Hezbollah’s efforts to regenerate have seemingly reached a critical juncture. In one of the most escalatory actions since the ceasefire took effect in Lebanon last November, Israel eliminated Hezbollah’s de facto military chief of staff Haitham Ali Tabatabai on November 23. Israel and Hezbollah may be closer to war than at any point over the last twelve months.
Another round of fighting is not in Israel's or Lebanon’s interest. Nor is it in the interest of Lebanon’s Gulf benefactors, most of whom have grown particularly disillusioned after receiving no return on their investments in various Lebanese politicians, movements, and governments. Decades of overpromising and underdelivering on countering Hezbollah — not to mention political reform and combating corruption — have lost support in Lebanon.
Exceptionally, Qatar remains willing to engage and entertain, aiding Lebanon. Senior Lebanese officials, including Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) Commander Rodolphe Haykal, visited Doha throughout 2025 seeking Qatari aid, including for the LAF. But any future Qatari aid will only perpetuate Lebanon’s self-destructive status quo unless preconditioned on meaningful Lebanese efforts to disarm Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s yearlong war with Israel, which ended in November 2024, significantly weakened the group militarily. Almost 40 years after the Taif Agreement, which ended Lebanon’s civil war by requiring all sectarian militias to disarm, Beirut now has a historic opportunity to rid itself of its most problematic and enduring vestige, Hezbollah.
But, so far, Hezbollah has managed to deftly navigate Lebanon’s post-war environment, retaining the overwhelming support of Lebanese Shiites — and demonstrating that support at several critical milestones since the war’s end. In effect, Lebanon’s social and political dynamics, which empower Hezbollah and have deterred successive Lebanese governments from disarming or restraining it for fear of provoking a civil war, remained virtually unchanged.
Thus, in February, Hezbollah received two ministries and corollary influence in Lebanon’s new cabinet. Now, that same government, which came to power in February, ostensibly promising to disarm Hezbollah, has ceded the initiative on disarmament to the group itself. Of course, Hezbollah has consistently refused to surrender its arsenal. Therefore, on September 5, the Lebanese government — deterred by Hezbollah’s popularity — declined to unambiguously adopt the LAF’s disarmament plan and kept its contents and progress secret. Senior Lebanese officials insisted Hezbollah’s forcible disarmament was not being considered.
The Lebanese government has since jumped through linguistic hoops to tacitly shift from a policy of “disarming” the group to a policy of inaction. The government hopes passive “containment” of Hezbollah’s arsenal will, in time, destroy what Israel hasn’t, even as the group is actively regenerating.
Meanwhile, as Lebanon musters, at best, token responses to Hezbollah’s open defiance, it is nevertheless seeking tangible benefits from the international community, including Qatari aid, for its irresolute and largely symbolic disarmament efforts.
Qatar has engaged Lebanon several times under similar circumstances in the past, seeking to sustain Lebanon over the long-term through creating increments of short-term stability. But that has only reinforced the country’s decades-long downward spiral.
After the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Doha unconditionally pledged $300 million toward the $2.3 billion reconstruction funds Lebanon required, alleviating from Hezbollah the burden of rebuilding what its war with Israel had destroyed. Two years later, Qatar brokered the Doha Agreement to resolve the ongoing deadlock between Fuad Siniora’s Western-backed government and the Hezbollah-led opposition, which had erupted into street fighting. The negotiated stability it produced, however, was only a veneer, coming at the price of granting Hezbollah and its allies a veto over government decisions. Meanwhile, Lebanon’s structural problems remained unresolved.
Almost a decade later, as a result, Lebanon suffered a total economic collapse, which the World Bank described as “one of the worst economic crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century.” This disaster was compounded by the August 4, 2020, Beirut Port explosion, one of history’s largest-ever non-nuclear explosions and perhaps the most egregious example of Lebanese governmental negligence, corruption, and incompetence. Qatar again stepped into the breach, immediately airlifted medical aid into Lebanon, deployed search and rescue personnel, and pledged another $50 million to help reconstruction efforts — all without demanding any meaningful change from Beirut.
