Live Updates: U.S. Pushes Cease-Fire in Lebanon as Netanyahu Says Israel Will Fight On

The escalation of the conflict in Lebanon has raised alarm international alarm, with President Biden warning on Wednesday that an “all-out war is possible” even as he expressed optimism about a possible settlement.

Israel and Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed militia, have been trading fire since the beginning of the war in Gaza, but Israel has intensified its attacks over the last week, with a one of the biggest bombing campaigns in recent military history. On Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, suggested that it was preparing for the possibility of a ground invasion.

Israel’s strikes have killed hundreds of people in Lebanon and have spread panic and desperation. Roughly 500,000 people have been displaced, according to Lebanon’s foreign ministry, and civilians have clogged the main roads leading to Beirut, the capital.

Here’s what else to know:

• Dueling strikes: Hezbollah fired a missile from Lebanon at Tel Aviv in central Israel for the first time on Wednesday, and hours later another Iran-backed group, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, launched drones at Israel’s southern port city of Eilat, causing some damage and lightly injuring two civilians.

But Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, dismissed the prospect of a truce on Thursday morning.

“There will be no cease-fire in the north,” he wrote on X. “We will continue to fight against the terrorist organization Hezbollah with full force until victory and the safe return of the northern residents to their homes.”

Hard-right ministers whose support Mr. Netanyahu needs to stay in office also appeared to be roundly opposed, as did a former prime minister viewed as a possible contender to replace Mr. Netanyahu.

“The campaign in the north must end with one scenario — the crushing of Hezbollah and the elimination of its ability to harm the residents of the north,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and leader of a far-right party in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition.

Mr. Smotrich has stymied efforts to reach a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, saying the war there must continue until Hamas is defeated. That sentiment also appeared to influence his stance on Thursday.

“We must not give the enemy time to recover from the severe blows it has received and to reorganize for continued war after 21 days,” Mr. Smotrich said in a statement. “Hezbollah’s surrender or war — only this way will we bring back the residents and security to the north and to the country.”

Months of cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has displaced tens of thousands of people in northern Israel, along with hundreds of thousands of people in southern Lebanon. Israel’s government has made the safe return of displaced Israelis an official war objective.

Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, said he could support a seven day cease-fire, but “we will not accept any proposal that does not include Hezbollah’s removal from our northern border.” The current proposal contains neither of those things.

Hezbollah — which has repeatedly said it will not stop firing on Israel until there is a truce in Gaza — had not responded to the proposal as of Thursday morning. Nor had Iran, the main benefactor of Hezbollah, which operates as both an armed militia and a political party in Lebanon’s parliament.

Officials said Hezbollah would not be asked to formally accept the proposal, which was unveiled on Wednesday by the United States, its allies in Europe and several Arab nations. It centered on a 21-day end to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which has killed hundreds of people and injured thousands more in a series of escalations over the last week.

There were indications, officials said, that Israel and Lebanon were supportive of talks that might soon lead to a cease-fire, although the Lebanese government has not been party to the conflict. Hezbollah has often been described as “a state within a state.”

While President Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France called for “immediate support” for the proposal by the two governments, that was far from forthcoming in Israel on Thursday morning.

The Israeli military continued striking Hezbollah, as more lawmakers dismissed the cease-fire proposal.

Yitzhak Kroizer, a far-right member of the governing coalition, said the proposal was “a moral disgrace” that would not be supported by “a single sane person in Israel.”

Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister who is seen as a potential challenger to Mr. Netanyahu, also rejected the proposal, underscoring the breadth of the opposition to it. In a statement, he called the proposal “the very definition of Chuzpa.”

“Israel must remove Hezbollah as a threat to our families,” said Mr. Bennett. “If Hezbollah wants the fire to stop, it can lay down its arms, demilitarize itself and move 15 km away the Israeli border.”

The deal was also rejected by Gideon Saar, a lawmaker who was recently viewed as Mr. Netanyahu’s favorite to potentially succeed defense minister Yoav Gallant. In a statement, Mr. Saar said he wanted the Israeli military to step up airstrikes in Lebanon, and to target Beirut.

The number of daily attacks has fallen since Monday, when Israel unleashed a wave of strikes that experts said had few precedents in the history of modern warfare. Mr. Saar said those two days of reduced fire had been “mistakes.”

“The continuity and systematic nature of operations are essential for destroying Hezbollah’s primary abilities to threaten the Israeli home front,” said Mr. Saar. “Failing to do so allows Hezbollah to take actions that will make the mission more difficult in the future.”

