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The recent news of a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel should be welcomed, if it is real and the parties are sincere about their statements and intentions. But how much can we trust western media to guide us through the maize of the deal, even its minutia, when we have seen their absolute allegiance to Israel? A recent ‘explainer’ by the BBC laid out all the points. Israel and the Lebanese state will enforce the UN article 1701 for the first time since 2006. In a nutshell, it requires all Hezbollah fighters and their equipment to be shipped north of the Litani river, thus creating a 20 km buffer zone on Israel’s border. Lebanese armed forced are expected to move into this area and to ensure that no Hezbollah presence is ever there and to play the role of some sort of peacekeeper, western police force. You know the kind of thing.

But just how serious is this plan and is it intended to last and be what Biden claims is a permanent ceasefire? Shouldn’t both the Lebanese state and the Shias who have left their bombed homes in the south be skeptical?

The first thing which should set alarm bells ringing is how the plan has been presented to the press. Outlets like BBC, who have an atrocious reputation for being stenographers for Israel’s propaganda, along with Sky News, have presented the details of the plan in great detail. Should western media be trusted as conduits to the whole deal when it is written up as though in bullet points with no journalist’s name and most of the material completely unattributed?

“The ceasefire agreement says Israeli forces will move south of the Blue Line “in a phased manner” within 60 days” claims the piece. “The Lebanese army’s troops will deploy “in parallel” to the positions”.

And then, it is explained, what is required from the Lebanese army gets cranked up to an almost preposterous level.

“Without mentioning Hezbollah, the agreement says the Lebanese army will “dismantle all infrastructure, and military positions, and confiscate all unauthorised arms” in what it calls the Southern Litani Area, as well as stop the unauthorised entry of weapons into Lebanon and dismantle any unauthorised weapons production facilities.

“The agreement also says that “Lebanon’s official military and security forces, infrastructure and weaponry will be the only armed groups, arms, and related material deployed” in the Southern Litani Area. The only exception is the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, Unifil, which has about 10,000 troops”.

And so Biden’s plans are to give a whole new level of power and responsibility to the Lebanese army, which until now, has been a very much poorer organization than Hezbollah, both in caliber of soldier and even equipment. Lebanon does receive considerable military aid but much of what the army has is outdated hand-me-downs from Uncle Sam. For example, most Lebanese army soldiers today still carry U.S.-made M16 rifles from the Vietnam era. Much of the hardware, although functioning is old.

But it’s not about the kit that the LAF has. It’s much more about the soldiers themselves and the real powers behind the army, which draws deep skepticism over this plan.

There are just too many ‘ifs’ attached to it, to make it work. If the LAF gets a total rebranding with equipment and training and if its officers can be allowed to carry out this operation which keeps Hezbollah on the northern side of the Litani it has legs. But there is also a bigger ‘if’ which perhaps the Americans haven’t thought of, true to tradition in dealing with all calamities in Lebanon. The LAF has many senior Sunni officers who are on the Hezbollah payroll, surreptitiously receiving a hefty pay check each month. The same goes for the security services which angers many western-aligned Christian officers who struggle to carry out their work and are exhausted by the internal corruption at play. How does the American blueprint take this into account, one has to wonder?

For it to work and to hold, the number allotted of 10,000 soldiers is not at all serious. The south of Lebanon is quite huge and Hezbollah will have no trouble at all sneaking back in and rebuilding their bunkers and tunnels, albeit over many years. But the idea that the LAF arrest Hezbollah fighters will give many Lebanese a laugh, during these few days where many have sought solace in the deal and are moving back south to the area to their bombed out homes.

One reason which might explain the deal being done is that it is simply a trap, orchestrated by the Israelis. Its own army has suffered many defeats and a 2-month hiatus will serve many purposes as it never came close to succeeding in its tasks. Even low in numbers and much of it senior level of commanders wiped out, Hezbollah fighters destroyed many IDF tanks and killed many of its infantry. A small number of well-placed sources in Lebanon believe this. They claim that Israel is planning on a second wave of attacks and has trapped the Lebanese Shias into moving back into the region, ready for the moment that Trump takes power. Geopolitics also plays a big role in that Biden has been threatening Israel, pushing it to end its campaign in Lebanon, while it also negotiates with France so that Paris would pull out of the ICC and its cases against Netanyahu. And of course the number of days of the ceasefire is almost exactly the same number as Biden’s days left in the Oval office.

“How can you tell all this is true?” one leading figure in Lebanon, who has close contacts with Israel and U.S. intelligence, says. “Netanyahu in his statement openly said that if the agreement is violated, they will go back in, and that the goal in the north is the return of the residents – and he didn’t call for them to go home yet. The durability of the ceasefire is completely dependent on Hezbollah and Lebanon abiding by it. If they don’t, and January 20 comes, Israel will do what it must,” he explains.