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When President Joe Biden stepped into the Rose Garden Tuesday afternoon, Israel was in the midst of a massive bombing campaign across parts of Lebanon. Its forces were pummeling Gaza with U.S. weapons and the death toll, which officially topped 44,000 Palestinians this week, was rising for the 416th straight day since Israel launched its genocidal war last October. “Today, I have some good news to report from the Middle East,” Biden said. The governments of Israel and Lebanon, he announced, “have accepted the United States’ proposal to end the devastating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.”
The agreement, which was spearheaded by the U.S. and France, took effect at 4 a.m. Wednesday morning. But it does so against the backdrop of the fires raging in Gaza and the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House. For the past year, Biden and his administration have empowered an Israeli war machine that is now more emboldened than at any point since the creation of Israel and the launch of the Nakba in 1948. While Biden and his advisors are promoting the deal as a monumental agreement “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” the bloody events of the past 14 months in the region will not recede to the pages of history.
“It's a whole new kind of world that we're going into. And we'll also have to wait and see if the ceasefire holds. I think the Israelis will do everything they can to provoke,” said Karim Makdisi, a professor of international politics at the American University in Beirut. “I think that as long as you have Netanyahu, something is going to happen.”
Under the terms of the deal, Israeli troops are to withdraw from south Lebanon over a 60-day period while Hezbollah is to end its armed presence in the area, moving its fighters and weapons to north of the Litani River. Lebanese troops and UN forces are to deploy to the south, which has been largely destroyed by over a year of Israeli attacks. An international committee led by the United States would monitor compliance by all sides, according to the agreement.
“It looks very temporary in nature. It looks very non-binding because it's a cessation of hostilities. It's not a ceasefire,” Amal Saad, a leading expert on Hezbollah, told Drop Site News. “We have a very kind of tenuous ceasefire agreement that looks a lot like a placeholder for a continued battle between the two sides. It's just like it's designed to give breathing space for Israel and obviously Hezbollah will use it to recuperate, rearm, reorganize. Both sides are going to use this agreement for that.”
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