Top Stories — Friday, April 17, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Lebanon Cease-Fire Leaves Netanyahu in an Uncomfortable Spot — nyt News
- In northern Israel, relief at the cease-fire is overshadowed by unease. — nyt News
- ‘I Just Want to Be Back’: Thousands Rush South in Lebanon Under Cease-Fire — nyt News
Lebanon Cease-Fire Leaves Netanyahu in an Uncomfortable Spot
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/17/2026, 5:57:56 PM
President Trump may be trumpeting the cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot.
Israeli voters did not want the fighting to end.
Overwhelmingly, polls showed, they wanted the military to keep up the pressure on Hezbollah, the militant group whose rockets and missiles have made life miserable and perilous for residents of northern Israel, until the group, which Iran backs, was destroyed or forced to disarm.
That, after all, is what Mr. Netanyahu and his military chiefs had promised to do.
But Mr. Netanyahu quickly, if grudgingly, fell in line on Thursday when Mr. Trump pressed for a cease-fire in Lebanon — just as the Israeli leader did with prior cease-fires the president had orchestrated.
Now, the prime minister’s critics, and even some of his allies on the right, have seized on what appears plain as day: his inability to resist Mr. Trump’s pressure, not just in pushing to bring the long-distance war with Iran to a close but even in demanding a truce with an enemy directly across Israel’s northern border.
“A cease-fire must come from a position of strength and be an Israeli decision, reflecting leverage that serves negotiations,” said Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff whose new centrist opposition party, Yashar, is gaining in the polls. “A pattern is emerging in which cease-fires are being imposed on us — in Gaza, in Iran, and now in Lebanon.”
It is a stark turnabout from Mr. Netanyahu’s role in personally persuading Mr. Trump to join Israel in attacking Iran in the first place — a hard-sell pitch, as The New York Times reported, that Iran was ripe for regime change, that a combined U.S.-Israeli operation could quickly topple the Islamic Republic, and that concerns about Iran’s responding by closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking U.S. interests in the region were overblown. None of those assurances proved true.
A core element of Mr. Netanyahu’s appeal to voters — the argument that his close bond and strategic mind meld with Mr. Trump make him uniquely equipped to ensure Israel’s security — now appears far less convincing.
“Netanyahu influenced how the war started,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He won’t influence how it ends.”
Mr. Netanyahu, who is up for re-election this year — and whose coalition is behind in the polls — took pains to reassure Israelis about the halt in fighting with Hezbollah, saying that soldiers would remain in a security buffer zone extending 10 kilometers into Lebanon. That would guard against incursions into Israel and against the use by Hezbollah of anti-tank rockets to terrorize border communities, he said in a televised address.
“Of course, there are still problems,” Mr. Netanyahu conceded. “They still have rockets left.”
But Mr. Netanyahu said that could be addressed in the context of talks over what he said could be a “historic peace agreement with Lebanon.”
David M. Halbfinger is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the politics editor from 2021 to 2025.
Read the full story at nyt News.
In northern Israel, relief at the cease-fire is overshadowed by unease.
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/17/2026, 5:55:24 PM
Christina GoldbaumEuan WardJohnatan Reiss and Max Bearak
Christina Goldbaum reported from Qasmiyeh, Lebanon; Euan Ward from Beirut, Lebanon; and Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv.
Thousands of Lebanese families displaced by fighting filled the main highway to southern Lebanon on Friday in hopes of returning to their homes, as a 10-day cease-fire in Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah went into effect.
The fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group, has threatened the fragile halt in the war between Iran and the United States. Tehran has insisted that the truce extend to Lebanon, meaning that if the Lebanon cease-fire holds, it could remove a major hurdle to ending the U.S.-Iran war.
In a statement on Friday, Hezbollah sidestepped any direct reference to the cease-fire while offering little indication that they would violate it. Israeli forces continue to occupy southern Lebanon and warned residents not to return there, despite the truce.
The latest fighting has killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon and displaced over one million residents, mostly from the south of the country, according to the Lebanese authorities. At least 13 Israeli soldiers have been killed, along with two civilians, according to the Israeli authorities.
