President Biden on Tuesday announced a cease-fire deal to stop the fighting between Israel and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, raising hope that it could bring a lasting end to the deadliest war in Lebanon in decades.
Minutes earlier, the Israeli prime minister’s office announced that ministers had approved the cease-fire proposal. The fighting has displaced over a million Lebanese and tens of thousands of Israelis, killed more than 3,000 Lebanese and 100 Israelis and upended the regional balance of power.
Speaking in a televised address from the White House, Mr. Biden said the cease-fire would go into effect at 4 a.m. Wednesday in Israel and Lebanon. He said that the deal was intended to definitively end the war between the two sides, calling it “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities.”
Hezbollah did not immediately comment on the announcement. Lebanon’s government — which does not control Hezbollah but plays an essential role in the deal — was set to meet on Wednesday morning to discuss the cease-fire agreement.
Israel’s security cabinet approved the U.S.-backed proposal late on Tuesday night after hours of deliberations, the Israeli government said in a statement. Shortly afterward, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, spoke with Mr. Biden to reiterate that Israel would crack down on “any threat to its security.”
In an address on Tuesday night to the Israeli public, Mr. Netanyahu sought to rebuff right-wing criticism at home over the decision to end the war with Hezbollah. He argued a truce was necessary to allow Israel to focus on the threat posed by its regional adversary, Iran, to isolate Hamas, and to replenish weapons stockpiles.
“We will respond forcefully to any violation” of the cease-fire by Hezbollah, Mr. Netanyahu said.
Under the agreement, Israel would gradually withdraw its remaining forces from Lebanon over the next 60 days, while Hezbollah would not be allowed to entrench itself near the Israeli border, Mr. Biden said.
“Civilians on both sides will be able to safely return to their communities and begin to rebuild their homes, their schools, their farms, their businesses and their very lives,” he said.
Mr. Biden said the Lebanese army and security forces would “deploy and take control over their own territory” again, and that the United States, France and other allies had pledged to ensure the deal worked.
“We’ve determined this conflict will not be just another cycle of violence,” he said.
In the hours before Israeli ministers approved the deal, the Israeli military launched one of its heaviest barrages of airstrikes since the war began, hitting the heart of Beirut and Hezbollah-dominated neighborhoods south of the city.
The cease-fire is officially an agreement among Israel, Lebanon and mediating countries including the United States. Nabih Berri, the speaker of Lebanon’s Parliament, has been acting as a liaison with Hezbollah, and any deal was expected to include the group’s unofficial approval.
Hezbollah has sustained blow after blow over the past few months, including the assassination of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Israeli officials say they have achieved their goals in Lebanon and that they are ready to turn their focus squarely on the Gaza Strip, where the country’s military is still fighting a war of attrition against Hamas that began over a year ago.
But the deal would also break Hezbollah’s previous vow to continue fighting until Israel ends its war with Hamas in Gaza. Some right-wing Israelis have argued that a cease-fire now only sets the stage for another war with Hezbollah a few years down the line.
Israel and Hezbollah last fought a major war in 2006, a 34-day battle that killed more than 1,000 Lebanese and 150 Israelis before ending in an internationally backed cease-fire. For years, the two sides observed an uneasy truce, as both prepared for what they viewed as an inevitable major conflict.
Hezbollah began attacking Israel last October, after Hamas’s surprise assault on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and set off the war in Gaza. Israel responded by repeatedly bombarding Lebanon and evacuating tens of thousands of Israeli civilians from border communities.
The volume of attacks on both sides slowly escalated. Then, over the past two months, Israel blew up thousands of pagers and radios belonging to Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon, killed Mr. Nasrallah and other leaders in massive airstrikes and launched a ground invasion to level structures that Israel said were used by Hezbollah.
While Hezbollah fighters have continued to fire thousands of missiles and drones at Israel, setting off air-raid sirens across the country, they have not inflicted anywhere near the casualties that Israeli forces have dealt the armed group.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York in September.Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has joined a group of lawyers who are planning to defend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him.
Mr. Cuomo, who is considering running for mayor of New York City next year, said on Sunday that he was proud to work with other lawyers to support Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Cuomo served as state attorney general from 2007 to 2010 and graduated from Albany Law School.
