Is Disarming Hezbollah and Hamas Possible?

The lesson of history is that armed movements do not disarm because they are defeated, but because political developments and integration make their arms functionally obsolete.

Emidio Lev Rahmani is the nom de plume of Francesco Di Bella, a researcher at Centro Studi di Politica Internazionale (CeSPI) in Italy. He writes on issues related to the political and social dynamics of the SWANA region, with a particular focus on Lebanon and Palestine.

The disarmament of armed non-state actors has long been one of the most complex challenges in post-conflict transitions. The core issue rarely lies solely in the weapons themselves, but rather in what those weapons represent—whether it be legitimacy, deterrence, or identity. This means that disarmament is not merely a technical process of demobilization but also a political act that redefines power relationships and national sovereignty. The contemporary debate surrounding Hamas and Hezbollah illustrates how deeply this issue is intertwined with questions of trust, representation, and security, since—in both Gaza and Lebanon—the presence of powerful and politically integrated militias challenges the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Yet outright attempts to dismantle these structures often face a “commitment problem,” which is the inability of parties to both credibly promise and fulfil future obligations.

The commitment problem arises when parties involved in a conflict have rational incentives to break promises once circumstances change. This creates a structural issue, particularly in asymmetric conflicts where one actor holds overwhelming military power, while the other relies on legitimacy derived from resistance. Israel’s approach to Hamas exemplifies this logic. From an Israeli perspective, any acceptance of a non-disarmed Hamas risks future attacks once the group rebuilds strength. For Hamas, however, complete disarmament would eliminate the sole Palestinian deterrent against Israeli military dominance. With both sides facing incentives to defect, the prospect of stable peace becomes increasingly fragile. A similar dilemma faces Hezbollah in Lebanon, which, after decades of conflict with Israel and deep integration into Lebanese politics and society, considers its armed wing not as a temporary tool but as an essential part of its identity and survival. It therefore views any disarmament attempt, whether through domestic legislation or international pressure, as an existential threat to its legitimacy. The result is a classic deadlock: the state cannot credibly guarantee Hezbollah’s security, and Hezbollah cannot credibly assure it will refrain from using force.

This dynamic is not unique to the Middle East. The histories of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in the Basque Country offer strong lessons on how credible commitments to resolving entrenched conflict can develop only through gradual integration, verified trust-building, and the establishment of parallel political institutions capable of reining in the continued use of armed force. Recognizing these precedents is essential for creating a practical route toward disarmament in both Gaza and Lebanon.

The Good Friday Agreement and the Basque Disarmament Model

The Northern Ireland peace process provides a key example of how the commitment problem can be addressed through gradualism, verification, guarantees, and inclusion. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement did not require the immediate disarmament of the IRA, but instead established a political and institutional framework in which disarmament became both credible and, eventually, in the organization’s own interest. The IRA’s armed campaign was justified by a perceived lack of political representation for the Catholic and nationalist communities. In response, the Good Friday Agreement aimed to address this structural imbalance by establishing a power-sharing executive, cross-border institutions with the Republic of Ireland, and eventually a Bill of Rights to ensure representation.

Only after these institutions became established—and as the IRA observed tangible political gains through Sinn Féin’s participation—did the conditions for voluntary disarmament mature. Even then, disarmament remained incremental and opaque: from 2001 to 2005, the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) oversaw the disposal of weapons under strict confidentiality and, crucially, the process was not externally imposed but negotiated through domestic consensus and international facilitation, especially by the United States and Canada. This sequenced approach transformed weapons from symbols of legitimacy into liabilities that hindered Sinn Féin’s full political normalization, illustrating that gradualism alone does not guarantee success; disarmament can only follow genuine political integration. Without the institutional and psychological transformation that made the IRA’s arms redundant, any externally imposed demand for immediate disarmament would have inevitably failed.

The Basque case shows a similar pattern of delayed, yet internally motivated, demilitarization. The Spanish state never engaged in direct negotiations with ETA, which officially renounced violence only in 2011 after more than four decades of armed conflict. However, ETA’s decision was not entirely unilateral: it resulted from increasing political inclusion and civil society mobilization. Key to the process was the emergence of a new and legitimate political space for the ezker abertzale (“patriotic left” in Euskara), formerly represented by ETA’s political wing, Batasuna, which was banned in 2003. As left-wing parties such as Sortu and Aralar distanced themselves from ETA’s violence, they gradually gained legal recognition and formed a coalition called Euskal Herria Bildu.