Israel and Hezbollah traded strikes on Thursday right up to midnight, when the cease-fire took effect, according to statements from both sides. And while Israel and Lebanon said they would abide by the U.S.-brokered truce, its enforcement could be complicated by the fact that the Lebanese government does not control Hezbollah, which is more powerful than the Lebanese military.
News of the cease-fire brought relief to many in northern Israel, which has faced daily Hezbollah rocket fire for seven weeks. No incoming rockets have been reported in Israel since the cease-fire took hold.
Still, there was unease on both sides of the border. In Israel, local officials criticized the U.S.-brokered truce for coming before Hezbollah had been militarily neutralized. Among the thousands of Lebanese waiting on the country’s main highway heading south, the cease-fire’s short length was a primary concern.
The State Department, in a memo outlining the terms of the truce, said that Israel would retain its right “to take all necessary measures in self-defense” but would not carry out “offensive operations” against Lebanese targets. The Lebanese government, with international support, is expected to take “meaningful steps” to prevent Hezbollah from attacking Israeli targets, according to the memo.
Here’s what else we are covering:
Israel’s leader: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was assailed by allies and critics alike for agreeing to the cease-fire. He faced pressure from Washington to stop the fighting as his goal to gut Hezbollah remained far from fulfilled.
Trump response: President Trump announced the cease-fire on Thursday and wrote on social media: “I hope Hezbollah acts nicely and well during this important period of time. It will be an GREAT moment for them if they do.”
Lebanon-Israel ties: Mr. Trump said he would invite Mr. Netanyahu and President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon to the White House for talks. Here’s a brief history of the relationship between Israel and Lebanon, which do not have formal diplomatic ties.
President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon said Friday that one of the country’s demands in upcoming negotiations with Israel was that Israel withdraw forces from the country’s south. It was unclear what leverage his government would have. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said after the cease-fire was announced that ground forces would remain in place and that Hezbollah’s disarmament was “fundamental” for peace talks to proceed. In a statement, Aoun reiterated his commitment to “ending armed manifestations,” a phrase widely understood as a reference to Hezbollah, without naming the group directly.
Along the seafront in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, rescue workers combed through the rubble of buildings hit by Israeli strikes at 11:56 p.m. on Thursday — four minutes before the cease-fire went into effect. By Friday afternoon, the workers had recovered 14 bodies and were looking for seven people still missing under the rubble, they said.
Amad Mounwiss, 40, stood on the road across from wreckage. Her 20-year-old son had been visiting his grandfather in one of the apartment buildings and died in the strike, she said. Emergency workers had recovered his body hours earlier.
“Why? Why?” she said, stifling tears. “There’s no reason for this.”
Reporting from Qasmiyeh, Lebanon
Thousands of displaced people crammed roads in Lebanon on Friday as they tried to return to the country’s devastated south, hours after a cease-fire paused fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Many rushed onto the main highway to southern Lebanon the moment the truce went into effect at midnight, desperate to get back to their villages — and to see if their houses had survived an intense campaign of Israeli airstrikes.
“Even if my home is destroyed, I will stay on the land — I just want to be back,” said Abbas Shami, 40, as his car sat motionless in traffic on the coastal highway.
As he waited to inch forward, Mr. Shami hopped out of the driver’s seat and tightened yellow string holding down three mattresses that he had stacked on his car’s roof. They were for sleeping outside, he said, if he returned to his village, in Ghandouriyeh, and found his home destroyed.
Shouting from a nearby car, Nadi Nouriddine, 43, offered some stronger rope. Neighbors who remained in her village, Froun, had already told Ms. Nouriddine that her home was gone.
“At least I’m prepared to see that,” she said. “I just want to be back to my land.”
The latest round of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, has killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon and displaced over a million, mostly from the south of the country, according to the Lebanese authorities.
Even before displaced families reached the south, the war’s devastation was in plain view. Israel has bombed all of the main bridges linking northern and southern Lebanon across the Litani River, forcing cars to snake one by one along a makeshift dirt crossing. The bottleneck created a four-lane traffic jam stretching miles.
