Useless UNIFIL
Were Hezbollah to disappear tomorrow, the world would be a safer place. Instead, thanks to UNIFIL’s failure to fulfil its mandate, the Middle East is on the precipice of a war of unprecedented destruction.
Since 2006, Hezbollah has been positioned right on the other side of the fence separating Israel from Lebanon. This is precisely the situation that the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, also known as UNIFIL, was designed to prevent.
UNIFIL was established by UN Security Council resolutions 425 and 426, after Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon to push terrorists away from its northern border, and was tasked with overseeing the Israeli military’s withdrawal from Lebanon, restoring peace and security in the region, and helping the Lebanese government regain effective control over the country’s south. Following the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War, its mandate was expanded under UN Security Council Resolution 1701, and it has since been tasked with ensuring, alongside the Lebanese Armed Forces, that all weapons and military personnel south of Lebanon’s Litani River belong to either UNIFIL or to Lebanon’s own military. In other words, per Resolution 1701, Hezbollah was to vacate southern Lebanon, and UNIFIL was to work with the Lebanese army to prevent Hezbollah from rearming on Israel’s border and carrying out cross-border attacks like the one that sparked the 2006 war. Yet, the past thirteen months have witnessed unprecedented amounts of Hezbollah rocket fire at Israel, which has forced the country to launch a ground incursion into Lebanon. Clearly, UNIFIL has failed.
So, what exactly is UNIFIL doing in Lebanon? How does an organisation with 10,000 troops and an annual budget of around $500 million USD ($125 million of which comes from the United States) allow Hezbollah to build an arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles, many of which are located in southern Lebanon? How has this UN peacekeeping force allowed Hezbollah to fire thousands of rockets at Israel from within UNIFIL’s area of responsibility over the year since the 7 October massacre? And now that Israeli soldiers have entered southern Lebanon, why won’t UNIFIL leave?
Since 2006, Hezbollah operatives have routinely harassed UNIFIL personnel in order to prevent them from fulfilling their mandate. As the Washington Institute’s Assaf Orion notes in a 2019 paper, the UN has documented over 150 reports of harassment of UNIFIL troops in southern Lebanon since 2006—Orion considers this an underestimate—and “at least 114 cases of violent conduct” against UNIFIL forces, which left six peacekeepers dead and 41 injured, were reported to the Security Council between 2006 and 2019.
By and large, Hezbollah has succeeded in keeping its intimidation campaign against UNIFIL out of the public eye. Footage from one particularly disturbing incident, however, emerged in 2019. On 4 August 2018, a group of around 20 men ambushed a UNIFIL convoy in the town of Majdal Zoun, right outside UNIFIL barracks. They surrounded the convoy; smashed in the vehicles’ windows with hammers; shot at the vehicles; set fire to one of them; aimed weapons at the peacekeepers; and confiscated the UNIFIL troops’ weapons. The peacekeepers’ crime? Taking photographs. UN Secretary-General António Guterres later reported that “some individuals assaulted the peacekeepers, punching and beating the patrol commander with sticks as he attempted to mediate the situation and kicking and dragging another peacekeeper while he was on the ground.” And all this was done, as Guterres noted, by “individuals in civilian clothes”—Hezbollah’s standard modus operandi, which offers plausible deniability for anyone wishing to turn a blind eye to the involvement of the terrorist group.
Benny Morris
As part of its investigation into the incident, Fox News spoke to two former UNIFIL peacekeepers. “What can we say about UNIFIL’s attitude,” one asked, “when decisions and orders are taken with the aim of avoiding issues with Hezbollah?” The second peacekeeper accused the Lebanese Armed Forces of passing information from UNIFIL to Hezbollah, adding that some areas in southern Lebanon “have been marked as UNIFIL ‘no-go-areas,’” and that Hezbollah makes it clear when it feels UNIFIL is “too active” in trying to fulfil its mandate.
Their accusations were corroborated this October, when Danish news outlet B.T. published testimony from a former UN peacekeeper who was stationed in Lebanon a decade ago. “We were totally subject to Hezbollah,” he claimed, adding that UN troops “had limited freedom of movement. For example, we never operated after dark for fear of Hezbollah. So they had free time in the evening and night hours.” This testimony came as little surprise to Dror Doron, who spent nearly two decades as an analyst in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office. “That’s the routine over there,” Doron told me in a phone call. The Lebanese militia’s consistent intimidation of UNIFIL troops has played a major role in neutering the peacekeeping force, added Doron, who is now a senior advisor at the non-profit United Against Nuclear Iran, where he focuses on Hezbollah. He noted that there have been multiple suspected Hezbollah attacks on UNIFIL over the years, including a June 2007 car bomb, which killed six UN peacekeepers near the southern Lebanese town of Khiyam. In June 2023, Lebanon’s military tribunal accused five Hezbollah members of killing Irish UNIFIL trooper Sean Rooney the previous December. But of the five accused, only one was arrested—and he was later released on bail. Nearly two years after the killing, Rooney’s family say that the UN has still not responded to a coroner’s request to help investigate his death.
