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Between April 5 and 12, the past week has been particularly rich in events in the Middle East. It concluded on Sunday, April 12, at dawn, with the announcement of the failure of negotiations between the United States and Iran in Islamabad, while mid-week, Israel gave its approval for direct negotiations with Lebanon, scheduled for Tuesday, April 14, in Washington. On April 8, the Israeli air force launched a massive attack – about a hundred raids in 10 minutes – against Hezbollah leaders and positions in several districts of Beirut, as well as in the Beqaa and South Lebanon. April 5 had been primarily marked by statements made by President Donald Trump, who had issued serious threats against the Iranian regime, ordering it to end the obstacles it placed in the way of free maritime navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump had given Iran an ultimatum that expired on Tuesday evening, April 7. While everything indicated, during the weekend of April 4-5, that escalation was hardly avoidable, the surprise came a few hours before the end of the ultimatum. A two-week truce was proclaimed, and negotiations were set for Saturday, April 11, in Islamabad, with a view to a settlement between the United States and Iran, focusing notably on the Strait of Hormuz.

During the last Council of Ministers, last Thursday, it was enough for Nawaf Salam to mention the demilitarization of the capital for the Ministers of Health and Labor (representing Hezbollah) to step up and oppose it. Irony and aberration. The irony is that the ministerial portfolios granted to Hezbollah are those directly concerned by the dramatic consequences of a war: strikes indeed cause market stagnation and an increase in the number of injured and dead. The aberration is that ministers of a government refuse to allow the State to have full sovereignty, at a minimum , in its capital, and prefer the rule of chaos and paramilitary groups to that of public institutions.

Disinformation and the distortion of historical facts clearly have no limits for certain circles. On the occasion of Catholic Easter, last April 5, a Hezbollah official, Hassan Dorr, published the following message on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/HasanDorr/status/2040735419952718037?s=20   « At the call of O Holy Mary: The « Resistance » sends its greetings to our Christian brothers on the occasion of #Easter by targeting the « Stella Maris » base, belonging to the murderers of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him), in occupied #Palestine » . The Hezbollah activist accompanied his message with a video of the operation. According to the visual elements displayed on screen, the video appears to be a recording of a live broadcast from Al-Mayadeen, a pan-Arab satellite news channel aligned with Hezbollah, with a banner indicating: «Images of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon». The video of the operation also bears the logo of «Hezbollah's media war apparatus» .

Marathon day for American and Iranian negotiators and experts, Saturday, in Islamabad. Arriving Friday evening in the Pakistani capital, the two delegations immediately began, each on its own side, informal discussions with high-ranking Pakistani officials who reportedly exchanged messages between the two parties to pave the way for formal, face-to-face negotiations, which began Saturday in the early afternoon. Late in the evening, the two delegations completed two successive working sessions and announced a suspension of work that was to continue on Saturday night (which, in this type of situation, opens the way for discussions away from the spotlight) or on Sunday.

While some Beirut residents continued on Friday, April 10, to inspect the sectors severely hit on Wednesday by Israeli aviation, as part of a surprise attack against Hezbollah cadres based in various neighborhoods of the capital, air raids continued in the South against several villages in the southern part of the country. One of these raids killed 12 people (State Security agents) in Nabatiyeh. But in the absence of major developments in military operations, it is the direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, scheduled for early next week in Washington, that are currently focusing the attention of local diplomatic and political circles.

The announcement of Lebanese-Israeli negotiations, with American participation, in Washington, amounts to no more than a first step along a long road that will pave the way for a definitive separation between the Iranian and Lebanese trajectories. It should likewise open the path, at least in principle, to a peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel modelled on the Egyptian-Israeli treaty of 1979 and the Jordanian-Israeli peace agreement of 1984. What is now at stake is Lebanon's capacity to recover its autonomous decision-making and to dissociate it from Iranian tutelage, much as it once managed to sever the unity of path with Syria under the successive reigns of Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad. Both had wielded the slogan of "unity of path and destiny" with Lebanon as a bargaining chip in their dealings with Washington, and as a tool for perpetuating the state of neither-war-nor-peace that has so long defined the Middle East.