Iran’s Focus on Nabih Berri
It is striking to observe the persistence with which the “Islamic Republic” insists that it negotiates on Lebanon’s behalf and claims credit for the ceasefire in that country. This is attested by the declaration of Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi who, in a phone call to President Nabih Berri, stated that “the cessation of Israeli aggressions against Lebanon is covered by our agreement with the Americans.” It is no coincidence that Araghchi chose to call Berri specifically, as if to signal that the Speaker of Parliament has become Iran’s last remaining refuge in Lebanon.
This Iranian stance toward Lebanon reveals a bankruptcy without precedent, all the more so since there is in reality no genuine ceasefire. All that is happening is that Israel continues its war against Lebanon, a war that Hezbollah itself originally provoked. In this phase, Israel is concentrating its operations on territories south of the Litani River, occasionally extending them to the western Bekaa with targeted strikes. In short, what exists is not a ceasefire but the ongoing prosecution of a war that the Hebrew State is conducting while accommodating certain American demands.
Israel is currently sparing Beirut, in conformity with the wishes of President Donald Trump, who harbors particular calculations regarding Lebanon and wishes to treat it as a country he claims to “love.” This approach appears to stem from personal motivations rather than from concerns related to Iran, and is driven above all by the desire to see any negotiations between Lebanon and Israel succeed. Worth noting in this regard is that Trump personally insisted on hosting the latest round of preliminary talks between Lebanon and Israel at the White House rather than at the State Department.
The Iranian position on Lebanon gives some measure of the illusions in which the “Islamic Republic” remains captive. Foremost among them is the belief that Lebanon is still subordinate to its will. Tehran refuses to acknowledge that Lebanon has moved to an entirely different place. What it declines to recognize is that Lebanese political decision-making is no longer under its dominion, particularly since its withdrawal from Syria.
The “Islamic Republic” disregards the fact that Lebanon needs to rid itself of Hezbollah’s weapons and, beyond that, to reach security arrangements with Israel in order to seriously undertake the return of the southerners displaced from their villages, or what remains of them. It equally ignores the fact that Lebanon cannot survive under the shadow of a ticking time bomb represented by more than a million displaced southerners who have lost everything they owned. The most essential dimension of the Lebanese reality is absent from the Iranian vision: on one side, the suffering of the people of the South; on the other, Israel’s determination to alter the very character of the southern land. The manner in which Israel destroyed a two-kilometer Hezbollah tunnel in Qantara stands as living proof of this — it was not simply a matter of demolishing an underground structure, but of physically reconfiguring the terrain itself.
Unable to keep all of Lebanon within its grasp and in the wake of Hezbollah’s military defeat, Iran has now focused its attention on Nabih Berri, who is these days taking pains to distinguish his positions from those of President of the Republic Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. Berri accommodates Iranian wishes under the pretext of preserving communal unity, rather than adopting the Lebanese national stance that the combined weight of domestic, regional, and international circumstances demands. He resorts to formulations such as his support for indirect negotiations with Israel, without asking himself how such indirect negotiations could possibly secure the recovery of territory through an Israeli withdrawal from approximately five percent of Lebanese land still under occupation.
Will the Iranian maneuver, which uses the Speaker of Parliament to link Lebanon to the American-Iranian negotiations that have themselves been reduced to indirect talks, succeed? The answer is that such a maneuver is destined to fail, given the reality on the ground, where Israel daily destroys what remains of predominantly Shi’ite villages with the aim of establishing a buffer zone in southern Lebanon.
Ultimately, whoever follows the Iranian logic, whether Nabih Berri or anyone else, serves only the logic of occupation and its entrenchment — nothing more. It is no secret that Hezbollah feeds on occupation; its conduct confirms as much, since it did everything in its power to bring it back. It is Hezbollah that deliberately engineered the “Gaza support war” on October 8, 2023, the consequences of which are well known, including the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and virtually the entire senior leadership of the party, without need to revisit the pager operation or what it revealed of Israel’s knowledge of Hezbollah’s internal structure and the residences of its commanders.
Neither Hezbollah nor Iran, which stands behind it, has drawn any lesson from the results of the “Gaza support war.” The “Iran support war,” launched on March 2, 2026, only compounded the disaster: Israel expanded its occupation. The question that lingers is how a figure such as Nabih Berri, endowed with all his political experience, can persist in following an Iranian policy that has reached a total dead end rather than supporting the national position embodied by Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam.
It is difficult to understand the stance of the Speaker of Parliament at a moment when Lebanon needs more than ever to affirm its break with Iran, rather than continuing to pay the price for the misdeeds of the “Islamic Republic” since the very first day of its establishment in 1979. Has the Lebanese Speaker of Parliament not taken note of the fact that Iran recently launched most of its arsenal of missiles and drones… in the direction of the Arab Gulf states, and not in the direction of Israel?