“This is a pivotal moment, and this is the moment when true friends stand shoulder to shoulder and fight for the state of Israel,” Mr. Cuomo said at an event in Manhattan held by the National Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education.
Last week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip. The court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Hamas’s military chief, Muhammad Deif, accusing him of crimes against humanity.
The prominent defense lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz said recently that he was putting together a “legal dream team” to defend Mr. Netanyahu in the “court of public opinion.” The group includes former U.S. attorneys general Michael Mukasey and William P. Barr.
The group will argue that “Israel’s actions in Gaza don’t violate any international law or laws of war over which the I.C.C. has jurisdiction,” Mr. Dershowitz said.
Mr. Cuomo served as governor of New York from 2011 until 2021, when he resigned amid a wave of sexual harassment allegations. A House subcommittee recently referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, accusing him of lying to Congress about his involvement in a state Covid report on nursing home deaths. He denies all the allegations.
Mr. Cuomo is considering challenging Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted in September on federal corruption charges. Several prominent candidates have entered the race ahead of the primary next June.
“It is imperative that this cease-fire be respected, and that it be lasting, in order to restore the security of the Lebanese and Israeli people,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Tuesday, adding that his country would “spare no effort to support the implementation of this agreement,” including by helping the Lebanese army increase its presence in southern Lebanon.
Macron also said that the deal should “open the path” to a cease-fire in Gaza, where he said civilian populations were facing “incomparable suffering.”
Biden Announces Israel and Lebanon Cease-Fire Deal
President Biden praised the truce, which would stop the fighting between Israel and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah.
Under the deal reached today, effective at 4 a.m. tomorrow local time, the fighting across the Lebanese-Israeli border will end. Will end. This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities. What is left of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations will not be allowed. Civilians on both sides will soon be able to safely return to their communities, and begin to rebuild their homes, their schools, their farms, their businesses and their very lives. We are determined that this conflict will not be just another cycle of violence. We, along with France and others, will provide the necessary assistance to make sure this deal is implemented fully and effectively. Let me be clear: If Hezbollah or anyone else breaks the deal and poses a direct threat to Israel, then Israel retains the right to self-defense, consistent with international law. And just as the Lebanese people deserve a future of security and prosperity, so do the people of Gaza. They too deserve an end to the fighting and displacement.
President Biden praised the truce, which would stop the fighting between Israel and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah.CreditCredit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times
Finally, President Biden got his Rose Garden peace deal. It was not exactly the one he has been straining to land for most of the past year, but it was a breakthrough nonetheless — and, coming after a bitter election, a sweet moment of validation.
The question is whether the cease-fire in Lebanon that Mr. Biden announced on Tuesday will be the coda to his diplomatic efforts in the Middle East or a steppingstone to more sweeping agreements that could at last end the devastating war in Gaza and potentially even set the stage for a broader regional transformation.
If it holds, the Lebanon cease-fire by itself could make an important difference. It was designed to restore stability along the border between Israel and Lebanon, permitting hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians on both sides to return to their homes while providing a buffer zone to ensure Israeli security and offering an opportunity for Lebanon’s government to reassert control over its territory from a weakened Hezbollah.
But as he stepped out of the Oval Office into the Rose Garden on a sunny November day in the winter of his presidency to hail the agreement on Tuesday, Mr. Biden clearly had grander ambitions still in mind. “It reminds us that peace is possible,” he said. “I say that again: Peace is possible. As long as that is the case, I’ll not for a single moment stop working to achieve it.”
With just 55 days left in office, Mr. Biden is racing against the clock of history. He would prefer to be remembered as the president who set the Middle East on a path toward a lasting settlement of longstanding animosities than one who turned over a mess to his successor.
With the Lebanon accord in hand, Mr. Biden said he would now renew his push for a cease-fire in Gaza, working along with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, and he called on both Israel and Hamas to seize the moment. He described the cataclysmic violence that Palestinians have endured in Gaza in more visceral terms than he typically has over the past 14 months of war.
“They, too, deserve an end to the fighting and displacement,” Mr. Biden said. “The people of Gaza have been through hell. Their world has been absolutely shattered. Far too many civilians in Gaza have suffered far too much.”
