About The Lebanon Ceasefire

Megatron has what I consider to be a pretty shrewd assessment of the dynamics behind the ceasefire:

Megatron @Megatron_ron

The CEASEFIRE agreement has been APPROVED by Israel and Hezbollah. It should be effective in the coming hours.

Why did both sides agree?

Israel agreed because it failed to achieve its objectives in the Lebanon campaign and push Hezbollah across the Litani River.

Israel actually failed to capture a single major settlement, despite losing over 60 Merkava tanks and a large number of military personnel.

Israel has by no means succeeded in returning the displaced in the North. It practically lost this battle despite the fact that they had the full support of the USA, UK, France and Germany, with all kinds of weapons, money and special units

But what managed to get Hezbollah to accept a ceasefire was Israel's constant bombing and massacre of civilians and destroying civilian buildings across Lebanon.

Pressure on Hezbollah inside Lebanon began to grow. Hezbollah did not have rockets with the destructive power like those of US that Israel used, so from here Hezbollah could not retaliate with the same measure and stop Israel from bombing civilian infrastructure, so Hezbollah failed to protect the civilian population.

In practice, Israel forced Hezbollah to cease fire by bombing civilians, not as they announced that they would defeat Hezbollah and drive them out of southern Lebanon with military force.

1:31 PM · Nov 26, 2024

Regarding Israeli casualties. Israel has officially admitted to 800 KIAs. However, Israel is notorious for covering up the true number of casualties. Lawrence Wilkerson, for example, claims the true number could be as much as twice the admitted number. Importantly, the number of wounded is likely to be 11x the number of KIAs, based on comparable ratios suffered by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. In modern warfare, many wounded are saved from being KIAs only because of modern medicine and quick evacuation. The result, however, is large numbers of permanently disabled so, in effect, the majority of the wounded are both permanent losses to the military as well as a burden on society. Israel, as predicted, was unable to sustain such predictably high losses.

Another factor in the pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire may have been the serious drain on munitions that has been inflicted on the US and NATO allies. Just last week a US admiral in the Pacific was complaining that his forces were low on anti-missile munitions because they were being taken from the Pacific and sent to the Middle East. It’s quite possible that pressure from the US led to the ceasefire based on the attrition of US supplies of munitions.