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.

“Israel’s war is not with you,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Lebanese people this week. “It’s with Hezbollah.”

But it’s not always clear where Hezbollah ends and Lebanon begins. The group, which the United States and many other countries consider a terrorist organization, is a dominant political and military power in the country.

The name Hezbollah (pronounced hez-bo-llah) is Arabic for “Party of God.” The group was founded, with help from Iran, to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon that began in 1982 during the country’s civil war. The United States believes that an early incarnation of the group also played a role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut.

As the Lebanese civil war drew to a close in 1990, the group was allowed to keep its weapons as part of the peace deal, even as Lebanon’s other religious sects were forced to disarm. Hezbollah argued that its weapons were necessary to protect Lebanon and the group continued to launch guerrilla attacks on Israeli forces in southern Lebanon until they withdrew in 2000.

In addition to its military activities, Hezbollah increased its participation in Lebanon’s political system, winning seats in Parliament and holding cabinet positions.

Its standing increased further after a 2006 war with Israel that was triggered when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during a cross border raid. The war ended after 34 days of intense combat with both sides declaring victory. In Lebanon and across the Arab world, Hezbollah were lauded as heroes for taking on Israel.

With support from Iran and Syria, Hezbollah rebuilt areas that had been damaged during the war. It established schools, set up its own covert communications network and launched a TV station. Former fighters even opened a museum celebrating the militia’s reputation as a wily force of resistance against Israel’s powerful military.

It continued building its military forces, which are estimated to include tens of thousands of soldiers and more than 100,000 missiles. Hezbollah has perhaps the largest arsenal of any nonstate armed group in the world, according to experts.

Hezbollah and its coalition allies gained a majority in the 2018 parliamentary elections, but lost it again in 2022. Hezbollah currently holds 13 seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament. That may not sound like much, but in Lebanon’s consensus-driven political system, which requires coalition building between religious and political factions, it is enough to wield significant power.

“They do not control parliament, but they have a lot of influence,” said Paul Salem, the Beirut-based vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Although Hezbollah’s coalition lost its majority two years ago, it has effectively maintained the power to block many major decisions. The effect has been gridlock: Lebanon’s Parliament has been unable to name a president for the past two years, and the country is run by a caretaker prime minister with limited powers.

A United Nations Security Council resolution called for Hezbollah to disarm and barred militants from the border area. But that resolution was never fully enforced, leading to long-simmering tensions and violence.

Now, with the Lebanese government crippled by deadlock and economic crises, there is no force in Lebanon that can limit Hezbollah’s power. Najib Mikati, the country’s caretaker prime minister, castigated Israel after this week’s bombings without mentioning Hezbollah.

“The continuing Israeli aggression on Lebanon is a war of extermination in every sense of the word and a destructive plan that aims to destroy Lebanese villages and towns,” he said at a cabinet meeting on Monday.

Despite its dominance in Lebanon, Hezbollah is not as popular in the country as it may seem, said David Wood, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group. Many resent the group’s outsize influence and accuse Hezbollah of dragging the whole country into an unnecessary war.

“It’s undeniable that these operations have weakened Hezbollah militarily,” Mr. Wood said. “What it has done to Hezbollah’s political standing is less clear.”

“We are following the threat from Iraq,” Admiral Hagari said, while declining to say if or how Israel might retaliate but saying it would do whatever was necessary to address the matter.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq published a statement on social media on Wednesday, saying it had targeted Eilat with drones in support of the Lebanese and Palestinian people. Israel has been bombing the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in an effort to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah. Both armed groups are backed by Iran and dedicated to destroying Israel.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Iraqi group had said in a statement that it had also aimed drones at Israel’s Jordan Valley. The Israeli military reported that a drone fell in the desert early Wednesday, causing no injuries or damage, after sirens had sounded in Israel, near the border of Jordan.

The latest strikes from the Iran-backed group in Iraq highlight the expansive role of Iran in Israel’s current conflicts, and how quickly any escalation could draw in more regional players.

Hezbollah began launching missiles into Israel from Lebanon a day after Hamas led an attack on Israeli communities on Oct. 7 last year, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostage.

Similarly, the Houthi militia in Yemen, also supported by Iran, has been attacking vessels in the Red Sea since last year, disrupting commercial shipping and forcing international shippers to seek alternate routes. The Houthis have also said that they are acting in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza.