Mr. Biden laid most of the blame for the continuing fighting in Gaza with Hamas, which “has refused for months and months to negotiate a good-faith cease-fire and a hostage deal,” he said. But he also called on Israel, which “has been bold on the battlefield,” to now “be bold in turning tactical gains against Iran and its proxies into a coherent strategy.”
An end to the fighting in Gaza accompanied by the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas — including seven Americans, four of whom are believed to still be alive — would be a gratifying final accomplishment for Mr. Biden and his team. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has made it his highest priority for the final weeks of his tenure. Mr. Biden’s advisers Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, along with the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, have all devoted much of the past year to the project.
At so many points along the way they thought they were on the cusp of a deal, only to have something blow it up — a new burst of violence, the targeted assassination of Hamas leaders, the killing of Israeli hostages. Yet they kept going back again and again, never giving up, perhaps naïve in the view of some, but certainly determined and relentless.
After so many close calls, it is hard to imagine that they could pull it off in the time they have left, especially if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel concludes that he would be better off waiting for President-elect Donald J. Trump to take office on Jan. 20. But Mr. Biden’s team insisted again on Tuesday that it was possible.
More elusive, yet endlessly attractive, for Mr. Biden is the broader realignment of the region represented by a long-sought agreement with Saudi Arabia that was derailed by Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, triggering the Gaza war. Even now, at this late hour, Mr. Biden said he might be able to nail down a deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia by providing American security commitments and civilian nuclear assistance to the kingdom and creating a credible pathway to a Palestinian state.
“I believe this agenda remains possible,” Mr. Biden said. “In my remaining time in office, I’ll work tirelessly to advance this vision for an integrated, secure and prosperous region, all of which strengthens America’s national security.” The chances seem remote, but if nothing else, he hopes he can set the table for the next administration to complete such a deal.
Administration officials said they were staying in touch with Mr. Trump’s team about their efforts. Mr. Hochstein briefed the president-elect’s national security advisers shortly after the Nov. 5 election and again in the past two days about the approach and came away feeling that the incoming team was supportive, according to a senior administration official who discussed the sensitive contacts on the condition of anonymity.
The official said that “the political and geopolitical stars both are aligned” for the Saudi deal, which would build on the normalization agreements that Mr. Trump helped seal between Israel and several smaller Arab nations during his first term. Mr. Trump has a close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who has made clear he is eager for a deal if one can be reached.
In the meantime, the Biden team has work to do to ensure the success of the agreement it has now negotiated in Lebanon, which could easily unravel given the fraught history of the benighted Arab state. Under the agreement, fighting was to halt at 4 a.m. local time on Wednesday, and over the next 60 days Hezbollah and Israeli forces are to make phased withdrawals from southern Lebanon while the Lebanese Army moves in to ensure the peace.
“This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” Mr. Biden said. “What is left of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations will not be allowed — I emphasize, will not be allowed — to threaten the security of Israel again.”
Mr. Biden said that the United States and France would work to ensure that the agreement was successfully enacted, but he repeated that no American combat troops would be involved in the effort. “We’re determined this conflict will not be just another cycle of violence,” he said.
That cycle has been hard to break. Among other things, the latest deal’s negotiators said that Israel would retain the right to respond to any new attacks by Hezbollah, raising the question of whether the cease-fire would really hold. Hezbollah is technically not a party to the agreement, but the Lebanese government ostensibly negotiated on its behalf.
The Biden team was mindful of the unsatisfying end to the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, when the international community brokered a cease-fire, only to essentially move on to other issues even as Hezbollah never really gave up its hold on the south. Mr. Biden’s aides said they had learned the lessons of 2006 and sought to craft this agreement to avoid the same pitfalls.
A “tripartite mechanism” created shortly after the 2006 war will be reformulated and enhanced to include France and to be led by the United States. The group will receive complaints about potential violations and work with the Lebanese Army to build its capacity to ensure security in the southern part of the country. A recently revived military technical committee will include other countries that can provide equipment, training and financial support for Lebanon’s security forces.
Mr. Biden in his televised speech on Tuesday made a point of guaranteeing that no American combat forces would be involved in securing the border. But officials separately said that noncombat American troops working out of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut could be involved in providing training and other support.
Those, of course, were important details, but they were details, best left to aides to describe. For a lame-duck president increasingly fading into the backdrop, the bigger picture loomed. Yes, his time at the top is coming to an end. Yes, his successor is now setting the tone. But for now, the Oval Office is still his. The final legacy is yet to be written.
