At a time when Lebanon is preparing to relaunch direct discussions with the Hebrew State, the specter of the Israeli-Lebanese agreement of May 17, 1983, which remained a dead letter, resurfaces. President Joseph Aoun and his Prime Minister Nawaf Salam are the target of vehement criticism from Hezbollah, which rejects any compromise in advance and makes implicit threats.

Published on: 04/22/2026 - 07:19 Modified on: 04/22/2026 - 10:15

Since the announcement of a new session of direct discussions between Lebanon and Israel, scheduled for Thursday April 23, after a first meeting in Washington on April 14, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and his Prime Minister Nawaf Salam have been the target of a smear campaign orchestrated by Hezbollah supporters.

The head of state, who is banking on these discussions to obtain the withdrawal of the Israeli army from South Lebanon and a definitive delimitation of the common border, was even the subject of an implicit death threat launched by officials of the Shiite party.

A threat taken seriously in Beirut due to the history of the pro-Iranian party, several members of which were found guilty of the death of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in an attack in 2005 by the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon (TSL).

Also read: How the Israeli occupations of South Lebanon strengthened Hezbollah

On Saturday, in an interview with Hezbollah channel Al-Manar, Nawaf Moussaoui, one of the party's executives, warned: if the Lebanese president "wants to make decisions unilaterally, he is not more important than Anwar al-Sadat" - a reference to the former Egyptian president assassinated in 1981, three years after signing a peace agreement with Israel at the Camp David conference.

He added that any negotiation or agreement between Israel and Lebanon would be "rejected, unrecognized and thrown in the trash, like the agreement of May 17, 1983."

An agreement that remained a dead letter

This security agreement, never implemented, was officially signed by Israel and Lebanon, under the aegis of the United States, in Khalde, near Beirut, in the middle of the Lebanese War (1975-1990). The Land of Cedar, chaired at the time by Amine Gemayel (1982-1988), was then occupied by both the Israeli army and the Syrian army.

Ambassador Antoine Fattal then headed the Lebanese delegation, while the Israeli team was led by diplomat David Kimche – with both delegations facing US President Ronald Reagan's envoy, Morris Draper, Undersecretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

The result of a cycle of 35 Israeli-Lebanese meetings that began on December 28, 1982, organized in turn in Lebanon and Israel, and composed of a dozen articles, the agreement was to constitute a first step on the path to lasting peace between the two countries.

In particular, it proclaimed in its preamble "the end of the state of war" between the two neighboring countries which, according to article 2, undertook "to settle their differences by peaceful means".

The text provided for the creation of a security zone in southern Lebanon, a timetable for the withdrawal of Israeli forces, and the commitment of each party to ensure that its territory would not serve as a base for "terrorist or hostile actions" against the other. He even envisaged, in the long term, subsequent negotiations for "agreements on the movement of goods, products and people, and [...] their implementation without distinction".

This agreement, although ratified by the Lebanese Parliament, was never promulgated by President Amine Gemayel. In March 1984, the text was repealed by the Council of Ministers under pressure from the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad and the arms of its Lebanese allies at the time, the Druze leader and warlord Walid Jumblatt, and Nabih Berri, leader of the Shiite Amal militia – and current president of the Lebanese Parliament since 1992 –, hostile to any agreement with the Jewish state.

The main opponent of this agreement, the Syrian Hafez al-Assad, had told Amine Gemayel, not without irony, that its abrogation was "a victory for the people of Syria and Lebanon and of the entire Arab nation" and that his country "will remain alongside Lebanon in its struggle for its independence and sovereignty." Even though his army was an occupying force in the Land of Cedar.

In an interview recently given to the French-speaking daily L'Orient-Le Jour, the former Lebanese head of state asserts that Israel also "did not, in reality, want to apply the agreement of May 17, 1983", accusing it of having added, "at the last minute, clauses to the previously negotiated text".

Precisely a clause requiring the simultaneous withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon with that of the Israelis. “It was a way of giving Damascus a right of veto,” he confided to the Lebanese newspaper. “Especially since we could not control the decision to withdraw the Syrian army.”

After the Syrian obstacle, the Iranian veto?

Asked about this Lebanese-Israeli precedent in relation to the current situation, Sami Nader, director of the Institute of Political Sciences at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut, points to a regional context that is totally different from the current period.

"At the time, in 1983, only Anwar al-Sadat's Egypt had signed a peace agreement with Israel, while today many Arab countries are ahead of Lebanon on this path, since the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in particular signed the Abraham Accords under the leadership of Donald Trump, and, before them, Jordan had also signed a peace treaty [in 1994, Editor's note]", he recalls. “Today, even Syria, which in its time was the main obstacle to the agreement of May 17, 1983, is ready to sign with the Israelis.”

Read alsoIn Lebanon, “the war was imposed on us”, declares Prime Minister Nawaf Salam

The current Syrian government, embodied by interim President Ahmed al-Charaa, said it was open, Friday during a diplomatic forum in Turkey, to direct negotiations with the Israelis on the subject of the occupied Golan, if the two countries reached a security agreement guaranteeing Israel's withdrawal from the recently occupied Syrian territories.

“In 1983, Hezbollah, which had just been founded, did not yet have a say in Lebanon. Today, it is the major obstacle to such negotiations, just like its Iranian sponsor who opposes regional normalization efforts with Israel,” recalls Sami Nader. “Direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel cause Tehran to lose a lever: the Islamic Republic wants Lebanon, through Hezbollah, to remain a card in its hands. And proof of this is that while the Iranians are negotiating with the big Satan, as they usually call the United States, they want to prohibit Lebanon from negotiating with the little Satan, which is Israel according to them.”

A yellow line that “instills doubt”

Finally, Sami Nader notes a "fundamental difference" between the Israeli invasion of 1982 and that of today "because of the famous yellow line drawn by the Netanyahu government, isolating part of the territory, devastated and emptied of its population".

Israeli authorities say they have drawn a "yellow line" deep in southern Lebanon, claiming they want to protect Israeli populations in the north from fire from Hezbollah.

On the Lebanese side, this “buffer zone”, which extends over several hundred square kilometers, from the Mediterranean in the west to the Lebanese-Syrian border in the east, is perceived as a new border unilaterally drawn by Israel. In the Gaza Strip, the "yellow line" established by Israel after the October ceasefire cuts the Palestinian territory from north to south between an area under Hamas control and another area held de facto by the Israeli army.

This yellow line “instills doubt about Israeli intentions”, insists Sami Nader. “Because it brings to mind a scenario already seen in the Syrian Golan, that is to say an annexation scenario, and no observer can rule out this hypothesis with the far-right government which is at the head of Israel.”

“Even more than President Gemayel in 1983, President Aoun seems to think that the only way for Lebanon to rule out the possibility of such a scenario is to negotiate, that is to say, to seek peace, and therefore in a certain way the disarmament of Hezbollah, in exchange for the conquered territory,” he concludes. “Because the other option, which is military, the one advocated by the Shiite party, allows the Israelis to justify the occupation of southern Lebanon.”

Keywords associated with the article

The content you are trying to access does not exist or is no longer available.