It’s a sunny day in Barcelona and I am catching up with my daughter when the images start coming in from Beirut. 

Over a hundred targets hit in less than ten minutes. 

From my different Whatsapp groups, I know everyone close to me is safe — but for how long? My apartment in Clemenceau, one of the safest neighborhoods in Beirut, sits at the center of a circle of destruction: Ain Mreisseh, Ain Tineh, Salim Salam, all hit within minutes. 

In those ten minutes, Netanyahu made clear that a Gaza scenario in Lebanon is not off the table. And this was only the first hours of the “ceasefire”.

In the hours that followed, a furious debate erupted over what the deal actually was. Iran said one thing, Washington another. Israel played off of the contradiction, and Lebanon paid the price. This is nothing new. 

Part of Israel’s calculation is about not giving Hezbollah a 2006-style victory, where Hezbollah, battered but standing, claimed  “divine victory”, and rebuilt itself  on the ruins of Lebanese lives. 

I covered the 2006 war. My daughter was six months old when I left her to report on the Qana massacre, where children her age were being pulled from the rubble. After the ceasefire went into effect, I watched how the party convinced its base that it alone — not the state — had won and how it alone would rebuild. The Lebanese government secured the reconstruction funding, then handed it to Hezbollah, which commissioned loyal contractors who took care of the buildings and the tunnels beneath them.

Then, like now, it didn’t matter whether Hezbollah had actually won the war against Israel. In a Washington Post op-ed, I wrote about how catastrophic even a propaganda victory could be — how reframing a military setback as divine triumph, while denying the state any credit, was itself a strategy for political survival and expansion. 

What followed proved it: the methodical capture of the Lebanese state, the May 7, 2008 armed takeover of Beirut, and the assassination of friends and colleagues who stood in the way.

The situation today is in some ways more dangerous. After the pager attacks and the assassination of Nasrallah and most of the Party’s  visible leadership, it is clear that the IRGC is running the show in Lebanon. Iran is not pretending otherwise. That is why I fear a Hezbollah “victory.” 

That does not mean I opt for an Israeli one.

The argument that Lebanon is too weak to rid itself of Hezbollah, so it should “let Israel finish the job,” is not just wrong. It is an amnesia so total it borders on delusion. 

I reject it, first, because I am convinced we can’t bomb our way to a sovereign Lebanon. Because it is our people being killed and our country being destroyed. Because Gaza is still too fresh and because Netanyahu’s government has openly declared its intent to occupy southern Lebanon.

And second, because Lebanon walked down this same path in 1982. The result was Sabra and Shatila, eighteen years of occupation, and the very creation of Hezbollah. The Lebanese quagmire didn’t only destroy Lebanon — it destabilized the entire region and produced disasters far beyond our borders: the Marine barracks bombing, the hostage crises, the spread of armed non-state actors from Beirut to Baghdad to Sanaa.

Lebanon today is caught between two catastrophes, each having fed the other across the decades. A Hezbollah victory means the continued strangulation of Lebanon by Iran. An Israeli campaign will destroy Lebanon and feed the radicalization that creates the next Hezbollah. 

But there is a third path. That of the strong, just state. 

Despite the enormous goodwill that greeted President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, they have failed us — on reform, on sovereignty, on the basic obligation to show up when the country is under attack. On the day Israel launched a hundred strikes, the Lebanese people did not see their president, their prime minister and their speaker of parliament standing together — even if just symbolically. That image would have cost nothing. Its absence cost everything.

Defending state institutions is not the same as defending the people who currently occupy them, and the answer to a failing government is not to abandon the idea of government. It is to hold it to account while insisting it must exist, must be strengthened, must be made worthy of the name.

What we have now is the possibility of a negotiation, and we must do everything to support the logic of a sovereign state in that process — even knowing we don’t fully have one. With all its limitations, it remains our best shot at actual sovereignty. 

What will happen in the coming few weeks will determine Lebanon’s fate for decades to come. 

To his credit, Salam is reportedly making a ceasefire a condition for direct negotiations. This is both realistic and necessary and must be supported unconditionally. 

But this support is neither guaranteed nor clear. Lebanon barely registers in the current American political moment — Trump’s focus is Iran, and Lebanon is treated as a sideshow. What is urgently required is that the international community, and the United States specifically, commit to a clear sequence: ceasefire first, then negotiations, then a framework that is actually enforced. Lebanon cannot negotiate with a gun to its head. Striking a hundred locations while demanding talks is not pressure. It is blackmail. And it weakens not Hezbollah, which thrives in chaos, but the Lebanese state — the very institution the international community claims it wants to strengthen.

Expecting a fragile government to disarm Hezbollah in months is a hallucination. Israel could not disarm Hamas in two years of total war. That is why sequencing matters: first the state, then sovereignty, then the peace that actually holds.

The model is an army defending Lebanon’s borders alone — not fighting Hezbollah’s wars, or Israel’s, or Iran’s. The Lebanese army already enjoys more cross-sectarian support than any other institution in the country. But let us be honest about what we are starting from. Most of the army’s officers in top positions are either close to or accepted by Hezbollah, and they can’t be expected to act against it overnight. 

This can change — officers can be retired, those who resist can face the corruption investigations most of them richly deserve — but it needs time and political will. The question of garnering consent and trust from the Shia community of course remains. The answer to both lies, again, in a state strong enough to be just — to all its citizens, regardless of faith.

In recent weeks, some Lebanese voices have slipped into openly sectarian language about the Shia community, as if Hezbollah and the Shia of Lebanon are interchangeable. They are not, and this matters enormously. The Shia community’s drift toward Hezbollah did not happen in a vacuum. It was the product of decades of marginalization, of a confessional system that excluded them, of a state that was absent before Hezbollah arrived. This collective blame does not weaken Hezbollah. It strengthens it. Every Lebanese who uses that language is doing Iran’s work for free.

The only honest answer, a sovereign Lebanese state with strong institutions, is harder and slower than anything currently on offer. In Lebanon’s short and violent existence, we have tried virtually every other option. Confessional power-sharing. Syrian invasion. Israeli occupation. Iranian hegemony. The one thing we have never seriously tried — never given the time, the resources, and the international support it requires — is a strong, sovereign, fair, and accountable state.

My eldest daughter, the one who was six months old when I covered Qana, lives in London now. Her sister lives here in Barcelona. I am one of countless Lebanese parents who made that calculation — send the children somewhere safe, and keep fighting for a country that might one day give them a better life than the one they were born into. A country that offers an option better than the two catastrophes we already know.