“Even if we have to walk, we will go home today,” said Ali Roumieh, 41. Around him, women and children squeezed between the cars after leaving their vehicles to travel by foot.
Still, excitement about return was tempered by uneasiness about the days to come. Unlike a previous cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah in 2024, which was indefinite, this one was announced as only for 10 days.
Abdullah Raouf Hamzieh, 54, recalled feeling ecstatic when the 2024 cease-fire was announced, and said it had felt like a win for Hezbollah. But he said his enthusiasm had faded as Israel continued to strike Lebanon in the year since.
“It actually wasn’t a victory — it was a disaster what happened,” Mr. Hamzieh said.
In a car nearby, Israa Jaber, 54, was waiting in traffic with her 9-year-old daughter, Lamis, who said she missed her teddy bears and her makeup. They were left at the family’s home in Srifa, a town in southern Lebanon, as the family rushed to flee Israeli airstrikes last month. Now they were headed back.
“I can’t express the joy I’m feeling. We didn’t sleep. But for this joy to be complete they have to extend this temporary truce,” Ms. Jaber said.
“If we have to leave again, I can’t describe how disappointing it would be,” she added. “It would be devastating.”
Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, said Friday that Israel’s goals for its war against Hezbollah had not been achieved before the cease-fire went into effect. He specified in a statement that an area of southern Lebanon “has not been demilitarized.” He added: “This would have to be done, either diplomatically or by resuming Israeli military activities at the end of the cease-fire.”
Katz indicated that Israeli military forces would continue to demolish structures in Lebanese villages that remained under Israeli military control.
Residents of northern Israel expressed relief, overshadowed by unease, on Friday as a cease-fire paused the country’s military campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah.
The 10-day truce, announced by President Trump on Thursday, is expected to bring some respite to the region, the area of Israel that has borne the brunt of its conflict with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia, since early March.
But many residents expressed frustration over Israel’s inability to curb Hezbollah after repeated rounds of conflict — and about having learned of the cease-fire from the leader of a foreign country.
“It’s like a betrayal,” Nadav Toledano, a shop owner who sells nuts in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya, said by telephone on Friday. “We feel like cannon fodder.”
David Azoulay, the head of Metula, an Israeli village near the border with Lebanon, wrote on social media, “This is what it looks like when a government cares about America’s interests, and not those of its own citizens.”
Residents of northern Israel described a busy Friday morning in some of the region’s commercial strips. Some towns announced that they would reopen schools on Sunday, pending any weekend developments.
Nearly seven weeks of daily rocket fire from Hezbollah into northern Israel killed at least two civilians and injured scores more. In response, Israel has invaded a broad area of southern Lebanon, which it still controls.
The current round of fighting has killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon and displaced over one million residents, mostly from the south of the country, according to the Lebanese authorities. At least 13 Israeli soldiers have also been killed, along with two civilians, according to the Israeli authorities.
The conflict left northern Israel under severe wartime restrictions, halting most day-to-day activities even as much of the rest of the country returned to normalcy after a cease-fire deal was struck with Iran this month.
Though his business suffered from a drop in activity, Mr. Toledano said he would rather absorb the economic blow now than face another conflict in the future. Once Israel launched an offensive, he said, “We should have seen it through to the end.”
Many residents of northern Israel had already been displaced for more than a year during the previous conflict with Hezbollah, between late 2023 and late 2024, and are wary that the current cease-fire may offer only temporary calm.
“Who can promise that we will not face renewed missile attacks against our people in hours, days or weeks?” Avichai Stern, the mayor of Kiryat Shmona, a northern Israeli city, wrote on social media.
The cease-fire, he added, “will endanger the safety of residents along the northern border and of all citizens of the State of Israel.”
Hezbollah did not make a direct reference to the cease-fire, while offering little indication that it would violate the agreement. The Iran-backed group warned in a statement on Friday that “the hands of these fighters will remain on the trigger.” Analysts say Hezbollah has little incentive to resume attacks, given the severe humanitarian toll the war has taken on its support base.
After weeks of war between Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s government has won a brief reprieve with a 10-day cease-fire.
Breaking a longstanding diplomatic taboo, the country’s leadership took a gamble by calling for talks with Israel in a bid to end the fighting — a bet that appears, for now, to have paid off.
