UN peacekeeping chief presses Security Council to decide Lebanon force's fate

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, ended a three-day visit to Beirut on Friday with an unusually direct public appeal: the Security Council, he said, needs to start deciding what happens to the UN's Lebanon peacekeeping force before its mandate expires at the end of this year. The UN Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, has patrolled the border with Israel since 1978, but a Security Council resolution passed under American pressure last year set 31 December 2026 as the mission's final day of operations, with a drawdown to follow.

During his visit, Lacroix met President Joseph Aoun and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, both of whom pressed him to keep the force in place. He also toured UNIFIL positions and met commanders from the roughly four dozen countries that still contribute troops. Speaking separately to Reuters, Lacroix said proposals for a continued UN presence after the mandate lapses are "on the table of the Security Council" and that negotiations over them need to begin "shortly, in earnest." Asked whether a decision should come sooner rather than later, he replied, "I think it would be better to have a decision soon rather than later, right?"

The numbers

UNIFIL currently fields roughly 7,500 uniformed personnel drawn from about 46 troop-contributing countries, spread across some 50 positions in a strip of territory south of the Litani River, according to figures published by the UN's peacekeeping department. That is already down from roughly 8,500 a year earlier, a reduction driven partly by a UN budget shortfall and partly by the Security Council's final extension of the mandate, Resolution 2790, which the Council adopted unanimously in August 2025. The resolution calls for operations to stop on 31 December 2026, followed by an orderly withdrawal of troops and equipment that officials say could stretch into 2027, with a limited guard force remaining to protect UN property during the final liquidation phase.

The human toll behind those logistics is large. More than 1.2 million people were displaced at the height of the renewed war between Israel and Hezbollah earlier this year, according to the International Organization for Migration, and more than 300,000 remain unable to return home. The European Union's humanitarian arm says it has committed €100 million to Lebanon this year alone, part of roughly €1 billion in EU humanitarian spending in the country since 2011, and that nearly a quarter of Lebanon's population faces acute food insecurity, according to an EU delegation statement issued earlier this year.

How the mission reached its final year

UNIFIL was created to confirm an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon and help the Lebanese government reassert authority over the area. Its mandate was expanded after the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah to include monitoring a cessation of hostilities and supporting the Lebanese army's deployment south of the Litani. It has not managed to prevent repeated rounds of fighting since, a record that American and Israeli officials cite when arguing the mission has outlived its usefulness.

The latest and most destructive round began in early March, when Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel two days after the United States and Israel opened their own war on Iran. Israeli forces launched a ground invasion that captured dozens of Lebanese border towns before a US-brokered ceasefire took hold at the end of June. That ceasefire was followed by a bilateral security arrangement, negotiated largely outside UNIFIL's framework, under which Israel agreed to withdraw from captured "pilot zones," the Lebanese army would deploy in its place, and Hezbollah would disarm. Implementation has mostly stalled: Israel has pulled back from only one zone, the two governments have not agreed which countries would sit on a committee verifying Hezbollah's disarmament, and Hezbollah has refused to give up weapons before a full Israeli withdrawal. Israel also maintains what it calls a security zone roughly 10 kilometres deep inside Lebanese territory, a presence Beirut and the UN both regard as illegal. A fuller account of the ceasefire's unraveling and its effect on the peacekeepers' standing was laid out in reporting from Beirut this week.

The most immediate exposure falls on residents of villages near the border, who rely on UNIFIL's daily patrols, its hotline between the Lebanese and Israeli militaries, and its role escorting aid into areas still under Israeli control. The Lebanese army, which is meant to eventually take over UNIFIL's positions, faces a harder problem: many of those positions now sit inside territory held by Israeli troops, and it remains unclear how Lebanese soldiers could deploy there without a new round of fighting. Troop-contributing countries, which include Italy, Indonesia, Spain and France among the largest providers, are also weighing what comes next for soldiers currently serving in a mission whose legal basis will lapse in just over two months.

"UNIFIL's withdrawal will create a vacuum that will have negative repercussions on the security situation in the region," President Joseph Aoun told Lacroix during their meeting, according to the Lebanese presidency's account of the visit.

Reaction

Lebanon's position, repeated by both Aoun and Berri, is that an extension is the country's first preference and that 86 of parliament's 128 members signed a letter in July asking the Security Council to keep the force in place with an expanded role. The European Union has echoed that call. Foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters during her own visit to Beirut earlier this month that the bloc favours extending the mandate to avoid what she called a "security vacuum," arguing that someone needs to independently verify compliance with the Israel-Lebanon arrangement while it remains unimplemented. Separately, EU governments agreed on 12 October to stand up a new training and advisory mission for the Lebanese armed forces and internal security services, with an initial three-year mandate and up to 150 staff; Kallas has stressed that mission is meant to complement, not replace, UNIFIL, a distinction detailed in an AFP dispatch from the visit.

Washington has taken the opposite view. A State Department official, speaking to the US-funded broadcaster Alhurra, said flatly that "the United States does not support an extension of UNIFIL's mandate beyond its final term ending Dec. 31, 2026," adding, "we consider UNIFIL to have failed" to prevent repeated conflict or stop Hezbollah's military buildup in the south. The official argued that the bilateral security arrangement Washington brokered between Israel and Lebanon, not an open-ended UN mission, should be the vehicle for enforcing Hezbollah's disarmament, a position set out at length by the broadcaster. Israel's government has made similar arguments at the Security Council, saying the mission failed to achieve what it was set up to do.

What happens next

Secretary-General António Guterres has already given the Security Council a set of options, requested under last year's resolution, for maintaining some form of UN presence in Lebanon after UNIFIL's mandate ends, according to Reuters' account of Lacroix's remarks. No Council member has yet moved to act on them, and with the United States holding a veto as a permanent member, any extension or successor arrangement will need Washington's consent or at least its abstention. Lacroix has warned that leaving Israeli and Lebanese forces facing each other across the same ground without a third party risks renewed escalation, and has said UNIFIL should not "leave those positions prematurely before we know what could come next."

No date has been set for the Council to take up the question, leaving little time to plan an orderly handover if the mandate is allowed to lapse as scheduled on 31 December. Lebanese officials have floated a fallback: if an outright extension fails, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has said Beirut could accept a smaller international presence limited to monitoring, coordination and communication between the two militaries, functions UNIFIL currently performs through daily patrols and its hotline. That option, too, would require Security Council approval and therefore remains hostage to the same disagreement between Washington and the mission's supporters.

For now, UNIFIL continues to operate as before: patrolling, running the hotline with Israeli forces, and drawing up contingency plans for a withdrawal that could begin within weeks rather than months if the Council takes no further action. With the Council's calendar filling up before the year-end holidays, the window for an orderly decision on the mission's future is narrowing by the week.