By October of 2022, another presidential crisis gripped Lebanon. The Qataris — alongside France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United States — sought to help, but without endorsing the preferred candidate of either the Hezbollah-aligned factions or their opponents. The presidency, Doha maintained, was “an internal Lebanese matter.”
Ultimately, the recent Israel-Hezbollah war broke Lebanon’s political deadlock and domestically humbled Hezbollah enough to deny the ideologically pro-“resistance” Suleiman Frangieh the presidency. Instead, the preferable but far from ideal Joseph Aoun took office on January 9.
Given the uncompromising anti-Westernism promoted by its various soft-power platforms, Qatar may be nefariously seeking to allow Lebanon’s political processes to run their natural course, strengthening Hezbollah and weakening American regional influence in the process. More realistically, however, Doha understands that Lebanon’s structural dysfunction cannot be cured easily or swiftly, and that pursuing deeper and sustained change will, in the immediate term, likely shatter the country’s veneer of stability. Even if Qatar were willing to upend the status quo, it’s difficult to predict whether a successful or stable Lebanon would emerge, or whether more chaos would ensue. So, Qatar falls back on the Faustian bargain routinely made by the Lebanese themselves of subsisting on short-term fixes that delay confronting the country’s corrosive elements.
That approach, however, is no longer tenable, especially as the Trump administration leans more heavily on Doha to promote regional stability. The administration has made clear that it wants genuine progress in Lebanon, not reversion to self-destructive patterns or continued hedging and inaction against Hezbollah. Doha, meanwhile, possesses tools to be the productive partner the United States wants and the one that Lebanon needs — even if it cannot, alone, solve all the country’s problems, or any of them in the short term.
Qatar possesses influential charitable funds and state-owned media outlets that Doha traditionally uses to promote radicalization. But they can likewise be influential tools that can, gradually and perhaps over many years, function as part of a comprehensive process to strengthen credible Shiite competitors to Hezbollah. If that momentum grows into sustained and widespread Lebanese Shiite opposition to the group, the risk that restraining Hezbollah would spark a civil war will recede. Over time, this will give Beirut increased flexibility to strip Hezbollah of its freedom of action – and then, ultimately, its arms.
In the interim, Qatar can condition incremental aid packages upon Beirut consistently enforcing the rule of law against all non-state actors, including Hezbollah. This can begin with ordering Lebanese security forces to prevent Hezbollah and all such actors from defying governmental decisions, and the Lebanese judiciary to punish them if they do. For example, Doha can press Lebanon to arrest and prosecute the Hezbollah entities and officials involved in publicly projecting the image of its late secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, onto Lebanon’s iconic Raouche rock in late September in violation of Beirut’s prohibition, and prevent similar acts of defiance in the future.
The accumulation and normalization of such measures will, in time, ensure that Beirut’s will by default trump the sectarian militias. Qatar can then condition further aid upon serious Lebanese efforts to cut off Hezbollah’s fundraising channels, including expanding Beirut’s largely symbolic ban on the arrival of Iranian airliners into thorough, transparent inspections of all arriving aircraft that could plausibly be carrying money destined for any militia. When social conditions are ripe, this can expand to delicensing Hezbollah’s social and financial apparatuses while the Central Bank incrementally clamps down on Lebanon’s shadow economy, where those organs operate.
In time, this can set the stage for Qatar funding the LAF, but only on the precondition that Beirut consistently demonstrates it is willing to order the Lebanese army to operate against Hezbollah. Even then, Doha’s aid should be disbursed in batches, as the LAF seizes and destroys Hezbollah’s arms and assets north of the Litani River, where the group has rejected disarmament. This will ensure that Qatari assistance rewards clear demonstrations of Lebanese intentions, and not merely its words.
Qatar alone can’t save Lebanon. None of Beirut’s international partners can. That task must be assumed, first and foremost, by the Lebanese themselves. But Doha can position itself as part of a constellation of helpful partners, using the unique tools at its disposal to nudge and guide Lebanon towards self-correction rather than continuing in its role as a reinforcer and enabler of Beirut’s excesses.
David Daoud is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Natalie Ecanow is a senior research analyst. Follow David on X @DavidADaoud and Natalie @NatalieEcanow.