Even as President Trump pushed for a direct phone call between Israeli and Lebanese leaders before the cease-fire on Thursday, President Joseph Aoun refused, opting instead to keep diplomatic engagement at a lower level. The move was apparently aimed at bolstering his political clout as he worked toward a cease-fire while avoiding the appearance of normalization with Israel, a deeply sensitive issue in Lebanon.
Turning that short-term truce into something lasting, however, will be a far greater challenge.
The government, which has no direct control over Hezbollah, now faces having to navigate the ever-thorny issue of the Iran-backed group’s disarmament.
But there is no national consensus in Lebanon on how or even whether that goal should be pursued. Hezbollah has long bucked calls to disarm and if the Lebanese government forces the issue, it could raise the risk of domestic instability at a critical moment.
For Israel, however, it is a nonnegotiable demand.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel described the disarmament issue on Thursday as “fundamental” to any broader peace deal.
That quagmire leaves Lebanon’s leadership with no good options, only less bad ones: pushing ahead with talks and moving against Hezbollah risks inflaming tensions at home, while failing to do so could mean a return to war.
“It’s a huge dilemma,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, the Lebanese capital.
Lebanon’s government also faces the prospect of an Israeli occupation across much of the country’s south, which Israel invaded during the war. Mr. Netanyahu made clear that he has no intention of withdrawing under the truce, and Washington has shown little sign of pressing him to do so.
“We are not leaving,” Mr. Netanyahu said after the deal was announced, outlining what he called a “security strip” stretching more than six miles into Lebanese territory.
That continued presence, which Israeli officials have said would entail the destruction of border towns and villages, will most likely prolong the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, deepening a humanitarian crisis that Lebanon’s government is already under pressure to alleviate.
As Lebanon gears up for further talks with Israel, the question of Israel’s withdrawal will be a central bargaining chip in the negotiations, analysts say.
“These are people’s homes,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “Will Israel use this in the negotiations? Absolutely. It’s just one more card they can play.”
“But,” she added, “you can’t build long-term peace under the barrel of a gun.”
Ayman Sojod, 55, who previously lived in Beirut’s southern suburbs, said he had been renting a home in the port city of Byblos, north of the city, since Israel’s 2024 strikes against Lebanon. On Friday, he was back in the southern outskirts to assess the situation and planned to bring his family in two or three days.
“I will keep paying the rent because the enemy cannot be trusted,” Sojod said of the Byblos home. “We are still worried that something might happen, so these 10 days are not going to be easy.”
President Trump may be trumpeting the cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot.
Israeli voters did not want the fighting to end.
Overwhelmingly, polls showed, they wanted the military to keep up the pressure on Hezbollah, the militant group whose rockets and missiles have made life miserable and perilous for residents of northern Israel, until the group, which Iran backs, was destroyed or forced to disarm.
That, after all, is what Mr. Netanyahu and his military chiefs had promised to do.
But Mr. Netanyahu quickly, if grudgingly, fell in line on Thursday when Mr. Trump pressed for a cease-fire in Lebanon — just as the Israeli leader did with prior cease-fires the president had orchestrated.
Now, the prime minister’s critics, and even some of his allies on the right, have seized on what appears plain as day: his inability to resist Mr. Trump’s pressure, not just in pushing to bring the long-distance war with Iran to a close but even in demanding a truce with an enemy directly across Israel’s northern border.
“A cease-fire must come from a position of strength and be an Israeli decision, reflecting leverage that serves negotiations,” said Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff whose new centrist opposition party, Yashar, is gaining in the polls. “A pattern is emerging in which cease-fires are being imposed on us — in Gaza, in Iran, and now in Lebanon.”
It is a stark turnabout from Mr. Netanyahu’s role in persuading Mr. Trump to join Israel in attacking Iran — a hard-sell pitch, as The New York Times reported, that Iran was ripe for regime change, that a combined U.S.-Israeli operation could quickly topple the Islamic Republic, and that concerns about Iran’s responding by closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking U.S. interests in the region were overblown. None of those assurances proved true.
