Two days after Israel and Lebanon sealed a ceasefire in Washington, Hezbollah fired surface-to-air missiles at Israeli Air Force aircraft above the northern border on Friday night, sending air raid sirens across Kiryat Shmona and eight communities in northeast Israel. The Israel Defense Forces said the incident ended without injuries or damage to the aircraft. Hezbollah was not a signatory to the agreement signed two days earlier.
The launches came hours after Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun, in a rare interview at the presidential palace in Beirut released by the Lebanese Presidency on Friday, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was using his country as “a bargaining chip” in Tehran’s negotiations with Washington. On Thursday, the IRGC had issued a statement naming a comprehensive ceasefire across all fronts, including Lebanon, as its primary condition for accepting any deal with the United States.
Friday Night in Kiryat Shmona
The surface-to-air missiles targeted Israeli Air Force jets, and the IDF confirmed Hezbollah launched them, per its Friday night statement. Eight villages in northeast Israel and Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city roughly three miles from the Lebanese border, went into shelter mode. Residents there have only seconds between the siren and the nearest safe room; Avichai Stern, the city’s mayor, wrote in Israel Hayom in May that they were living under a “constant threat,” with “children who jump at every unusual noise.”
Surface-to-air missiles target aircraft rather than ground positions, a distinct type of incident from the rocket and drone fire that had characterized most cross-border exchanges since March. Friday’s incident was the third confirmed Hezbollah firing on Israeli targets in the first 48 hours of the current ceasefire. On Thursday, Capt. Eitan Shmuel Lemberg, 21, was struck by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile in southern Lebanon, the first Israeli soldier killed under the new framework. Earlier that day, senior members of the Israeli delegation in Washington had told US officials that Hezbollah had not stopped fighting, despite reportedly pledging to President Donald Trump earlier in the week that it would.
- 3,500+ Lebanese people killed since Israel’s military offensive resumed in March, per CNN
- 28 Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon or along the border since the broader Iran war began in late February
- 15 of those soldiers died after the April 16 ceasefire took effect
- 48 hours elapsed between the June 4 Washington signing and Friday’s surface-to-air launches
The June 4 Framework
The ceasefire was signed Wednesday at the US State Department by Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter and Lebanese Ambassador Nada Hamadeh, with US State Department Chief of Staff Daniel Holler and US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa present. Under the joint framework, Lebanon agreed to establish “pilot zones” in southern Lebanon where the Lebanese Armed Forces would take exclusive territorial control, excluding all non-state actors. The State Department said the arrangement would “enable progress towards a comprehensive peace and security agreement.” Israel agreed to halt offensive military operations and committed not to strike Beirut’s southern suburbs.
The agreement did not specify enforcement mechanisms for the pilot zones or what would happen if Hezbollah refused to vacate designated areas. Hezbollah has operated in southern Lebanon for decades, building military and civilian infrastructure throughout the region. The Lebanese Armed Forces have historically avoided direct confrontation with the group.
The talks were the first direct diplomatic engagement between Israeli and Lebanese officials since the May 17 Agreement of 1983, a previous peace effort that collapsed and left the two countries without formal diplomatic relations. Lebanon’s government described the deal as a historic opening.
Hezbollah was not a formal signatory to the agreement, despite providing the principal armed force on the Lebanese side of the conflict. Israeli officials stated that forces would remain deployed inside southern Lebanon during the truce.
| Party | Position on the June 4 Framework |
|---|---|
| Israel | Agreed to halt offensive operations; committed not to target Beirut’s southern suburbs |
| Lebanon | Agreed to establish pilot zones under Lebanese Armed Forces’ exclusive control |
| Hezbollah | Formally rejected; called the talks “absurd, humiliating and insulting”; demanded full Israeli withdrawal |
| Iran’s IRGC | Conditioned any US-Iran deal on a comprehensive ceasefire including Lebanon |
Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s secretary general, issued a written rejection on Thursday. He described the Lebanon-Israel talks as “surrender” and the framework as “a roadmap for the annihilation of a section of the Lebanese people and the enslavement of the rest,” and pledged continued attacks as long as Israeli forces remained on Lebanese soil. He also threatened to bring down the Lebanese government through street protests.
