The Interim

On March 31, Tom Fletcher — the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs — briefed the Security Council from Beirut. He posed three questions.

“Given the trajectory that some Israeli ministers have described, and given what we have seen in plain sight in Gaza, how will you protect civilians?”

“Given the intensity of the coercive displacement that we are seeing, how should we prepare collectively as the international community for a new addition to the list of occupied territories?”

“Given the political tension here in Lebanon and the fragility of political structures, how should we prepare for the potential terror of a fresh round of internal targeting and political strife?”

The council answered none of them.

The second question is the one I cannot stop reading. Fletcher did not use the word “occupation” as metaphor or warning. He used it as a category requiring administrative preparation. How should we prepare. The question assumed the occupation is coming and asked the council to organize around its arrival. The council’s response — silence, no binding resolution, no formal statement — is not a failure to act. It is the act. The question was answered by the absence of an answer.

Eight days earlier, on March 23, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich gave a radio interview: “I say here definitively — in every room and in every discussion, too: the new Israeli border must be the Litani.”

Not a security zone. Not a temporary buffer. A new border. The Litani River is thirty kilometers north of the current Israel-Lebanon boundary. What Smotrich described is the annexation of a sovereign state’s territory, stated on public radio, by a sitting cabinet minister.

Eight days later, on March 31, Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed the operational plan. The IDF will “maintain security control over the entire area up to the Litani River.” All houses in border villages will be demolished “in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun models” — explicit reference to two towns nearly completely destroyed during the Gaza war. More than 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon are barred from returning until “the safety and security of northern Israeli residents is ensured.” Haaretz reported the IDF plans to establish permanent military outposts.

Katz used the phrase “security zone.” Smotrich used the phrase “new border.” These are different claims. One is conditional occupation. The other is annexation. Both come from the same cabinet. The distinction matters legally. Operationally, the difference is the difference between a promise to leave and an announcement that you won’t.

Fifteen days before Katz’s announcement, Haaretz reported something that restructures the entire framing. On March 16, IDF officials stated that the ground operation in Lebanon is focused on pushing Hezbollah operatives from the border — “not designed to halt Hezbollah rocket fire.” At the time, officials explicitly stated there was no intention to establish a permanent security zone.

Fifteen days. On March 16, no permanent security zone. On March 31, permanent security zone, village demolition, population displacement ban, and Gaza models cited as precedent. Either the policy reversed in two weeks, or the March 16 statement was the last moment before the operational reality was stated publicly.

I think it was the latter. The ground operation was never about the rockets. The rockets were the justification. The territory was the objective. The March 16 statement was the final iteration of the public frame before the frame was discarded because it was no longer needed. The operation had already built the conditions for what Katz announced.

The architecture that was supposed to prevent this has a name: Security Council Resolution 1701, adopted August 11, 2006, at the end of the last Lebanon war. Full cessation of hostilities. Hezbollah withdrawal from south of the Litani. Deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces and UNIFIL. Israeli withdrawal. Disarmament of non-state actors in Lebanon.

None of it happened. Not in 2006, not in the twenty years since. Hezbollah did not disarm. Israel conducted periodic incursions. UNIFIL operated in the space between two armed forces that both treated the resolution as aspirational. The ceasefire held because it was useful — not because it was enforced. When it stopped being useful, it stopped holding.

On August 28, 2025, the Security Council adopted Resolution 2790 — unanimously. It extended UNIFIL’s mandate for a final time, through December 31, 2026. It ordered an “orderly and safe drawdown and withdrawal” beginning January 1, 2027. The US representative said: “The first ‘I’ in UNIFIL stands for ‘Interim.’”

He was right. The interim lasted twenty years. UNIFIL has approximately 10,800 military and civilian personnel — three of whom have been killed and six wounded in the current escalation. They are the physical presence of the international community’s stated commitment to Resolution 1701. That presence ends in nine months. Nobody has built what replaces it.

The numbers Fletcher brought to the council:

1.1 million people displaced within Lebanon over four weeks, including 370,000 children. Over 200,000 people crossed from Lebanon into Syria in March alone — nearly 180,000 Syrians, 28,000 Lebanese — through three official crossing points. Lebanon’s displaced population is roughly twenty percent of the country’s entire population. 1,240 killed in four weeks. 124 of them were children.

Katz’s order prohibits the return of 600,000 residents south of the Litani. The displacement is not incidental to the operation. It is the operation. The villages will be demolished. The population will not return. The language — “in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun models” — is not inference. It is citation.

Two weeks after I wrote about Lebanon’s arrest warrant for Naim Qassem — the Lebanese state’s assertion that it exists — the structural gap has widened.

On March 24, Lebanon declared Iran’s ambassador-designate persona non grata and ordered Mohammad Reza Sheibani to leave by March 29. The stated reason: violating diplomatic norms, unauthorized meetings, interference in domestic affairs.

Iran refused. Spokesman Esmail Baghaei: “Our ambassador, following remarks made by relevant Lebanese bodies and the conclusions reached, will continue his mission in Beirut and he is still there.”

A sovereign state ordered a foreign diplomatic representative to leave. The foreign state said no. The representative remains.

The warrant was a piece of paper. The expulsion is a piece of paper. The ban on Hezbollah military activities — issued March 2 — is a piece of paper. Each is an exercise of sovereign authority by a government that possesses the authority and lacks the capacity to enforce it. Lebanon can issue warrants for Hezbollah’s leader, declare Iranian diplomats persona non grata, and ban military activities on its territory. It cannot arrest Qassem. It cannot remove Sheibani. It cannot stop the rockets.

And it cannot stop the IDF from demolishing its border villages.

France proposed a peace plan. Israeli withdrawal within one month. Lebanese Armed Forces redeploying south of the Litani. Lebanon to issue initial recognition of Israel and commit to negotiating a permanent non-aggression agreement within two months. UNIFIL to verify Hezbollah disarmament south of the Litani. Border demarcation by end of 2026.

Lebanon accepted it as a basis for talks. Israel has not accepted.

The plan requires Israeli withdrawal. The Israeli defense minister has announced permanent security control. The plan requires Hezbollah disarmament. Hezbollah’s leader has pledged allegiance to Tehran. The plan requires UNIFIL verification. UNIFIL is leaving.

Every element of the proposed solution depends on an actor who has stated, publicly and recently, that they will not do what the solution requires. The plan is not naive. It is the formal documentation of what a resolution would look like, filed into a record that already contains its own impossibility.

Fletcher asked: how should we prepare?

The honest answer is that the preparation already happened. It happened in twenty years of treating 1701 as permanent. It happened in the assumption that UNIFIL’s “interim” could extend indefinitely without anyone building what comes after. It happened in the US veto that ensures no binding resolution will pass. It happened in every month that the ceasefire held and no one used that time to construct the institutions that would survive its collapse.

The question assumed the council would answer. The assumption — that the international community prepares, that it collectively organizes, that when an occupation begins the relevant bodies respond — is the same assumption that built 1701. That assumption was twenty years old when Fletcher said it out loud. The silence that followed confirmed what the assumption had been concealing for all twenty of those years.

The interim is over. Nothing replaces it.

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