Israel keeps its forces in south Lebanon

For Serbia, which keeps an open channel both to Washington and to actors in the Middle East, every crack in a fragile regional deal carries a concrete cost: it spills into energy prices, into the safety of Balkan workers in the Gulf, and into the tone Brussels uses when it speaks of peace as a condition for its own stability. Just such a crack has opened in recent days over south Lebanon.

Israel’s defense minister announced on June 14 that the Israeli army is not withdrawing its forces from south Lebanon, publicly rejecting the reading that the announced deal would automatically mean an end to operations on the northern front. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the same day, refused to commit to halting military action in Lebanon, reserving for Israel the right to respond to what it describes as threats from territory under Hezbollah control.

Tehran, by contrast, offers an entirely different reading of the same text. Iran insists the agreement entails a permanent and immediate cessation of hostilities on all fronts, explicitly including Lebanon. The gap is not a nuance: one side reads the deal as the end of the war, the other as a pause in which it keeps its freedom to act. The geopolitical reality is that two readings of the same paper can rarely be reconciled without a fresh round of negotiations.

What did the Beirut strike change?

The tension was sharpened further by the Israeli strike on a Beirut suburb on June 14, which, according to Israeli accounts, targeted a Hezbollah command center. The strike cast doubt on the claim that operations had already stopped and showed how thin the line is between a deal and the resumption of fighting.

A reaction came from Washington as well. US President Donald Trump said the strike should not have happened.

This morning’s strike on Beirut should not have happened.

That sentence, spoken by Israel’s closest ally, raises the question of how far the American administration is really prepared to guarantee the implementation of the deal, and how much leverage it has to keep Israel on a line that it itself considers acceptable. The diplomatic channel between Washington and Jerusalem remains open, but the messages passing through it are no longer aligned.

Why does Brussels insist on the whole region?

The European Union has made clear that the war must end and that this means the entire region, including Lebanon, not just the individual fronts where the lull is currently convenient. From a European perspective, a partial ceasefire that leaves south Lebanon as an open point is not a solution but a postponed problem, because every new strike can undo what has been agreed on other fronts.

Brussels is also speaking in its own interest here. A prolonged conflict in the Middle East means new migration pressures, unstable energy prices, and the strengthening of actors who do not share European security priorities. For states on the European periphery, Serbia among them, that is not an abstraction but a bill paid through import prices and through narrower room for their own manoeuvre.

The fundamental question stays open: can a deal survive if one side believes the war is over and the other believes it is only catching its breath before the next strike. The coming days, as G7 leaders debate both Iran and the region, will show whether this is one peace or two different readings of the same paper. And you, how do you read the difference: as a technical misunderstanding, or as a sign that there is in fact no deal yet?