From Tehran to Beirut, the Iranian Axis Seeks to Legitimize its Grip on Lebanon

At the opening of Thursday’s parliamentary session in Beirut, MP Sami Gemayel (Kataeb) challenged Speaker Nabih Berri, calling on him to respond to remarks by the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

On Wednesday evening, in an interview with the channel Al Jazeera, Ghalibaf said that “Lebanon and Iran form a single front, in peacetime as in wartime,” adding that “any Israeli aggression against an Islamic state will trigger a collective response from all the others.” In other words, if Israel attacks Iran, Hezbollah will have to come to its aid.

“You are wasting your time asking Hezbollah for guarantees that it will not enter another war in support of an ally. Your answer has come directly from the speaker of Iran’s parliament. What is your response?” Sami Gemayel demanded of Nabih Berri.

Without losing his composure, Berri replied: “We are free, we are free.” A vague phrase—three words repeated twice—to dodge the question and try to offer reassurance.

Nabih Berri’s terse response thus echoes Lebanese officials’ statements about Hezbollah, Lebanese sovereignty and decisions on war and peace, which are supposed to rest exclusively with the Lebanese state. While the Lebanese authorities’ intentions are not in doubt, their willingness to deliver on the promises to restore sovereignty and the state’s monopoly on arms that pepper their speeches inspires some skepticism. All the more so because Hezbollah continues to try to impose its own interpretation of sovereignty through barely veiled threats. Last Wednesday, its leader, Naim Qassem, once again ruled out handing over any weapons and reaffirmed his readiness to resume war with Israel should it attack Lebanon.

The remarks by Mohammad Ghalibaf and Naim Qassem, made on the same evening, at least have the merit of dispelling any ambiguity about Iran’s and Hezbollah’s intentions: for the Iranian axis, the weapons issue is part of a regional strategy controlled exclusively by Iran, in which Lebanon, as a state, has no say. In Naim Qassem’s rhetoric, the state is seen as an “enemy.” The Lebanese state, meanwhile, has no strategy of its own.

Front organizations

Even more serious is the case of the five men—Hezbollah officials—arrested, also on Wednesday, in the high mountains between Batroun and Bsharri in northern Lebanon. The incident sparked deep concern across the country, though it is in fact just one in a long series of security operations Hezbollah has conducted nationwide for years. In southern Lebanon, Green Without Borders, an NGO affiliated with the party, founded in 2013 and placed under US sanctions, served as a front for the pro-Iranian group’s paramilitary activities along the border with Israel.

The five Hezbollah officials arrested in the northern highlands, carrying maps and documents relating to specific missions—which they tried to tear up—reportedly belong, according to the daily newspaper An-Nahar, to an association dedicated to the development of five villages. Outside Hezbollah’s strongholds, the activities of these “associations” serve security objectives known only to the group itself.

What is new, then, is not the pro-Iranian party’s conduct, but the fact that such acts are now punished when discovered and that the Lebanese authorities openly condemn them as illegal, in line with the government’s March 2026 decision.

What is missing, however, is the logical follow-through to these condemnations. Yet the discovery of two shipments of explosives a month ago in Dahr el-Baydar and Hermel, along with the arms trafficking thwarted much earlier at the Syrian border, gives the Lebanese authorities ample concrete grounds to seriously begin a process aimed at shielding the country from the threat of an armed group that takes orders from abroad and now appears to be pursuing a security strategy entirely unrelated to its traditional rallying cry: “the struggle against the Israeli enemy.”

In his remarks to Al-Jazeera, on the subject of Lebanon, Mohammad Ghalibaf effectively sought to legitimize Iranian interference in the country’s affairs, with no regard for the sovereignty of its institutions. He spoke as though the Lebanese state did not exist, even though just two days earlier, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had stressed that Tehran had no business in Lebanon, “which remains a sovereign country.”

Indeed, since the Democrats’ victory in the US midterm elections and the losses suffered by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud in Israel’s parliamentary elections, Iran’s tone has become even more arrogant. Tehran sees the results of both elections as working in its favor. This interpretation has led to a hardening of Iranian rhetoric toward Washington amid ongoing mediation efforts with Tehran, and, through Naim Qassem, toward the Lebanese authorities.

Consequently, from the Iranian axis’s perspective, there is now no reason to change the status quo imposed for years, which has turned Lebanon into something of an Iranian province.

And while the authorities continue to put off the moment when they must turn their decisions into action—admittedly at the risk of entering into a confrontation with Hezbollah, which has never intended to submit to state authority—the Shiite party continues to expand its security network throughout Lebanon. The Jurd affair clearly demonstrated its operational capabilities and illustrated its capacity to cause harm.