According to the State Department, Islamic Resistance in Iraq is a group that includes multiple “terrorist and militia groups” responsible for dozens of attacks on U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Syria. In August, a rocket attack targeting U.S. personnel housed at a base in Iraq’s western desert injured several American troops. It resembled previous strikes carried out by Iran-backed Iraqi armed groups, which have intensified their attacks after the war in Gaza began.

International diplomats have been scrambling to broker a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, in the hopes it will deter a wider war that could draw Iran directly into the conflict. Those talks have stalled in recent months, and the United States and others are now working on a proposal to cease hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and address the war in Gaza.

The United States, which has designated Hamas, Hezbollah and members of the umbrella group Islamic Resistance in Iraq as terrorist organizations, has tried to cripple them by cutting off their funding. On Wednesday, the Treasury Department said it had sanctioned about a dozen individuals, businesses and vessels in connection with oil and gas sales for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah.

Iran relies heavily on illicit sales to fund its proxy groups and to pay for “destabilizing activities,” Bradley T. Smith of the Treasury Department said in a statement, adding that the United States “remains committed to disrupting the networks of shippers, brokers, and buyers that facilitate these schemes.”

Officials said there were indications that Israel and Lebanon were supportive of talks that might soon lead to a cease-fire, and Mr. Biden and Mr. Macron called for “immediate support” for the proposal by the two governments.

The proposal was endorsed by Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. In a statement, all of the signatories called for “an immediate 21-day cease-fire across the Lebanon-Israel border” to provide space for further negotiations.

Mr. Biden, arriving back in Washington from the United Nations General Assembly in New York, told reporters that “we were able to generate significant support from Europe, as well as the Arab nations.” He added: “It’s important the war does not widen. I’ll have more to say tomorrow.”

Two American officials said late Wednesday that they hoped a three-week cease-fire would allow time for a permanent end to the fighting between the two countries. They hinted that Israel and Lebanon had been supportive of the rapid-fire discussions over the previous 48 hours and might agree to the proposal soon.

One official said that diplomats have had conversations with both countries and were hopeful that representatives of their governments would accept the proposal for a cease-fire in “the coming hours.”

Hezbollah, a militant group that does not have the same accountability as a state institution in Lebanon, would not be formally asked to accept the proposal. But the officials, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations, said that if Lebanon agreed to a cease-fire, its government would be expected to ensure that Hezbollah fighters adhered to it during the 21-day period.

They said a temporary pause in the fighting could provide “diplomatic space” that could help revive stalled negotiations over the fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Israel. Mr. Biden offered a three-step proposal in May to bring an end to the nearly yearlong war in Gaza, but it has stalled amid objections from both Israel and Hamas.

The proposal from nearly a dozen countries came after intense discussions between Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and other diplomats on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, where leaders from around the globe are confronting the latest violence in the Middle East.

Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s minister for Europe and foreign affairs, told the U.N. Security Council during an emergency session on the crisis on Wednesday evening that neither country had yet signed on to the proposal after a wave of fierce airstrikes by Israeli forces that have killed hundreds of people over the past week. But officials said they would try to persuade the two sides to agree to the proposal in the coming days.

Mr. Barrot said he was traveling to Beirut at the end of the week to work with Lebanese officials on supporting a cease-fire.

The immediate goal of the diplomatic effort is to reduce the chance that the deadliest week of fighting between Lebanon and Israel in years will draw the region into a wider conflict that kills many people and destabilizes the region.

But American officials also hope that stepping back from a war with Hezbollah would put pressure on Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader, to agree to a deal that would end nearly a year of fighting in Gaza and lead to the release of the remaining hostages taken during the Oct. 7 attacks.

The push for an end to the fighting comes at what American officials describe as a dangerous new moment in the yearlong spiral of violence, with the possibility of a second front along the border with Lebanon that could draw much bigger players. Hezbollah is supported by Iran, which considers the group its most important proxy in the region.

“An all-out war is possible, but I think there’s also the opportunity — we’re still in play to have a settlement that can fundamentally change the whole region,” President Biden said during an appearance earlier on Wednesday on ABC’s “The View.”

The president is under intense pressure to avert that broader conflict, and the clock is ticking. There are 117 days left before Mr. Biden leaves office. He and his aides have been searching — so far unsuccessfully — for a negotiated solution to the violence that would help Mr. Biden burnish his legacy on the world stage.

Mr. Blinken has been shuttling back and forth this week between European and Arab delegations in New York for the U.N. General Assembly to try to clinch the temporary cease-fire, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door diplomacy.