A core element of Mr. Netanyahu’s appeal to voters — the argument that his close bond and strategic mind meld with Mr. Trump make him uniquely equipped to ensure Israel’s security — now appears far less convincing.
“Netanyahu influenced how the war started,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He won’t influence how it ends.”
Mr. Netanyahu, who is up for re-election this year — and whose coalition is behind in the polls — took pains to reassure Israelis about the halt in fighting with Hezbollah, saying that soldiers would remain in a security buffer zone extending 10 kilometers into Lebanon. That would guard against incursions into Israel and against the use by Hezbollah of anti-tank rockets to terrorize border communities, he said in a televised address.
“Of course, there are still problems,” Mr. Netanyahu conceded. “They still have rockets left.”
But Mr. Netanyahu said that could be addressed in the context of talks over what he said could be a “historic peace agreement with Lebanon.”
Of course, it is Hezbollah, which could use a cease-fire to regroup, that looms as the would-be spoiler. The cease-fire negotiations were between Israel and the Lebanese government, not Hezbollah — and peace talks would be the same. But the militant group’s assent would be crucial for any agreement to be enforceable.
Whatever comes of those negotiations, the talk in Israel of Mr. Netanyahu’s tendency to “overpromise” when it comes to security matters — and particularly about what can be gained from military action — is growing louder.
“It creates, even for his supporters, this serious frustration because the results do not align with the promises,” said Shira Efron, an Israeli analyst at RAND. “Not even close. What are the war aims that have been achieved?”
So, too, is the talk of Mr. Netanyahu’s apparent inability or unwillingness to stand up to Mr. Trump.
Before the cease-fire was announced Thursday, “There was a serious school of thought here that said that, when it comes to Iran, Netanyahu has no choice but to go for a cease-fire if that’s what Trump wants, but when it comes to Lebanon, he will defy him,” said Nimrod Novik, a onetime aide to Prime Minister Shimon Peres and a fellow of the liberal Israel Policy Forum.
“He can’t,” Mr. Novik added. “Not in an election year, when he’s counting on Trump perhaps to campaign on his behalf, and at least not to throw him under the bus.”
There is a more forgiving read of Mr. Netanyahu’s latest acquiescence to Mr. Trump’s pressure.
For one thing, the military gains to be had in Lebanon may have reached the point of diminishing returns.
For another, Mr. Netanyahu has already gotten more from Mr. Trump than an Israeli leader has ever gotten from an American president.
“It’s not necessarily a negative to be considerate of their needs,” said Ms. Efron, referring to the United States.
Ms. Efron argued that Mr. Netanyahu’s big promises “cannot be achieved using military means alone.” Negotiations will be necessary, she said, but diplomacy was a largely forgotten art in Israel.
“So if it leaves this whole idea of Trump pushing Israel to negotiations?” she added. “Good. That’s great. Israel will not go voluntarily. Not under Netanyahu.”
When the war began, Abdullah Raouf Hamzieh, 54, had to leave his home near Bint Jbiel, a town in southern Lebanon where Hezbollah and Israeli forces have clashed in recent days. He recalled feeling ecstatic when the 2024 cease-fire was announced, and said it felt like it was a win for Hezbollah. But as Israeli forces continued to strike Lebanon in the year since, his enthusiasm faded.
“It actually wasn’t a victory, it was a disaster what happened,” Hamzieh said. Now, he hopes that the temporary truce will finally lead to a more lasting peace.
Many Lebanese, especially those displaced by the war, still feel uneasy and uncertain about the days to come. Unlike the cease-fire in 2024, which was indefinite, this one is for only 10 days.
“If we have to leave again, I can’t describe how disappointing it would be, it would be devastating,” said Israa Jaber, 54, as she sat in her car waiting in traffic heading south to her home in the town of Srifa. Jaber’s 9-year-old daughter Lamis said she missed her teddy bears and her makeup, which she left at home in their rush to flee last month.
In Qasmiyeh, a town on the highway that runs along Lebanon’s coast, Lebanese army soldiers are using excavators to repair a bridge that links the road from the north to the south. The crossing has become the main bottleneck as thousands of people try to return to their homes in southern Lebanon.