Similarly, civil organizations like Elkarri and Lokarri promoted social dialogues that redefined disarmament not as defeat, but as moral and civic maturity. Therefore, when ETA ultimately surrendered its weapons in 2017—under the supervision of the International Verification Commission (IVC)—it did so not due to coercion, but because the group’s political project had found a new outlet within democratic institutions. The Spanish and French governments set firm conditions, but the true impetus came from within Basque society—a shift in legitimacy that rendered armed struggle obsolete. As in Northern Ireland, disarmament only had meaning because it followed (not preceded) political normalization. The broader lesson is that coercive disarmament, without concurrent processes of inclusion and institutional legitimacy, tends to reinforce resistance rather than eliminate it.

The Problem in Lebanon and Palestine

Hezbollah’s disarmament debate reveals a similar kind of structural commitment problem to the ones raised above. In the aftermath of Hezbollah’s 2024 conflict with Israel, the organization’s military strength was greatly diminished; international mediation resulted in an agreement to move heavy weapons north of the Litani and to allow oversight by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). But Hezbollah’s subsequent rhetorical and practical retreat showed that formal clauses cannot substitute for the deeper political and institutional conditions necessary for credible compliance. The Lebanese state’s own vulnerabilities (confessional fragmentation, an underfunded and politically limited LAF, a social contract that has long tolerated parallel providers of security and welfare) mean that any disarmament demand is immediately judged against whether the state can replace both Hezbollah’s deterrent role and its social services. Simply put, Hezbollah’s resistance to unilateral or coercive disarmament reflects not only a strategic calculation about military advantage but also a perceived threat to organizational legitimacy and community representation.

The Palestinian situation in Gaza highlights the same commitment dilemma in a different context. Israel fears that a formally undeclared disbandment of Hamas could allow it to regain its capabilities and restart cross-border attacks, while Hamas, in turn, worries that disarmament would make it vulnerable to coercive measures and political marginalization. The importance of the tunnel networks in Gaza—both materially and symbolically—intensifies these fears: tunnels serve as tactical assets, means of governance and supply, powerful bargaining tools, and as instruments for maintaining clandestine mobility under pressure. As such, their immediate removal without credible guarantees against subsequent Israeli coercion or punitive occupation is unlikely to ensure long-term security. Conversely, demanding total, immediate disarmament risks creating a governance vacuum in Gaza, which could lead to social breakdown and the resurgence of armed groups that are essentially the same as the original organization.

Lebanon and Gaza both face a straightforward political calculation: weapons serve both as military tools and as symbols of political power, so trying to disarm them while ignoring the political dimension is unlikely to succeed. Historical examples like the IRA and ETA show that arms only lose their perceived necessity when the political environment is changed so that legitimate goals can be pursued without violence. In Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, disarmament happened as a result of gradually including groups in the political process that established institutional guarantees and socially delegitimized violence, not as a prerequisite for starting talks. This highlights the main flaw in current approaches to disarmament in Lebanon and Gaza: outside actors, like the United States in Lebanon through the diplomatic initiative led by Thomas Barrack, often insist on disarmament before negotiations. Such approaches fail to address key obstacles such as Israel’s belligerent insistence on maintaining total asymmetric dominance. History indicates that negotiations and political inclusion should come first for disarmament to be believable. Translating these lessons into practical prescriptions for Gaza and Lebanon involves prioritizing processes over declarations.

