As soon as the provisions of the framework agreement signed between Lebanon and Israel in Washington were made public, attention turned to what appeared to be the Lebanese negotiating team’s abandonment of the country’s right to pursue legal action against Israel and seek justice.
Article 13 of the agreement stipulates “the cessation of all hostile or adverse actions in international political or legal fora,” raising concerns that Lebanon is effectively committing not to pursue legal action against Israel before international courts, or at the very least, suspending such efforts and tying them to the course of future negotiations.
This approach, however, did not begin with the current agreement. It dates back to the government led by Najib Mikati, in which Hezbollah held significant influence over decision-making. In 2024, the government reversed its decision to grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to investigate alleged war crimes committed on Lebanese territory. Article 13 has since drawn widespread criticism in Lebanon.
Both Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun sought to reject the notion that Lebanon had fully relinquished its legal rights. Salam argued that the provision does not amount to a waiver of Lebanon’s right to seek justice, but rather suspends recourse to international courts for the duration of the negotiations. He also maintained that international humanitarian law does not permit states to waive the prosecution of war crimes.
President Joseph Aoun, for his part, said that Article 13 merely suspends reciprocal legal proceedings for the duration of the negotiations. He stressed that it does not prevent victims or non-state actors, including the country’s two bar associations, from exercising their right to file legal cases.
These clarifications, however, have done little to ease concerns. The prevailing view among legal experts and human rights advocates is that, while the provision does not legally extinguish either the victims’ right to seek justice or the state’s right to pursue accountability, it is drafted in broad and ambiguous terms that could be used politically or legally to restrict any Lebanese action before the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, or United Nations accountability mechanisms.
Legal experts also fear that the provision could become a pretext for Israel to argue that Lebanon has committed to halting any legal action against it, even in cases involving alleged war crimes or other serious violations that cannot legally be waived.
Most of the criticism came from two camps. The first consisted of those who had long been pressing the Lebanese government to grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to investigate alleged Israeli war crimes in Lebanon, particularly the targeting of journalists since 13 October 2023.
The second came from a broad segment of media figures affiliated with Hezbollah and its supporters. Their objections were not rooted in a commitment to justice or accountability, but rather in their view of the provision as an opportunity for political exploitation.
They remained silent for years while their representatives in parliament and government actively contributed to blocking efforts to grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction, or at the very least failed to wage a serious campaign in support of that course of action. This was evident when the government of Najib Mikati reversed its 2024 decision to grant the court jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed in Lebanon.
It is therefore hardly surprising that Lebanon so readily, and without meaningful public debate, agreed to suspend its citizens’ recourse to international justice. The relationship between the Lebanese state, its citizens, and the very notion of justice extends far beyond the issue of Israel. The ease with which Lebanon accepted this provision reflects a broader political culture that has long tolerated impunity, placed little value on accountability, and treated justice as something to be traded away through political compromise without provoking widespread public outrage.
Lebanon’s hostility toward justice, or its acceptance of impunity, did not begin with the agreement with Israel. It dates back decades, most notably to the general amnesty law enacted in the early 1990s for crimes committed during the Lebanese Civil War. For years, Lebanon’s warlords, political elites accused of corruption, and their supporters have operated on the premise that holding one party accountable inevitably opens the door to holding others accountable. As a result, they have collectively undermined justice by shielding one another from scrutiny.
The same logic shaped the debate over the war with Israel long before the agreement was signed. Hezbollah feared that allowing legal proceedings against Israel for alleged war crimes could also expose the group itself to prosecution on similar charges.
As a result of practices entrenched since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, hostility toward justice has become deeply embedded in both Lebanon’s political system and large segments of its society. It has reached the point where even the demands of families of those who disappeared during the civil war to learn the fate of their loved ones and recover their remains decades later have been met with resistance, out of fear that doing so could amount to a moral condemnation of those responsible. This has persisted even though the families have repeatedly said they are willing to forgo prosecution and seek only the most basic right of all, the right to know what happened to their relatives.
This hostility toward justice was also reflected in the way Hezbollah, under the leadership of its former Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, confronted investigations into the causes of the massive Beirut port explosion. Earlier, the group had rejected investigations into the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the series of political assassinations that followed. The same mindset was evident after Lebanon’s 2019 economic collapse, when Hezbollah, alongside members of the ruling political elite and the banking sector, resisted public demands to hold those responsible for looting public funds to account.
All of these practices, along with countless others, compounded by the conduct of parts of the judiciary, have distorted the very meaning of justice in the eyes of many Lebanese. They have eroded the place of accountability in Lebanon’s political culture, making it easier, beginning in 2024, to retreat from the country’s right to seek recourse through the International Criminal Court and pursue an investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes.
This long accumulation of practices has entrenched the belief that justice is not an inalienable right, but a demand that can be negotiated away or sacrificed whenever political expediency requires it. More than that, this mindset holds that pursuing accountability should be avoided altogether to preserve stability.
Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that Article 13 of the framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel was accepted, and even defended by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, a former international judge, as a suspension rather than a waiver of Lebanon’s legal rights. In the end, the provision fits a governing model that has long prioritized reassuring perpetrators over victims, favored political settlements over justice, and repeatedly chosen political continuity at the expense of accountability.
Confronting any future aggression, therefore, begins with abandoning the approach that has governed Lebanon for decades, one rooted in impunity and hostility toward justice. It begins with pursuing accountability at every level, both domestically and internationally. Refusing to compromise on accountability, even in the most basic domestic cases, is essential not only to building a state founded on the principle that there can be no impunity, but also to breaking the cycle of futile wars and moving toward lasting peace.