Over the past month and a half, Israeli forces bombarded all of the main bridges on the Litani River, which divides northern and southern Lebanon. They hit the bridge in Qasmiyeh again yesterday, hours before the ceasefire was announced.
There have been heavy Israeli airstrikes in Dahiya, the dense area on the southern edge of Beirut. Ahmad Lahham, a Dahiya resident, expressed defiance on Friday and criticized the Lebanese government for trying to end to the fighting.
“I am standing in front of my destroyed house, you think I care? I don’t,” said Lahham, 48. He added: “They want peace with the enemy and we still have blood on our ground.”
Some in northern Israel criticized the truce after it was announced on Thursday, arguing that it would do little to remove the threat posed by Hezbollah. “This is what it is like to have a government that cares about America’s interest, and not that of its citizens,” David Azoulay, the head of the Israeli border village of Metula, wrote on social media.
The cease-fire has brought relief to many in northern Israel, which faced intense Hezbollah rocket fire in the current round of fighting. These rocket launches continued into the last hour before the cease-fire went into effect at midnight. At least eight people were injured in the city of Nahariya on Thursday, according to the national emergency service.
After the cease-fire went into effect at midnight, thousands of displaced families hoping to return to their homes flooded onto the main highway to southern Lebanon. But since Israeli forces destroyed the two bridges connecting the highway to the south over the Litani River, vehicles have to snake one by one along an ad-hoc dirt crossing. That bottleneck has created four lanes of stand-still traffic that stretches for more than two miles. “We will make it home. Even if we have to walk, we will go home today,” said Ali Roumieh, 41, as he sat in his car.
One of the main questions in Lebanon on Friday morning was if the cease-fire would hold. NNA, the state news agency, reported traffic jams on roads leading to southern Lebanon, from where many had fled because of Israeli evacuation orders and bombardment. Earlier, the Lebanese army said it had recorded several Israeli violations since the cease-fire went into effect at midnight. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Trump hailed the cease-fire in Lebanon late Thursday. “May have been a historic day for Lebanon,” he wrote on social media. “Good things are happening!!!” The president announced the 10-day truce after an American diplomatic push, removing a major obstacle in the efforts to end the war with Iran. “No more killing. Must finally have PEACE!” Trump said in a post earlier on Thursday.
In Sidon, Lebanon, displaced residents began to return to their homes early Friday after a cease-fire was to have taken effect between Israel and Lebanon. Car caravans filled roads and residents waved flags in celebration of the temporary truce. More than one million residents, mostly in southern Lebanon, were displaced by the fighting.
In a statement released at midnight in Lebanon, the official start time of the cease-fire, the Israeli military said it had struck 380 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon over the prior 24 hours, including launchers and headquarter sites. It said it was “on high alert in defense” and would operate according to the directives of the Israeli government.
Celebratory gunfire pierced the night sky above the Lebanese capital, Beirut, as the cease-fire went into effect.
The spokesman of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, welcomed the Lebanon cease-fire, according Iranian state media, saying it was part of the Iran-U.S. agreement brokered by Pakistan. He credited Pakistan’s efforts over the past 24 hours for the 10-day pause, and called for Israel’s full withdrawal from southern Lebanon.
The cease-fire, first announced by President Trump on Thursday, reflects Mr. Trump’s desire to wind down the war in Lebanon, where renewed fighting has threatened to undermine a fragile cease-fire in Iran.
That has put Mr. Netanyahu in an awkward position. Even as he faces pressure from Washington, his own goal to gut Hezbollah is far from fulfilled, and he was swiftly assailed by his allies and critics.
Avigdor Liberman, a right-wing opposition party leader, called the cease-fire a “betrayal of the residents” of northern Israel, many of whom have fled their homes on the border.
Yair Lapid, the centrist parliamentary opposition leader, said the cease-fire announcement was “not the first time this government’s promises have been shattered by reality.”
Even inside Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party, lawmakers offered veiled criticism of the decision. Some questioned whether the Lebanese government could negotiate on behalf of Hezbollah, which it does not control. Hezbollah, a proxy of Iran which began firing rockets over the border after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran last month, had for many years constituted a more powerful fighting force than the Lebanese national military.
