The UN’s peacekeeping mission in Lebanon has been renewed, but amid constant clashes, will it help?

BEIRUT — The United Nations Security Council has extended the mandate of United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the first time it has done so while the country is seeing virtual daily clashes in the south — the kind of violence the peacekeeping mission has struggled to dampen

Resolution 2749, adopted by the Security Council on Wednesday, extends UNIFIL’s nearly two-decade long mission of keeping peace between Israel and Lebanon through Aug. 31, 2025, highlighting the need of a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East,” according to an announcement from the UN.

“The Council also demanded the full implementation of resolution 1701 (2006) and urged all relevant actors to implement immediate measures towards de-escalation — including those aimed at restoring calm, restraint and stability across the Blue Line,” the announcement further stated. The Blue Line refers to the UN-recognized border between Lebanon and Israel.

Resolution 1701 [PDF] ended the one-month long Israeli war with Lebanon in July 2006, and greatly increased the number of UNIFIL troops in Lebanon deployed along the border to a maximum of 15,000. As of now, about 10,000 troops are operating there, UNIFIL deputy spokesperson Kandice Ardiel told Breaking Defense, a force the UN says is drawn from 49 participating countries.

It was a mission that was difficult, dangerous and controversial to begin with. But the group has found itself between a “rock and hard place” as one expert put it, since Oct. 7 when the armed Lebanese group Hezbollah began launching a barrage of rockets, missiles and drones at Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian group Hamas, prompting violent reprisals by the Israeli military in southern Lebanon. The repeated clashes have fallen short of a much-feared all out war, but are continuous and deadly, nonetheless.

“From 2006 until October 2023, under the framework of resolution 1701, we did not see major conflict in the south. We saw occasional incidents, but those were de-escalated relatively quickly. The situation now is far worse than anything we saw since 2006,” Ardiel said.

The peacekeepers’ mission is not to directly intervene with force, beyond some “counter-rocket launching operations,” but instead is focused on monitoring the area for the UN. It also mediates between the Lebanese and Israeli governments — but not directly with Hezbollah, who has de facto control of the southern border with Israel — and provides some civilian services like medical care for noncombatants caught in the crossfire. (Counter-rocket operations, according to the UN, involve UNIFIL and Lebanese military troops jointly patrolling “a selected area” and establishing checkpoints to search vehicles, as well as assessing and searching “potential sites for launching rockets.”)

The new fighting has only added to a complicated situation, Ardiel said.

“It’s not that our mandate has changed or that our tasks have changed, but we’ve had to readjust what we do in the context of what the Security Council resolution says,” Ardiel said. “We’re continuing to monitor the situation and focusing our patrolling efforts on areas near the Blue Line, because that’s where the majority [of] these exchanges of fire are happening, to be able to observe and report what’s happening back to the Security Council.”

In light of the ongoing clashes, she explained that UNIFIL has been adding “more patrols near the Blue Line and increasing counter-rocket launching operations, for example.”

“But we have also made some changes for our own security, because we can’t, as peacekeepers, perform our role if we’re injured or worse,” Ardiel said. “We have implemented security measures that require peacekeepers to return to their bases or even go to shelters depending on the level of the threat.”

Containing A War

For now, the Lebanese government has said it is not interested in a wider war. Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, who visited the peacekeepers at the border recently, reportedly has been working to keep the conflict from spreading.

“In their public statements, and in discussions with UNIFIL, both parties say they don’t want a war. Everyone has said they prefer to find a political and diplomatic solution to bring an end to this. Nobody wants to see widespread destruction, though at the same time everyone emphasizes that they’re prepared for war even if they don’t want it,” Ardiel told Breaking Defense.

The UN is not backing out either, as Ardiel said none of the nations who have contributed peacekeepers to the mission have requested they be pulled out.

But Ardiel concluded that the main challenge for UNIFIL now is that there is no “political will on both sides of the Blue Line to commit to resolution 1701 in full and bring an end to the firing.”

A pair of experts told Breaking Defense that although the UNIFIL is unlikely to bring about peace between Israel and Lebanon, the UN deciding to renew the operation was an important signifier.

“UNIFIL is incapable of fully achieving its mission due to technical and political hurdles. It does not have the needed equipment to monitor its area of operations effectively, relying mostly on local reports,” Firas Maksad, director of strategic outreach and a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told Breaking Defense. “And it is required to coordinate its activities with Lebanese authorities who lack the political will to limit Hezbollah’s armed activities south of the Litani, as required by UNSCR 1701.”

While Maksad said renewing the mission is vital for restoring lasting calm in the region, “UNIFIL needs to be retooled to achieve its mission effectively. That requires a more nimble and technical capable force, and greater operational flexibility.”

Theodore Karasik, senior advisor at Gulf State Analytics, said that since Oct. 8, the force has been “stuck between a rock and a hard place, and it’s challenging for UN peacekeepers safety and security in this type of environment.”

He agreed, however, that the renewal is important because in the conflict “environment one cannot have the removal of this UNIFIL at this time because it signals retreat. But renewal means that some lessons might have been learned over the past year and can be applied in the next year of the mandate.”