From Taif to today: A history of attempts to disarm Hezbollah

Hezbollah’s recent announcement that it will not hand over its arsenal to the Lebanese state recalls several watershed moments when the movement fiercely resisted disarmament.

Over the past few months, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Naim Qassem has repeatedly reaffirmed that the movement would retain its weapons as long as Israel continued to occupy Lebanese territory.

Nevertheless, in August, amid mounting US and Arab pressure to establish a state monopoly on arms, the Lebanese government tasked the army with drawing up a plan to achieve this objective by the end of the year.

The move has placed significant pressure on a heavily weakened Hezbollah, following a bruising war with Israel that resulted in the assassination of its historic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and the loss of much of its senior military leadership.

Since the end of the war in late November, Hezbollah has maintained that its weapons remain essential - both to liberate the five areas Israel still occupies since the ceasefire, and to deter ongoing Israeli airspace violations, drone attacks, and potential future threats.

Founded in 1982, largely in response to Israel’s massive invasion of Lebanon, Hezbollah waged persistent guerrilla warfare that ultimately forced Israeli troops to withdraw from most of the country's south in May 2000. 

As Hezbollah faces the most serious threat to its arsenal since its inception, Middle East Eye looks back at previous attempts to disarm the movement and how it resisted them, sometimes through a combination of political leverage and force.

1986: The Tripartite Agreement

Hezbollah’s rejection of disarmament calls or attempts by Lebanese authorities dates back to January 1986, less than a year after the movement emerged publicly.

Amid Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990), Hezbollah feared that any peace settlement would compel it to surrender its weapons to the state. Syria, which had stationed troops in Lebanon shortly after the outbreak of the war, was involved in nearly every initiative to broker an end to the fighting.

One such effort was the Tripartite Agreement, signed in Damascus on 28 December 1985 by Nabih Berri, leader of the Shia Amal Movement; Walid Jumblatt, head of the Druze Progressive Socialist Party; and Elie Hobeika, commander of the Christian Lebanese Forces militia.

The accord called for a reshuffling of power amongst Lebanon’s main sects and for the disarmament of all armed movements.

Hezbollah strongly opposed the agreement, with Nasrallah, then a senior official, declaring: "Those who think that we will hand over our weapons, I tell them we will not do that."

Earlier that year, in an August 1985 speech, Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi, a senior Hezbollah cleric who would later become the movement’s secretary-general, said: “All the solutions proposed to solve the Lebanese crisis aim at disarming [the people of] this region.

"We say to Arabs, to parties and sects: you have to liberate Jerusalem first and only then you can ask people to drop their arms.” 

The Tripartite Agreement was ultimately pronounced dead less than three weeks after its signing, when a rebellion in the Christian camp toppled Hobeika.

1988: The Shia power struggle

The next threat to Hezbollah’s weapons came from the Amal Movement, its Shia rival at the time, which sought to monopolise arms in south Lebanon.

With Syria's backing, Amal moved to suppress Hezbollah in spring 1988, targeting the movement in both south Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs. Amal was adamant that any armed operations against the Israeli occupation, now confined to the south, could only be carried out under its authority.

Hezbollah, however, refused to yield, insisting on retaining its weapons and maintaining freedom of action in the south.

The conflict evolved into three years of sporadic fighting between the two movements in south Lebanon and south Beirut. 

It ended only after a Syrian-Iranian mediated agreement, which allowed Hezbollah to retain its arsenal and continue its armed activity against the Israeli army.

1989: The Taif accord and Hezbollah’s exception

In October 1989, much as it was by the earlier Tripartite Agreement, Hezbollah was alarmed by provisions of the Taif Agreement.

The agreement, reached after three weeks of deliberations by Lebanese MPs in the Saudi city of Taif, brought Lebanon’s civil war to an end the following year.

Brokered by Syria and Saudi Arabia, the agreement rebalanced Lebanon’s political system: it stripped the powerful Maronite president of prerogatives in favour of the Sunni prime minister and the Shia speaker of parliament, while also dividing parliament and cabinet seats evenly between Muslims and Christians.

Taif also called for the disarmament all Lebanese and non-Lebanese armed organisations in Lebanon within six months of its ratification by parliament.

Hezbollah rejected this.

In November 1989, senior Hezbollah official Sheikh Mohammad Yazbek denounced the accord, saying it “aims at confiscating arms used to fight Israel”.

Around the same time, Hezbollah’s newspaper Al-Ahd warned on 27 October that Taif “constituted a prelude to the actual annihilation of the resistance and the consecration of occupation.”

But while all other Lebanese armed factions handed over their heavy weapons in line with the agreement, Hezbollah managed to preserve its arsenal due to Iran and Syria’s interest in maintaining military pressure on Israel’s occupation troops in south Lebanon.

This was all the more possible after Syria was given a green light from Washington and most Arab states to oversee the implementation of Taif on its own terms. In return, Damascus agreed to join the US-led international coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in Operation Desert Storm, launched in January 1991.

Over time, Hezbollah gradually softened its opposition to the Taif Agreement.

2008: March 14 and Hezbollah’s red lines 

Following the withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon in April 2005, the question of Hezbollah’s arms quickly became a divisive and controversial issue in Lebanese politics and society.

The pro-Saudi and western-backed March 14 coalition began a pressure campaign on the movement to surrender its arsenal to the Lebanese state. 

Tensions peaked in 2008, when Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s March 14 government moved to dismantle Hezbollah’s private telecommunications network, used by its military wing.

Hezbollah responded by overrunning large swathes of west Beirut and areas in Mount Lebanon, sparking days of armed clashes with pro-14 March group that killed around 80 people.

“We will cut off the hand targeting the resistance’s arms regardless of its source,” Nasrallah said at a news conference on 8 May 2008.

He added that the government’s decisions had crossed all Hezbollah’s red lines and that “arms will be used to protect arms”.

The violence forced Siniora’s government to go back on its decision. The crisis ended two weeks later with the Doha Agreement, which granted Hezbollah and its allies veto power in government.

Since then, no Lebanese cabinet has attempted a similar measure, until the session held last month.