Hours after Mr. Trump’s cease-fire announcement, Mr. Netanyahu said Israeli troops would remain inside Lebanon during the cease-fire, as part of what he described as an “expanded security zone,” stretching between Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast and its border with Syria, south of the Litani River.
“This is where we are located,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a three-minute video. “We are not leaving.”
The latest war in Lebanon, which began in early March, has killed nearly 2,200 people. In Israel, 13 soldiers and two civilians have also been killed, according to the Israeli authorities.
Moshe Davidovich, the head of a cluster of Israeli villages along the border with Lebanon, responded with a searing critique on social media. “Agreements are signed by suits in Washington, but the price is paid in blood, destroyed homes, and wrecked communities here.”
Mr. Davidovich’s constituents are among tens of thousands of Israelis who were displaced last year during a previous conflict with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, and had since returned to their homes, only to again come under almost daily rocket fire.
In an official statement, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group, acknowledged the cease-fire’s announcement, but did not directly address whether it would accept it. The group cautioned residents of Lebanon’s south to not head toward areas targeted by Israeli strikes during the war, saying that Israel had a “history of violating pledges and agreements.”
The announcement of a cease-fire in Lebanon followed a flurry of phone calls among key officials, according to the White House. President Trump spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday evening, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio later called Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, to secure his support for the agreement. On Thursday, Trump spoke twice with Netanyahu and once with Aoun to finalize the deal. The State Department worked simultaneously with the governments of Lebanon and Israel to formulate a memorandum of understanding for the cease-fire.
President Trump announced on Thursday that the leaders of Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a 10-day cease-fire, a development that could bring an end to fighting between Israel and the Iranian-backed militant group, Hezbollah.
Mr. Trump’s announcement came after Israeli and Lebanese officials met this week in Washington for direct talks, a rarity because the two nations have technically been at war since 1948. Lebanon’s prime minister welcomed news of the cease-fire. Hezbollah and Israel have yet to comment.
Central to the dispute is Israel’s conflict with Lebanese-based Hezbollah militants, marked for decades by cross-border attacks, repeated Israeli invasions and tenuous truces. Lebanon’s government has been caught between the warring sides. It has long struggled to balance any effort to curb Hezbollah — whose forces outstrip the government’s in parts of the south — with fears of inflaming sectarian conflict.
Here’s a brief history of Israel-Lebanon relations:
In 1948, five armies from Arab countries, including Lebanon’s, invaded Israel after it declared itself an independent state, sparking the first Arab-Israeli war. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled, including many to refugee camps in Lebanon.
In 1949, Israel and Lebanon agreed to an armistice along their internationally demarcated border, though they have never signed a formal peace treaty.
Two decades later, Lebanon did not join a coalition of Arab states that attacked Israel in 1967, setting off a renewed bout of fighting that ended six days later in the coalition's defeat. Israel gained control of the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, displacing more Palestinians and leading to a buildup of more militants in Lebanon.
In March 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon for the first time, partly in response to an attack by Palestinian militants that left 35 Israelis and an American dead. Lebanese officials said 1,200 people died in the three-month invasion, during which Israel said it killed 350 Palestinian militants and lost 34 of its own soldiers.
Against the backdrop of civil war in Lebanon, a brutal sectarian conflict that lasted until 1990 and resulted in 150,000 deaths, Israel occupied areas of southern Lebanon in 1982 and besieged Beirut, with the stated goal of rooting out Palestinian operatives.
In September 1982, a Lebanese Christian militia, enabled by Israeli military authorities, committed a massacre at two refugee camps in southern Beirut, Sabra and Shatila. The militiamen killed hundreds if not thousands of Palestinians — estimates of the death toll vary — prompting an international backlash and the resignation of Israel’s defense minister.
In response to Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, militants there formed Hezbollah, a radical Shiite movement backed by Iran. Israeli forces occupied areas of southern Lebanon and battled Hezbollah until withdrawing in 2000.