For Gaza, the immediate focus ought not to be a doctrinaire demand for total demilitarization, but a carefully staged program of arms reduction through transparency and verification, linked to governance reforms and strong international guarantees. This process can only be credible if it acknowledges and addresses the context of profound hostility generated by the highly asymmetric security environment that Israel staunchly preserves. Eliminating the tunnel system should be regarded as a non-negotiable security measure because, even though tunnels have played an essential strategic role for Hamas against Israel’s on-the-ground genocidal policies, they are uniquely destabilizing—defeating conventional surveillance and embodying a subterranean capacity that is exceptionally difficult to monitor. Nonetheless, this measure should not be framed as a precondition for engagement, but as a component of a phased and gradual process in which both sides undertake steps to address existing power asymmetries. In this sequence, allowing Hamas to keep a limited, clearly defined surface arsenal, observable to external monitors and periodically verifiable, would reduce the group’s incentive to see disarmament as an existential surrender and would lower Israel’s motivation to pursue preemptive annihilation. This measured approach turns weapons from irreducible assets into politically manageable elements within a transition process.

In Lebanon, a comparable strategy would be an integration pathway that gradually incorporates Hezbollah’s military and social capacities into state institutions—in other words, a credible approach recognizing that Hezbollah’s arms are intertwined with its domestic legitimacy and perceptions of state failure. A realistic roadmap thus begins with strengthening the institutional capacity of the LAF and a program to absorb, retrain, and redeploy selected Hezbollah personnel and technical assets into national structures under transparent civilian oversight. Additionally, parallel efforts should redirect Hezbollah’s welfare networks into public service frameworks to avoid creating a social vacuum that could provoke backlash or revive parallel governance. Importantly, any such program requires strong international guarantees—both economic incentives and security assurances—that effectively reduce the perceived benefits of armed autonomy while safeguarding vulnerable communities during the transition.

Across both theaters, verification and third-party guarantees are essential because they significantly influence the calculus of commitments; neutral, globally respected monitors do not merely record compliance, but also shape expectations of future behavior. Where credible, persistent monitoring exists, the incentive to break commitments is diminished because violations become detectable and politically costly. The IICD in Northern Ireland and the IVC in the Basque case succeeded not because they were punitive but because they were integrated into a political framework that made compliance rational for the armed actors. This suggests that without carefully designed, technically capable, and politically accepted institutions, any pledge to disarm remains an empty unilateral gesture.

This is not to romanticize gradualism, nor to understate the political challenges ahead. In Israel and among many of its supporters, any proposal permitting an armed Hamas or a partially armed Hezbollah would be politically damaging, while in Lebanon, domestic actors worry that external pressure to disarm could spark instability or be exploited by regional rivals. Yet history indicates that insisting on immediate, unconditional disarmament as a precondition for political normalization is a dead end, encouraging both the state and the armed non-state actor to see arms as the ultimate safeguard of their survival. A more politically prudent strategy recognizes that disarmament is a process of political replacement and a trade-off in which weapons are made irrelevant not solely through force but by creating alternative, legitimate avenues for representation, security, and welfare.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The journey toward disarmament in Gaza and in Lebanon cannot simply imitate European experiences, since the sociopolitical contexts of Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, Palestine, and Lebanon vary significantly. Still, the core principles of credible commitment and gradual trust-building remain universally applicable. External pressure and conditional aid, like current U.S. policy toward Lebanon, may speed up negotiations but cannot replace internal political ownership. Hezbollah’s integration into the Lebanese state will demand not surrender but transformation through a redefinition of its role from an autonomous resistance group to an institutional stakeholder (which it already is in many respects). Similarly, Hamas’s path to normalization must include a phased arms-control process recognizing its embeddedness within Palestinian governance structures in Gaza.

The key lesson from the IRA and ETA cases is that violence ends not when weapons vanish, but when their political usefulness disappears, and this change requires inclusive governance, socioeconomic stabilization, and credible guarantees—conditions that cannot be imposed from outside but must be developed from within. Disarmament in these cases is less about removing weapons and more about redefining legitimacy. In Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, legitimacy shifted from the battlefield to the ballot box through negotiated power-sharing and social consensus. In Lebanon and Gaza, by contrast, the dynamics are far more complex, since the challenge is less about integration into a domestic political system but rather the near-total lack of workable political processes with Israel. The lesson of history is that armed movements do not disarm because they are defeated, but because the political system makes their arms obsolete. Until states like Israel and Lebanon can credibly commit to long-term political and security guarantees, and until movements like Hamas and Hezbollah can trust that disarmament will not mean their destruction and, ultimately, giving up the defense of their homelands and people, the weapons will stay. Bridging this trust gap is essential for any lasting peace.