President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah that would end more than a year of fighting across the Lebanese-Israeli border. Violence has reached catastrophic levels since October 1, when Israel intensified its strikes on Lebanese civilian areas and launched a ground invasion that has displaced more than a million people.

In unveiling the truce, which came into effect after a last-minute Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, President Biden proudly claimed that Hezbollah had been dealt a devastating blow.

Biden declared: “What remains of Hezbollah... will not be allowed to threaten Israel’s security again.”

According to experts, Hezbollah has suffered heavy losses. The group’s top leadership has long been eliminated, and the party has failed to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza—the goal that prompted the party’s late leader Hassan Nasrallah (who was assassinated by Israel on 27/10/2024) to intervene against Israel in the wake of October 7.

Despite claims by President Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu that it was the defeat on the battlefield that forced Hezbollah to retreat, experts say the opposite is true.

“Even with military support from its American patron, Israel was unable to stop Hezbollah strikes on Israeli territory, and it suffered heavy losses when it invaded Lebanon,” says Aaron Mati, a researcher and historian at The Grayzone website and program. “Hezbollah’s ability to survive yet another punishing war—not just the 2006 conflict, but also years of fighting U.S. and Israeli proxies in the dirty war in Syria—defeated Washington and Tel Aviv’s extreme goal of destroying the group.”

“Apart from killing Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders,” notes Matti, the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, “Israel’s main strategic achievement in Lebanon was to terrorize the country’s civilian population enough that Hezbollah eventually agreed to mediate an end to the destruction. Meanwhile, the long-awaited indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Galant by the International Criminal Court may have helped force Israel to act.”

It is noteworthy that France announced that it would not arrest Netanyahu on its territory, which raised speculation that Netanyahu had replaced French mediation in Lebanon with a pledge not to implement the ICC warrant.

Because the United States is committed to defending Israel’s “aura of power,” it cannot “allow” Israel’s monopoly on aggressive capability to be deterred, Biden said Tuesday. Israel will therefore reserve the right to continue violence at the earliest opportunity—a threat that will only strengthen Hezbollah’s resolve and its ability to recruit members, Mattei said.

With his blind devotion to Israel’s aggression in Gaza, Lebanon and the region, Biden also claimed that the ceasefire in Lebanon “brings us closer” to what he called his “distinctive vision for the future of the Middle East…in peace and prosperity.” At the heart of this effort, Biden said, is “a set of historic deals with Saudi Arabia” in which the Gulf kingdom would normalize relations with Israel in exchange for incentives including a security agreement and “a credible path to Palestinian statehood.”

Biden’s team is so enthusiastic about its “vision” that it believes, as one senior U.S. official put it, that “the political and geopolitical stars are aligned” for a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, though it is likely to be finalized under the next administration. To that end, U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein briefed the Trump camp and “came away feeling that the incoming team was supportive,” the New York Times reported.

“Outside of Biden and Trump’s mutually supportive circles, the rest of the world sees only one credible path to Palestinian statehood—and the United States and Israel are the only obstacles,” Mattei says. “That universally recognized path was expressed this month at the United Nations General Assembly, when member states renewed a decades-old tradition of voting on “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.” The measure called on Israel to end its now 57-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, followed by the establishment of a Palestinian state there—a major compromise for the Palestinians, who accepted only 22 percent of their stolen homeland and ancestral homeland. The resolution passed by a margin of 170 to 6, with the United States and Israel casting their traditional opposing votes.”

It is noteworthy that in rejecting the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, Biden also agrees with his future successor, Trump, who has appointed a government of pro-Israel hardliners who do not bother to pretend that they accept a Palestinian state.

Biden’s stated belief that there is a “path” to a Palestinian state is a carbon copy of his approach to the Gaza ceasefire. He spent more than a year pretending to broker a truce in Gaza while facilitating Israel’s destruction of the besieged territory, slaughtering tens of thousands of its besieged Palestinian residents. The same duplicity recently prompted Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to threaten Israel with punitive measures unless it allowed more aid into Gaza, only to do nothing when the deadline passed and Israel’s blockade and deliberate starvation continued.

It is noteworthy that the official spokesman for the US State Department, Vedant Patel, said in response to a question from the Jerusalem correspondent on November 12 that the United States feels that punishing Israel is ineffective, and that he - the Biden administration - feels that Israel has shown flexibility in allowing some aid in, noting that the "US Development Organization" said that the entry of aid has declined significantly during the period cited by the administration.

“The same is true of other aspects of the Israeli occupation regime,” Mattei says. “Biden has sat idly by amid Israel’s largest theft of West Bank land in decades, all while fanatical Israeli settlers and law enforcement have carried out escalating violence against their besieged Palestinian subjects. Nor has the Biden-Trump camp said anything about the public calls from Netanyahu’s allies to return illegal settlers to the Gaza Strip.”

It is noteworthy that in his statements on Tuesday (26/11), Biden pledged to use his remaining weeks to "work tirelessly to advance this vision of an integrated, secure, and prosperous region... all of which enhances American national security."

“Biden, who was so devoted to US-Israeli hegemony that he was willing to prioritize genocide over winning an election, has actually done more harm to the cause of regional peace than any of his predecessors, including George W. Bush, who invaded Iraq,” Mattei says. “Whatever Biden manages to accomplish in his remaining days, any further steps toward his ‘vision’ for the Middle East will only undermine peace and security for all.”