Six years later, Hezbollah and Israel resumed fighting after a surprise incursion by the militant group in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two captured. The conflict, lasting 34 days, involved a third Israeli ground invasion, the bombardment of Beirut and the deaths of over 1,000 Lebanese, most of them civilians, and 150 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
In a step toward warmer relations, Israel and Lebanon signed a maritime deal in 2022, brokered by the Biden administration, to better demarcate their shared border at sea. But any good will soon came under intense strain.
After Hamas, the Iran-backed militant group in Gaza, attacked southern Israel in October 2023, killing about 1,200 people, Hezbollah fired rockets on Israel in solidarity with Hamas. Repeated exchanges of fire culminated in Israel’s fourth ground invasion of Lebanon in October 2024, which it said was intended to remove Hezbollah’s military infrastructure used to attack towns in northern Israel.
After a cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel the following year, Lebanon’s government declared a renewed push to disarm Hezbollah under pressure from Washington.
Fighting flared again in March 2026 after the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, and Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel. Israel intensified its ground invasion of southern Lebanon, sending in thousands of troops and outlining plans to occupy about 10 percent of the country.
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‘I Just Want to Be Back’: Thousands Rush South in Lebanon Under Cease-Fire
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/17/2026, 5:54:12 PM
Stuck in standstill traffic, Lebanese people who had been displaced by fighting expressed a mix of excitement and uncertainty about a pause in Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah.
Christina Goldbaum and Hwaida Saad
Reporting from Qasmiyeh, Lebanon
Thousands of displaced people crammed roads in Lebanon on Friday as they tried to return to the country’s devastated south, hours after a cease-fire paused fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Many rushed onto the main highway to southern Lebanon the moment the truce went into effect at midnight, desperate to get back to their villages — and to see if their houses had survived an intense campaign of Israeli airstrikes.
“Even if my home is destroyed, I will stay on the land — I just want to be back,” said Abbas Shami, 40, as his car sat motionless in traffic on the coastal highway.
As he waited to inch forward, Mr. Shami hopped out of the driver’s seat and tightened yellow string holding down three mattresses that he had stacked on his car’s roof. They were for sleeping outside, he said, if he returned to his village, in Ghandouriyeh, and found his home destroyed.
Shouting from a nearby car, Nadi Nouriddine, 43, offered some stronger rope. Neighbors who remained in her village, Froun, had already told Ms. Nouriddine that her home was gone.
“At least I’m prepared to see that,” she said. “I just want to be back to my land.”
The latest round of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, has killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon and displaced over a million, mostly from the south of the country, according to the Lebanese authorities.
Even before displaced families reached the south, the war’s devastation was in plain view. Israel has bombed all of the main bridges linking northern and southern Lebanon across the Litani River, forcing cars to snake one by one along a makeshift dirt crossing. The bottleneck created a four-lane traffic jam stretching miles.
“Even if we have to walk, we will go home today,” said Ali Roumieh, 41. Around him, women and children squeezed between the cars after leaving their vehicles to travel by foot.
Still, excitement about return was tempered by uneasiness about the days to come. Unlike a previous cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah in 2024, which was indefinite, this one was announced as only for 10 days.
Abdullah Raouf Hamzieh, 54, recalled feeling ecstatic when the 2024 cease-fire was announced, and said it had felt like a win for Hezbollah. But he said his enthusiasm had faded as Israeli continued to strike Lebanon in the year since.
“It actually wasn’t a victory — it was a disaster what happened,” Mr. Hamzieh said.
In a car nearby, Israa Jaber, 54, was waiting in traffic with her 9-year-old daughter, Lamis, who said she missed her teddy bears and her makeup. They were left at the family’s home in Srifa, a town in southern Lebanon, as the family rushed to flee Israeli airstrikes last month. Now they were headed back.
“I can’t express the joy I’m feeling. We didn’t sleep. But for this joy to be complete they have to extend this temporary truce,” Ms. Jaber said.
“If we have to leave again, I can’t describe how disappointing it would be,” she added. “It would be devastating.”
Christina Goldbaum is The Times’s bureau chief in Beirut, leading coverage of Lebanon and Syria.
David Guttenfelder is a Times visual journalist based in Minneapolis.
Read the full story at nyt News.
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