The efforts have focused on trying to get multiple nations across Europe and the Middle East to agree to the terms of a proposal that would then be presented to Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

On Monday, Mr. Blinken raised the issue at dinner with top diplomats from the Group of 7 nations. He told them that the United States was working on a proposal and wanted to keep efforts coordinated, the official said.

Then on Wednesday morning, at a session with top diplomats of Gulf Arab nations, Mr. Blinken pulled aside Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani of Qatar and got his country’s agreement to support the proposal. At the end of that session, Mr. Blinken did the same with Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia.

Along with Amos Hochstein, the White House official who conducts diplomacy with Lebanon, Mr. Blinken met with the prime minister of Lebanon, Najib Mikati, on Wednesday. By Wednesday evening, the Biden administration had gotten multiple European and Arab nations on board with the proposed terms, and was ready to announce the proposal.

The new push represents the first time since Oct. 7 that the United States has sought to link the two conflicts involving Israel into a single diplomatic effort.

The logic, according to another official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic negotiations, is that Hamas has sought to sow regional discord and chaos since the moment of the Oct. 7 attacks by triggering a wider war. As long as Israel is caught in an escalating series of conflicts, officials believe, the leadership of Hamas will not be motivated to reach a deal.

That official said the United States believed that Mr. Sinwar would have less leverage over the situation if the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah stopped and could feel more pressure to agree to a cease-fire deal in Gaza.

The official cautioned that it remained uncertain whether Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, or the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was prepared to agree to a halt in the fighting.

Some Israeli military officials have argued for months for a more aggressive response to Hezbollah’s attacks. On Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, hinted that a ground invasion in Lebanon was possible.

“You hear the jets overhead; we have been striking all day,” General Halevi told soldiers along Israel’s border with Lebanon. “This is both to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah.”

Mr. Nasrallah pledged support for Hamas after the group killed about 1,200 people in a surprise attack last year in Israel. Hezbollah has repeatedly fired missiles and drones into northern Israel, forcing Israelis to flee their homes near the border.

One of the officials said it was unclear whether Hezbollah’s leader was willing to accept a cease-fire deal without seeing movement toward a similar deal in Gaza, which could complicate the effort.

The diplomacy is being conducted by the United States, with support from France. It comes a week after pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah fighters exploded across Lebanon, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands in an attack apparently orchestrated by Israel.

Israeli officials have not said Israel was responsible for the remote attacks, in which the communications devices were packed with explosives and remotely detonated. But a dozen current and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on the attacks said that Israel used shell companies to get into the supply chain and booby-trap the devices.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

The Israeli military was drawing up plans for a ground maneuver that would see soldiers “enter enemy territory, enter villages that Hezbollah has prepared as large military outposts,” General Halevi added.

It was not clear whether his remarks were saber-rattling or a realistic scenario being weighed by Israeli decision makers. In 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon as part of a 34-day war with Hezbollah, leading to deadly battles on the Iranian-backed militant group’s home turf.

“Your entry into those areas with force, your encounter with Hezbollah operatives, will show them what it means to face a professional, highly skilled and battle-experienced force,” General Halevi told the soldiers. “You go in, destroy the enemy there and decisively destroy their infrastructure.”

Israel has deployed additional soldiers and resources to the fight against Hezbollah as the battle between the two sides has rapidly escalated over the past week. On Wednesday, the Israeli military announced that two more brigades were being mobilized for “operational missions” along the northern front.

For now, Israeli officials have emphasized that they are focusing on an intensive aerial campaign against Hezbollah military sites. Sending Israeli forces into Lebanon could take an additional toll on Israel, which has been fighting Hamas on the ground in Gaza for months.

It would also raise bitter memories for the Lebanese people. Israeli forces occupied much of southern Lebanon for about two decades as part of a “security zone” intended to prevent cross-border attacks by militants. The occupation ended with Israel’s withdrawal in 2000.

Hezbollah began firing missiles and drones at Israel in solidarity with its Palestinian ally, Hamas, after the Gaza-based group led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7. The fighting has displaced roughly 60,000 Israelis and hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, according to authorities in both countries.

Nearly a year after the Oct. 7 attacks, Israeli officials face increasing domestic pressure to push Hezbollah away from the border. But while Hezbollah has sustained several blows over the past week, its leaders have vowed to press on until Israel ends its devastating war against Hamas in Gaza.

How big is Hezbollah?

