It’s easy to hold United Nations peacekeepers in contempt. Once they were placed in charge of “safe havens” in Bosnia and Rwanda, genocide followed. Introduced to bring order to chaos in countries where law has broken down, Blue Helmets themselves have too often been caught up in racketeering scandals. It sometimes seems the more peacekeepers are needed, the less they achieve.
For the most part, however, this contempt tends to be politicized or ill-informed, ignoring extreme restrictions on the mandates that peacekeeping missions are given by member states. It forgets, too, that the only reason for inserting Blue Helmets is that there has already been failure: Whatever the problem, it had proved intractable for the parties involved.
That’s rarely been more true than for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or Unifil. It’s been in southern Lebanon in various iterations since 1978, when Israel first invaded in response to cross-border attacks by the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Both the mission, two subsequent invasions and a lengthy occupation that spawned Hezbollah in response have failed to make Israel’s northern border secure.
Now, Israel has invaded southern Lebanon once more. There were legitimate grounds for doing so, given that Hezbollah has been firing rockets across the border for a year. But this is nonetheless a war of opportunity and choice. A cease-fire in Gaza could have ended the rocket fire from Lebanon and made northern Israel safer, at least for the time being. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided on invasion, in a bid to escape Israel’s security predicament once and for all.
The UN has a case to answer. Unifil was monitoring the area from which Hezbollah fired most of its rockets and was supposed to help clear Southern Lebanon of all armed forces other than the official Lebanese Army years ago. It didn’t. It’s now in the way of the Israeli Defense Forces, which have fired on Unifil posts and headquarters multiple times in recent days, injuring peacekeepers, knocking out an observation tower and crashing through gates to enter a compound by force.
On Sunday, Netanyahu addressed UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres directly, saying that while he regretted peacekeepers getting hurt, and the IDF was doing all it could to avoid this, it was all Guterres’ fault; by refusing Israeli demands to pull the Unifil’s roughly 10,000 peacekeepers out of the fire zone, he was putting their lives at risk and making them hostages to Hezbollah.
If that sounds like gaslighting, it is. It’s also unwise, guaranteed to further alienate the 50 nations contributing troops, with Indonesia, Italy, France, South Korea, China, Ireland, Poland and Germany all on the list.
Israelis are understandably frustrated at Unifil’s failure to solve their Hezbollah problem. Netanyahu has chosen this invasion to reframe the war in Gaza as part of a wider conflict with Iran, and he has strong support for that at home. I’ve argued as to why that’s unlikely to succeed in the absence of a wider political strategy that’s unpalatable to the extremists in Netanyahu’s government, yet it is the IDF’s commander-in-chief — not Guterres — who has a legal duty to ensure peacekeepers aren’t harmed.
The IDF claims to have found an extensive network of Hezbollah tunnels and bases just north of the border. According to Israel, these were in preparation for another Oct. 7-style attack and close enough to UN monitoring posts that they can’t not have known about them. The clear implication is that Unifil must have been covering up Hezbollah’s activities, either through incompetence or complicity.
Read Unifil regular updates to the UN Secretary General and you will see that it has been reporting on Hezbollah’s border activities including the installation of shipping containers belonging to Green Without Borders, an environmental charity that is in fact a front for Hezbollah. It was sanctioned as such by the US Treasury in August 2023. The Unifil reports express concern over the purpose of the containers, their CCTV cameras, drilling equipment and use to block Unifil patrols.
The reports also describe how the Lebanese Army, which Unifil is supposed to be helping assert control over the south, has limited the movements of UN monitors on some roads and blocked access to suspicious sites. They also report in detail on shenanigans that are keeping Lebanon weak and virtually ungoverned, creating a void for Hezbollah and its Iranian backers to operate in. Over the years, 329 Unifil peacekeepers have lost their lives to the mission.
Then read the 2006 mandate, in particular as set out in UN Resolution 1701. A key goal is to monitor the Lebanese Army’s removal of all other armed formations from the south. However, the member states didn’t give the mission either the task of disarming anyone, or the wherewithal to do it. The resolution talks tough, but was created under Chapter VI of the UN charter (for “pacific disputes”), rather than Chapter VII (for “threats to peace”), which would have authorized the use of force, beyond self-defense. Israel, to its credit, wanted the Chapter VII framework that could have made the mission more effective.
Dealing with Hezbollah is not Unifil’s only job under the mandate. Its others were to keep an eye on the border and report on breaches of the 2006 cease-fire agreement, clear mines, patrol coastal waters and monitoring Israel’s withdrawal of forces. Those forces are now back, and it’s this monitoring function – absent in Gaza – that’s of value if inconvenient to the IDF. The UN mission will also “fail” to halt the Israeli invasion, but as with Hezbollah it can create a measure of transparency by reporting on it.
It is not and should not be up to Israel to make the call on whether to end the UN mission in Lebanon. That’s for the Security Council to decide. Unifil certainly failed to enforce its key mandate of expelling armed Hezbollah fighters from areas bordering Israel, yet it was never given the power to do so. This has been a collective failure of states, with all too much blame to share around. Those bearing responsiblity include the UN Security Council members making the decisions on Unifil's mandates, Iran, Lebanon itself, and last but by no means least, Israel.
Credit: Bloomberg
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