Even more disturbingly, Hezbollah exploits UNIFIL in ways that are eerily similar to Hamas’s use of UN facilities in Gaza. On October 13, for example, it emerged that a Hezbollah tunnel had been constructed a mere 100 metres away from a UNIFIL observation point in southern Lebanon. Jotam Confino, who visited the site for the Telegraph, provided this assessment: “It’s incomprehensible that UNIFIL didn’t know about this.” Douglas Murray, who reported from there for the New York Post, asked: “How is it possible that the kind of heavy digging needed to create these tunnels could have happened literally right under the noses of the UN?”
Most of Hezbollah’s recent flagrant violations of Resolution 1701 have been conspicuously absent from UNIFIL’s own press releases. Although it has issued many public statements since the 7 October massacre, the first one to mention Hezbollah by name only appeared on October 8 this year—12 months after Hezbollah began its attacks on Israel, which have forced over 60,000 Israelis to flee their homes.
Even more chillingly, UNIFIL has been accused of actively collaborating with the Lebanese terror group. In October 2000, Hezbollah operatives kidnapped three Israeli soldiers. UNIFIL filmed the kidnapping live. The following day, UN peacekeepers produced videotaped evidence of the kidnapping, but when Israel’s government asked that it share the footage, the UN at first denied the tape existed and only backtracked on this in July 2001. That same month, a security figure told the Israeli newspaper Maariv that Hezbollah had bribed Indian UNIFIL troops to aid Hezbollah in the kidnapping—though this accusation has been rejected by both UNIFIL and the Indian government. The soldiers’ remains were returned to Israel in a 2004 prisoner swap, but two years later, after new footage of the abduction emerged, the father of one of the soldiers alleged that “from the movie, it is clear that the UN cooperated with the attack … They filmed the kidnapping and knew all along what was happening.”
Richard Goldberg
This is not the only occasion on which UNIFIL has been accused of collaborating with Hezbollah. In October, citing security sources, the newspaper Israel Hayom reported that some Hezbollah operatives recently captured by the IDF “disclosed during interrogations that the organization paid off UNIFIL personnel to use their positions in the region,” and claimed that “Hezbollah also took control of UNIFIL cameras in compounds near the Israeli border and utilized them for their own purposes.” UNIFIL has denied the allegations. If Hezbollah is indeed using UNIFIL infrastructure, Dror Doron suggested, it may go some way to explaining recent allegations that Israel’s military has targeted UNIFIL posts. It could also explain the peacekeeping force’s refusal to evacuate its positions, since it may fear what Israel might discover in its absence.
“The core issue with UNIFIL,” according to Doron, “is that it’s dependent on the LAF … UNIFIL is supposed to assist the LAF in enforcing 1701, but if the LAF doesn’t want to enforce it,” there’s nothing much UNIFIL can do. Resolution 1701 is not enforceable militarily because it falls under Chapter 6—not Chapter 7—of the Security Council bylaws. Whereas Chapter 7 enables UN bodies to militarily enforce their mandates, Chapter 6 merely empowers them to make non-coercive recommendations. In other words, the UN’s peacekeeping force in Lebanon has no independent agency but relies on the Lebanese Armed Forces to help it carry out its mission. And the Lebanese military has not always been cooperative. In July, the UN Secretary-General’s report on UNIFIL activity complained that “the Lebanese Armed Forces continued to object to some patrol routes proposed by UNIFIL to expand the Force’s presence outside main routes and municipal centers, on the grounds that they were either private roads or areas of strategic importance to the Lebanese Armed Forces.”
Doron acknowledged, however, that the connections between UNIFIL and Hezbollah can occasionally be used for positive purposes. Since, as he puts it, “anything that goes into the LAF is passed on to Hezbollah,” this enables UNIFIL to create communication channels between Hezbollah, the Israeli military, and the Lebanese army, which has helped in “de-escalating certain events.”
But UN resolutions aside, Hezbollah has no right to a military presence in Lebanon at all, nor can it claim to be fighting a war of self-defence. Unlike the Lebanese Armed Forces, it is not a national army, but an Iranian proxy that exists to protect the regime in Tehran. It is also, of course, an internationally designated terrorist organisation that has the blood of countless Western and Arab civilians on its hands, helped Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad wage a brutal war against his own people, and traffics in sex slaves and drugs.
Were Hezbollah to disappear tomorrow, the world would be a safer place. Instead, thanks to UNIFIL’s failure to fulfil its mandate, the Middle East is on the precipice of a war of unprecedented destruction. The peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon is hardly the UN’s first inept and corrupt body, and it’s unlikely to be the last. But if UNIFIL is unable to restrain Hezbollah, the region might be best served if the organisation were to stay out of Israel’s way, allowing the Israeli military to do what UN peacekeepers have failed to do over the past 18 years: dismantle the terrorist organisation on its northern border.