It was almost possible to hear Mr. Biden trying to write it in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. “Today’s announcement,” he said, “brings us closer to realizing the affirmative agenda that I’ve been pushing forward during my entire presidency, a vision for the future of the Middle East where it’s at peace and prosperous and integrated across borders.”
Avichai Stern, the mayor of Kiryat Shmona, an Israeli border city pummeled by Hezbollah rockets, slammed the cease-fire agreement. “I don’t dispute that we’ve achieved a lot in the war. But what happens the minute we withdraw?” Stern said. “They’ll return to the same place, just a minute from the border, with a clear line of sight — ready to conquer northern Israel.”
At least some residents of Kiryat Shmona were unlikely to return home, fearing that they might be subject to a massive attack similar to the one Hamas perpetrated on southern Israel in 2023, Stern said. “Some people will always go back — but in this situation, I think many will not,” he added.
Lebanon’s caretaker cabinet is set to meet on Wednesday morning, when they are expected to formally approve the cease-fire deal. Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said in a statement late Tuesday that he had reviewed the agreement, which he called a “fundamental step” to regional stability. Mikati thanked the U.S. and France for their help in brokering the deal.
Just minutes after President Biden announced that a cease-fire agreement had been reached, an Israeli airstrike once again hit in the heart of Beirut. It appears the fighting is set to continue until it formally goes into effect at 4 a.m. local time in Israel and Lebanon.
Israel’s approval of the cease-fire deal comes exactly 70 days after Israel detonated Hezbollah’s pager devices across Lebanon, signaling the start of a full-blown war between the two sides. It also comes exactly 415 days since the two sides first exchanged fire, when Hezbollah began launching rockets into Israel in support of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack.
Biden said that Israel retained the right to defend itself “consistent with international law” and could respond if Hezbollah breaks the terms of the cease-fire.
President Biden just spoke with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s office said. Netanyahu thanked Biden for U.S. involvement in achieving the cease-fire deal and for “the understanding that Israel will preserve its freedom of action in enforcing it.”
Biden said civilians on both sides of the border would soon be able to return to their communities and their lives. He said the United States was determined that the cease-fire would not just be another in a cycle of violence.
President Biden on Tuesday hailed a cease-fire agreement between Lebanon and Israel to halt fighting that has been raging across the border between Israel and Hezbollah. He said that under the deal, the fighting will end, saying it was “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities.”
The Israeli cabinet approved the “American proposal for a cease-fire arrangement in Lebanon” by a majority of 10 ministers to one, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement. “Israel values the contribution of the United States to the process and preserves its right to act against any threat to its security,” the statement said.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the hard-line national security minister, called the proposed cease-fire deal with Lebanon a mistake on social media. Without a “security zone” inside Lebanon to ward off Hezbollah, the situation would ultimately lead to another war with the Lebanese armed group sometime in the future, he said.
Eli Rachevski, who lives in a northern Israeli community that has seen near daily air-raid sirens for months, said the news of a potential cease-fire evoked mixed feelings. While hopeful for an end to the chaos, Rachevski, a resident of Sa’ar, said he was skeptical that Israel would actually immediately attack should Hezbollah violate the truce.
“Our enforcement should be substantial — no patience and no letting things slide,” he said. He added that making the tens of thousands of displaced Israelis feel safe enough to return to their homes in the north would take a long time.
Netanyahu’s televised address in support of the cease-fire proposal on the table with Lebanon appeared to be aimed primarily at rebuffing right-wing criticism of the deal in Israel. The prime minister vowed that Israel would attack immediately should Hezbollah violate the deal — including by arming itself, rather than directly firing at Israel.
Netanyahu noticeably did not give any details of the cease-fire to the Israeli public, which has mostly learned of the contours of the truce from leaks to the news media.
U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said the U.N.’s peacekeeping forces in southern Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, and the U.N.’s special coordinator for Lebanon “stand ready to enforce" a cease-fire. He added that the U.N. was “seriously concerned” about the heavy Israeli bombardment campaign currently unfolding in Lebanon.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said there were three reasons for a cease-fire in Lebanon: It would allow Israel to focus on Iran; give Israel’s military an opportunity to rebuild its stockpiles; and isolate Hamas, which Israel is fighting in the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu vowed that Israel would not be lulled by a truce into allowing Hezbollah to violate the truce by firing rockets or building military fortifications along Israel’s border. “We will respond mightily to any breach,” he said.
