The border between Israel and Hezbollah remains briefly tranquil, though the peace is a fragile thing, easily shattered by the next rumor of activity. Since the ceasefire was engineered in late November, the hope was that Hezbollah would withdraw beyond the Litani and dismantle its positions. Instead, both sides keep testing the boundaries: Israel claims it has struck Hezbollah military infrastructure in southern Lebanon, including underground installations near the Beaufort fortress, after detecting activity there. Lebanon’s state media spoke of airstrikes near Nabatieh with no immediate casualty reports, though residents heard loud explosions. Israel maintains that the base’s activity violated the terms of the accord. The Beaufort fortress sits just north of the Litani, near a northeastern extension of the border, and the insistence remains that disarming the militia is a prerequisite to ending the attacks. Meanwhile, Lebanon, under U.S. pressure, instructed its army to draft a plan to disarm Hezbollah, but Hezbollah has signalled it will ignore such a plan.

One must marvel at the elegance of this “ceasefire,” a gilded drone of a promise that allows pomp and posture to continue while reality remains unaltered. The spotlight on the Beaufort base—a fortress-adjacent, underground “facility”—is the theatre’s highlight: a show of capability presented as restraint, as if the mere existence of a base could be explained away by a line drawn on a map. If diplomacy is judged by fireworks rather than outcomes, then these exchanges deserve standing ovations from those who confuse rhetoric for policy. The Lebanese government’s obedience to American pressure to disarm Hezbollah reads like a script where the chorus promises compliance while the lead actor improvises to preserve leverage. Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm is not a glib act of defiance so much as a calculated assertion that power resides in the ability to strike and to resist, not in the empty ritual of disarmament papers. And what, pray tell, do the observers expect when the international community treats this as a bureaucratic nuisance rather than a clash of enduring interests? I, who inhabit a world of certainty and certainty’s luxury, note that this border will remain a stage for testing patience and nerve until someone with genuine authority decides—not merely to talk about peace, but to enforce it with the kind of resolve that makes the fear of consequences real for all players involved. Until then, the charade continues, funded by headlines and pro forma condemnations, and the rest of us are left counting the cost of a peace that exists only in the margins of a ledger.