The C.I.A. World Factbook estimated in 2024 that Hezbollah had 50,000 armed combatants, although it said that not all were full-time soldiers. That would make it one of the largest militia groups in the region, behind the Houthis, who operate in Yemen and who the C.I.A. estimated had 200,000 fighters in 2022. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said that his group has 100,000 trained fighters.

One of Hezbollah’s political objectives, however, is to present itself as a giant capable of going toe-to-toe with Israel, and so Mr. Nasrallah has an interest in maximizing and potentially inflating the group’s size and capability, according to experts. It even opened a museum in southern Lebanon to showcase its fight against Israel.

“It is in Hezbollah’s interest to engage in psychological warfare that amplifies its power and capacity in the face of the enemy,” said Lina Khatib, an associate in the Middle East and North Africa program at the Chatham House research group in London. She said in an interview that Israeli officials had also inflated Hezbollah’s strength to support the country’s recent attacks, some of the heaviest aerial assaults in modern warfare.

What about Hezbollah’s weapons?

Hezbollah has perhaps the largest arsenal of any armed group in the world, excluding governments, according to experts. Aside from machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and mortars, the C.I.A. said, Hezbollah possesses around 150,000 rockets and missiles of various types.

In the past two decades, Hezbollah has “developed elements of a more traditional statelike conventional military force and demonstrated considerable military capabilities,” the C.I.A. said. It sustained huge losses during a conflict with Israel in 2006, but emerged intact, and, since then, its weaponry has grown in size and sophistication, according to experts.

But estimates vary. A report in March by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization based in Washington, put the size of Hezbollah’s stockpile between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles and said they included guided ballistic missiles, short-range and midrange unguided ballistic missiles and short- and long-range unguided rockets.

“Because of Hezbollah’s close relationship with Iran, it is likely that Tehran would resupply Hezbollah quickly if it used this arsenal in a conflict with Israel,” the report said, adding that Iran’s relationships with Syria would facilitate the weapons pipeline.

One measure of Hezbollah’s strength is the weapons it has deployed against Israel in the past year. On Wednesday, Hezbollah said it had used a midrange missile in an attempt to strike the headquarters of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, in Tel Aviv, a distance of around 70 miles.

The attack was an outlier, however. Hezbollah has launched more than a thousand attacks on northern Israel in the past year, using exploding drones, anti-tank missiles and short-range rockets that can carry around 44 pounds of explosives, according to an analysis on Tuesday by the Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. Most have been intercepted by Israel’s missile defenses. One missile fired on Sunday hit a residential neighborhood in the city of Kiryat Bialik, which is around 17 miles south of the border. This appeared to have been its deepest strike to that point.

Hezbollah has also occasionally deployed a Burkan rocket, which has a range up to six miles and can carry a much bigger warhead, the report said.

Where does Hezbollah gets its weapons?

Ms. Khatib argued that Hezbollah relied on Iran for much of its stockpile, but this was also a constraint, given sanctions on Tehran. At the same time, she said, the group had developed its own program to modify and upgrade missiles, and had built a network of tunnels and bunkers in which to hide them.

Hezbollah has developed an arsenal specifically to counter Israel’s military strengths and also to strike critical infrastructure and cities in an attempt to sap the Israeli government’s resolve in the event of a ground invasion, according to Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based analyst with The Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington.

To do this, he said, the militant group has gotten weapons and other military technology, not just from Iran, but also from Syria and, indirectly, from Russia, as well as from the black market. But so far, Hezbollah has relied for the most part on legacy weapons such as Katyusha rockets and has not used its most advanced equipment, which includes missiles capable of hitting tanks and ships.

“The good stuff that they have, such as precision-guided missiles, those are being held in reserve,” Mr. Blanford said in an interview. “The day that Hezbollah starts using those is the day a relatively limited conflict will explode into a major war.”

What about longer-range missiles?

Hezbollah’s attacks in the past year have prompted Israel to order the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from northern Israel, but the group also has the capacity to target cities farther south.

The Institute of National Security Studies cited one missile in the group’s arsenal that had a range of around 130 miles and could carry a payload of more than 1,000 pounds. It described that missile, the Zelzal, as inaccurate, but said that Hezbollah could also use another type of missile, the Fateh-110, which is more advanced, precise and can exceed the Zelzal in range and payload.

Ms. Khatib said that Hezbollah would be loath to use its most powerful weapons in the present conflict and would most likely deploy them in the event of a full-scale regional war.