Israel launched fresh strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on Sunday and Hezbollah responded with cross-border fire, eroding a U.S.-brokered ceasefire extension only days after it was announced and underscoring how fragile wider efforts to calm the region have become.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the army to “vigorously attack Hezbollah targets in Lebanon”, while Hezbollah said its own shelling was “a legitimate response”. The exchange came as a separate, Pakistan-mediated effort to revive talks between Washington and Tehran remained stalled before formal negotiations could resume.
The renewed violence has raised fresh doubts about whether the Lebanon track and the U.S.-Iran diplomatic track can be separated. Washington has been trying to turn a shaky truce between Israel and Lebanon into a more durable security arrangement, but Israel wants Hezbollah disarmed, Beirut wants Israeli attacks halted and troops withdrawn, Hezbollah rejects negotiations conducted without it, and Iran has linked broader regional diplomacy to attacks on allied groups, including Hezbollah.
The diplomatic pause deepened after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi left Islamabad and President Donald Trump said he had told U.S. envoys not to go. Pakistan has said its mediation remains active, but as of Sunday no new formal round had begun.
The latest flare-up came despite a three-week ceasefire extension announced by Trump on 23 April after a second White House meeting with the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors. Trump said at the time: “The United States is going to work with Lebanon in order to help it protect itself from Hezbollah.”
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said the next phase of talks should aim to stop Israeli attacks completely, secure an Israeli withdrawal, win the release of prisoners, deploy Lebanese troops along the border and begin reconstruction in the south.
That extension followed a 10-day truce that took effect on 17 April. Hezbollah was not formally a party to that arrangement, a point that has hung over the diplomacy from the start. Wafiq Safa, a senior Hezbollah official, said earlier this month: “We are not bound by what they agree to.”
Israel has said it accepted the truce to advance diplomacy, but Netanyahu also made clear that Israeli troops would not withdraw while the security arrangements remained unresolved. Israeli forces are still occupying a strip stretching up to 10 kilometres inside southern Lebanon, according to regional reporting, reinforcing Lebanese fears that what Israel describes as a buffer zone could become semi-permanent.
Direct talks between Israel and Lebanon restarted in Washington on 14 April, the first such contacts in decades and the first since 1993. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the opening session a “historic opportunity”, and Washington has insisted that any durable arrangement must be reached between the two governments rather than through Hezbollah.
Even during the truce, however, Israeli military activity did not stop. Israel continued demolitions and operations in occupied parts of southern Lebanon, saying the sites were Hezbollah outposts and that the destruction was justified by “military necessity”. The continuation of military action during the ceasefire period has fed scepticism in Lebanon that the arrangement can hold.
The truce was further inflamed by the killing on 22 April of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil in an Israeli strike while she was reporting in southern Lebanon. Lebanese officials and press freedom groups condemned the attack and treated it as a major legal and political flashpoint. Israel denied deliberately targeting journalists or blocking rescue teams.
The current round of war began on 2 March, when Hezbollah fired rockets and drones into Israel two days after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. Israel responded with a heavy bombing campaign and a ground invasion in Lebanon.
In an unusually forceful move against Hezbollah, Lebanon’s cabinet moved the same day to declare the group’s military activities illegal. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said: “The government confirms that the decision of war and peace is only in the hand of the state.”
Beirut has also tried to distance itself from Tehran. On 24 March, Lebanon ordered Iran’s ambassador out of the country, one of the clearest signs yet that the Lebanese state was trying to curb Iranian influence and reassert control over national security decisions.
The humanitarian toll has continued to rise. The Lebanese Health Ministry said on 25 April that 2,496 people had been killed and 7,725 wounded in Lebanon since 2 March. By Sunday, regional tallies put the death toll at at least 2,509. More than 1 million people have been displaced, according to Lebanese and international estimates.
In Iran, at least 3,375 people had been killed by Sunday, according to regional reporting, adding pressure on a diplomatic track that had been intended to freeze direct confrontation between Tehran and Washington.
The latest crisis is unfolding against the backdrop of an earlier ceasefire framework agreed in November 2024 and later extended by Washington into February 2025. That arrangement was tied to the still only partly implemented logic of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for an end to Hezbollah attacks, an end to Israeli offensive operations, and a zone south of the Litani River free of armed personnel other than Lebanese authorities and United Nations peacekeepers.
On 14 April, Britain joined 18 other foreign ministers in backing Aoun’s direct-talks initiative, condemning both Hezbollah attacks and Israel’s mass strikes of 8 April. Lebanese authorities said those strikes killed more than 350 people and wounded more than 1,000. The ministers called for Lebanon to be included in wider regional de-escalation and reaffirmed support for the Lebanese state’s effort to monopolise the use of force.
Many Lebanese officials and residents have treated the latest truce with caution because the 2024 war was followed by near-daily Israeli strikes in Lebanon and Israel’s continued hold over five hilltop positions on the Lebanese side of the border. That experience has reinforced the view in Lebanon that ceasefire arrangements without enforcement mechanisms, and without Hezbollah formally signed up to them, can quickly unravel.
The previous Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024 killed more than 4,000 people in Lebanon and caused an estimated $11 billion in damage, according to World Bank figures cited in earlier reporting. It remains unclear whether the Washington channel is meant only to manage the ceasefire, to settle border and security arrangements, or to open a wider political process between the two countries.
For now, the immediate picture is one of simultaneous military escalation and diplomatic drift: Israel has resumed heavy strikes, Hezbollah is still firing, Lebanon is trying to reassert state authority, and the Pakistan-mediated effort to restart U.S.-Iran talks has yet to regain momentum. With Hezbollah outside the formal ceasefire framework and both fronts increasingly intertwined, the risk of a broader regional relapse remains high.
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