Lebanon’s President Calls Out Iran
Aoun addressed the IRGC directly in the interview, conducted at the Lebanese presidential palace and released by the Lebanese Presidency on Friday. “You are not trying to help us,” he told Amanpour. “The people of Lebanon are paying the price for the sake of your own interest. Our interests do not coincide with your interests. This is not your country. It is our country.”
They are Lebanese people. They are not Naim Qassem’s people.
The remark came after Aoun said he had spoken with Lebanese citizens from multiple sects, including Shiites, who told him they were “fed up” with Hezbollah’s war against Israel. He called the deal a “last chance” for a comprehensive settlement and described the conflict between Netanyahu and Hezbollah as a “futile war” that would never lead to the “desired outcome” for either side.
The Israeli army could “invade the whole country, flatten the whole country,” he told Amanpour, “but they will never be able to achieve their objective.” Hezbollah’s disarmament, he argued, had to come from the Lebanese state once Israeli forces withdrew. He said he would meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu only after a formal agreement was in place, a meeting that would be the first between the two countries’ leaders in modern history.
Aoun has instructed his government to negotiate ceasefire agreements directly with Israel, the first Lebanese president to take that approach, per CNN’s reporting. “I will try to negotiate and reason with them,” he said, speaking of Hezbollah and disarmament. “Eventually they will be persuaded, but the cost will be high.”
Iran’s Condition for Any Deal
Iran’s demand that Lebanon be included in any comprehensive ceasefire isn’t new. Tehran made the same argument from at least March 2026, when the broader Iran war began and Hezbollah resumed launching rockets into northern Israel. Hezbollah was excluded from the April 16 truce as well; that ceasefire was breached within days, with the Lebanese Health Ministry reporting civilian deaths in Nabatieh and Bint Jbeil governorates following Israeli strikes.
The IRGC’s Thursday statement sharpened the position. It named a comprehensive ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon, as Iran’s primary condition for accepting the April 8 truce proposal with the United States. A full ceasefire in Lebanon was already one of Tehran’s key demands in ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration, per Axios, citing US and Israeli officials. Iran had also, per reporting, halted those negotiations at one point following continued Israeli strikes in Lebanon.
In April, when Trump announced the first Israel-Lebanon truce, Iran announced that commercial passage through the Hormuz Strait would be permitted during the ceasefire. It reversed that position the following day after the United States declined to lift its naval blockade of Iranian waters.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi pushed back on Aoun’s “bargaining chip” charge in a post to X on Saturday: “Had Lebanon been a bargaining chip for Iran, we’d have a deal long ago,” adding, “Save Lebanon from your real foe, Mr. President,” in an apparent reference to Israel. On Thursday, the US House of Representatives defeated a Democrat-led resolution that would have directed the president to remove US armed services from Lebanon within seven days, by a vote of 92-324, leaving the US military posture in Lebanon unchanged.
How Long Can the North Wait?
An Agam Labs poll conducted in May at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shared exclusively with Reuters before the latest round of talks, found northern Israeli residents abandoning Netanyahu’s Likud party at a sharper rate than the rest of the electorate. They offered harsher assessments of his handling of the Lebanon war. The survey focused on northern border communities where Hezbollah rocket fire has fallen most heavily since March.
Stern wrote in the same May op-ed in Israel Hayom that the government was cutting budgets for northern communities while businesses collapsed and families struggled to return to normal life. The economic pressure had run alongside the security threat continuously since October 2023, when Hezbollah first opened fire on Israel following Hamas’s attacks.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir told ministers at a cabinet meeting that Hezbollah “has not been destroyed but is weaker now than ever,” and that if Israel can reach a ceasefire “under conditions acceptable to us,” taking it now is better than waiting for the same terms in a few months, per Channel 12. At a separate meeting with northern border mayors, he added that Hezbollah’s degradation gave Israel a window, without specifying how long it would last.
Israeli forces have occupied dozens of villages in southern Lebanon since the offensive resumed in March, and nearly a fifth of Lebanon’s population has been displaced by the fighting, per CNN. Those conditions were not resolved by the agreement, which addressed the ceasefire framework but deferred the question of withdrawal from Lebanese territory.
The ceasefire requires Hezbollah’s compliance to function on the ground; Hezbollah’s commanders answer to Tehran, and Tehran’s price for any US deal is the commitment the June 4 framework left out: Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
