Lebanon and Israel Open Fifth Round of Talks in Washington

For Belgrade, which has spent years balancing its partnership with Washington against its own web of Middle Eastern ties, the Lebanese-Israeli talks that opened in the American capital on Wednesday are not a distant matter, because every shift in the architecture of the Mediterranean truce reshapes the frame within which small states like Serbia calculate their energy and diplomatic moves. The fifth round, scheduled for June 23 to 25, openly merges for the first time two tracks that have until now run separately, the political and the military, and it is precisely that synthesis that makes this meeting weightier than the ones before it.

The Washington talks were arranged after a phone call from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, in which the American side repeated two messages that have anchored its Lebanon policy for months. The first is its insistence on disarming Hezbollah, the Shia movement that still controls its own arsenal despite earlier agreements. The second is support for a sovereign Lebanese state and its army as the only legitimate armed force on the country’s territory. Joining the political negotiating table to military arrangements on troop withdrawal shows that Washington this time wants to tie promises to concrete steps on the ground.

What does merging the political and military tracks bring?

Earlier rounds produced the concept of pilot zones, limited areas from which Israeli troops would gradually withdraw while the Lebanese army assumed control. The model was conceived as a test of trust, since it allows a disputed space to be demilitarised step by step, without the single sweeping withdrawal that neither side is willing to accept without guarantees. The political track is meant to define who guarantees the stability of those zones and how, while the military track sets out the timing, sequence and oversight of the pullback.

The trouble is that this construction is being built on shaky ground. Israel has stated plainly that it will keep forces in a security zone inside Lebanon despite the ceasefire arrangements, which the Lebanese side reads as a permanent breach of sovereignty. On the other hand, disarming Hezbollah remains a question for which the Lebanese state holds no easy responsibility, since the movement operates both as a political actor and as a paramilitary structure with its own logic. The negotiators in Washington are thus trying to craft a withdrawal agreement at a moment when both sides openly doubt the intentions of the other.

How durable is the truce, really?

The latest events on the ground show how thin the line between talks and combat is. The truce has stayed fragile after fresh Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon, which by available figures have killed at least 47 people since midnight. It is the kind of escalation that shadows almost every diplomatic round, as each side seeks to reach the table from the strongest possible position on the ground. The casualties in southern Lebanon are not merely the tragic backdrop to the talks, they are also a message that no deal reached in Washington will be enforced without oversight and without a guarantor ready to act when the truce slips.

For the European outlook, and indirectly for Serbia, the key question is whether American diplomacy will this time settle for a statement of principle or insist on measurable steps, because that determines whether the Mediterranean enters a period of calm or another cycle of postponed conflict. Three days of talks in Washington will give the first real indicator. What do you think, can an agreement on gradual withdrawal survive the pressure of a ground where weapons speak louder than the negotiating table?