In televised remarks, Prime Minister Netanyahu said he was bringing an “outline for a cease-fire in Lebanon” for approval by the Israeli cabinet tonight. “The length of the cease-fire will depend on what happens in Lebanon,” said Netanyahu. “With the full understanding of the United States, we are preserving full military freedom of action — if Hezbollah breaks the agreement and seeks to arm itself, we will attack.”
Video
CreditCredit...Israel Government Press Office via Associated Press
Smoke rises over a building after a strike in Beirut, Lebanon, on Tuesday.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
The first Israeli airstrike that rattled Beirut, the Lebanese capital, on Tuesday struck without warning, destroying a four-story building in the heart of the city. Then a barrage of airstrikes struck the city’s southern suburbs in quick succession: One strike, then two, then 20 — all within minutes and all sending plumes of black smoke across the skyline.
Soon a city on edge was panicked, as the Israeli military issued warnings for four more imminent strikes in the capital. People jumped into their cars or took to the streets on foot trying to get out of the city, clogging the roads with crowds and bumper-to-bumper traffic. Few were certain of where to go or how to avoid the neighborhoods highlighted in the warnings.
“There is no safe place tonight,” said Mohammed Awada, 52, who fled the southern suburbs of Beirut in October.
The Israeli bombardment of Beirut and its surroundings on Tuesday was the most intense since the war between Hezbollah and Israel escalated, stoking panic in the Lebanese capital as people anxiously waited for news of a cease-fire deal.
The airstrikes struck in the heart of the capital after a series of evacuation warnings — the first for the city center during the war. Around 10 minutes later, airstrikes began hitting central Beirut, leaving almost no time for people to evacuate. The areas targetedincluded an upscale neighborhood on Beirut’s seafront, home to the American University of Beirut.
The intensified bombings came as Israeli officials prepared to meet to discuss a possible cease-fire with Hezbollah. The final days of the 2006 Lebanon war, the last major conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, featured some of the most intense Israeli bombardments of that war.
Lebanon’s health ministry said that at least 10 people were killed and dozens of others injured in the strikes on Tuesday in Beirut. Many were presumed to be still trapped under rubble, with rescuers working into the night as Israeli surveillance drones whirred overhead. Southern Lebanon, where Israel is involved in a ground offensive, also experienced heavy strikes throughout the day that killed at least eight people, including children, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
The Israeli military also carried out some of its most intense bombardment yet on the Dahiya, the southern outskirts of Beirut that is effectively governed by Hezbollah. The strikes sent a huge cloud of smoke into the city’s skyline. Unlike Beirut, the once-bustling area has been left almost entirely empty in recent weeks as a result of Israel’s bombing campaign.
The simultaneous wave of strikes in the Dahiya and central Beirut sounded for miles, rattling windows and sending people running for cover.
Shortly before 6 p.m., Marie Therese Zouein Tabet was attending a funeral in the Dunes Center in the Verdun district of Beirut when she received a text message on her phone with a link to an evacuation warning from the Israeli military for parts of Beirut. Within seconds, the room filled with buzzing and ringing as the hundreds of people in attendance received similar messages from friends and family.
People looked at one another, panicked, and started rushing to the door. But even as they left the building, many were unsure of where to go or how to get there without crossing through neighborhoods outlined on the maps of the evacuation warnings.
“It’s terrifying; everywhere the roads are closing,” Ms. Zouein Tabet said. “We cannot go back home because we don’t know which road to take.”
Zeinab Jouneideh, who lives in the Zuqaq al Blat neighborhood of Beirut, which was included in the evacuation warnings, said that she and all her neighbors in her apartment building had fled in a panic. Her two sisters ran to a nearby school. Her brother fled to the basement parking garage of their building and sheltered in his car. Her nephew went somewhere — where exactly she did not know.
Her sister asked her if she could go to Ms. Jouneideh’s office in the Hamra area of the city. Then she saw that Hamra, too, was included in the warnings.
“All of Beirut is under attack,” Ms. Jouneideh said.
Farnaz Fassihi, Dayana Iwaza and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
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