperwork since the Iran war’s earliest days. Israel launched what it called its “most powerful attacks” on Lebanon within hours of the original April ceasefire announcement, killing more than 350 people by some tallies. In the first week of June, Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon killed nine people — including three Lebanese army officers — just days after the Washington ceasefire was reached, prompting Lebanese President Joseph Aoun to call the strike “a flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty.” Israel struck Beirut’s southern suburbs again on June 7 and once more on June 14, with the later strike reportedly close to triggering an Iranian retaliation that US intervention managed to head off just before the MOU signing.
Seen against that backdrop, this week’s escalation isn’t an aberration — it’s the continuation of a front that has broken every previous ceasefire attempt within days, often hours, of being announced.
Why Ben Gvir’s “all of Lebanon” comment matters more than a single quote
Itamar Ben Gvir is Israel’s National Security Minister and head of the far-right Otzma Yehudit faction inside Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition. His response to the deaths of four soldiers — “with all due respect to the Americans… all of Lebanon must burn” — is notable less for its rhetoric and more for what it signals about the limits of Washington’s leverage. The MOU is a US-Iran instrument; it does not bind Israeli cabinet ministers, and Ben Gvir has been one of the most consistent voices inside Netanyahu’s government for pursuing harder military responses than any US-brokered framework has called for.
That creates a structural problem for the broader deal: the 60-day negotiating window the MOU establishes is meant to de-escalate the US-Iran relationship, but it has no direct mechanism for restraining either Hezbollah, which never agreed to anything, or hardline factions inside Israel’s own security cabinet, who answer to domestic politics rather than the memorandum’s text.
What this means for the broader ceasefire
None of this necessarily unravels the US-Iran track. Oil is still moving through the Strait of Hormuz, the naval blockade is being lifted, and the 60-day clock on a final nuclear and sanctions agreement is running. But Lebanon is the one front where every actor that matters on the ground — Hezbollah, Ben Gvir’s faction, and the Lebanese state caught between them — sits outside the document that’s supposed to have ended the fighting there. If the broader Iran deal is going to be tested early, the Lebanon border is the most likely place it happens.
Continue reading — Why Iran series:
- The US-Iran 60-Day MOU Deal Explained: What’s Inside, What’s Still Disputed — Full breakdown of the signed memorandum, the Strait of Hormuz reopening, and what’s still unresolved.
- Why is Israel attacking Lebanon in 2026? 4 reasons of Israel-Lebanon bombing
- Why the US-Iran ceasefire not apply to Lebanon