Self-Defense Carve-Outs, Ceasefire Violations, and Who Gets to Decide
On the morning of November 27, 2024, a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon went into effect at 4 a.m. local time. Hours later, Israeli forces fired on civilians returning to their homes in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam. The Israeli military said the ceasefire had not been broken. The action was not offensive, it said — it was a defensive response to a threat. It was enforcement of the agreement’s terms.
That framing — defensive rather than offensive, enforcement rather than violation — has been Israel’s consistent position across three successive ceasefire agreements spanning Gaza, Lebanon, and the current Iran war theater. In each case, the agreements contained language reserving the right to act in self-defense. In each case, independent tracking bodies documented Israeli military operations continuing from the first hours of each ceasefire. In each case, the Israeli military maintained that its actions fell within the terms it had agreed to.
The question this report examines is not whether Israel has a right to self-defense. Under international law, it does — subject to the conditions of necessity and proportionality. The question is structural: how self-defense carve-out language has functioned in practice across these agreements, who determines what qualifies as a threat requiring a response, what accountability mechanisms exist when that determination is contested, and how the conduct of all parties — Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah — compares when assessed against the same analytical standard.
AGREEMENT ONE: GAZA, JANUARY 2025
The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that took effect on January 19, 2025 was, on paper, a genuine bilateral agreement. Hamas accepted the framework on May 5, 2024, after months of indirect negotiations mediated by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States. The deal was structured in three phases: a six-week initial ceasefire with hostage and prisoner exchanges, followed by negotiations on a permanent end to the war and full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Hamas was a full party to this agreement. That matters for what follows. When either side failed to meet its obligations, that failure was a real violation — not a question of standing.
The agreement’s critical structural feature was an expiry mechanism. Hamas had sought language guaranteeing that Phase 1 would automatically extend into Phase 2 negotiations regardless of whether terms were agreed. Israel proposed instead that mediators would make “every effort” to continue talks, but that if those talks did not progress, the ceasefire would automatically expire after six weeks. Hamas accepted these terms through Qatari and Egyptian mediators, and the final text reflected Israel’s proposed structure.
Israel’s stated rationale for continued military operations during the ceasefire was that Hamas retained armed capacity and administrative control in Gaza, and that the ceasefire did not require Israel to halt all activity — only to observe the hostage exchange framework and allow humanitarian access. Israeli officials argued that targeted operations against Hamas military infrastructure fell within the agreement’s terms. UN human rights experts documented a different picture: in the period from January 19 to mid-March, Israeli forces killed at least 100 Palestinians, bringing the total killed since October 7, 2023 to at least 48,400. Israel maintained these actions were within the ceasefire terms.
Hamas’s documented violations in Phase 1 were of a different character. On February 10, Hamas announced a suspension of hostage releases, citing Israel’s failure to allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza — specifically, the agreed 600 trucks per day. The mediation mechanism convened. Egyptian and Qatari mediators assessed the situation and pledged to remove obstacles to humanitarian deliveries. Hamas revoked the suspension two days later, and hostage releases continued. The monitoring process functioned as intended: a dispute was raised, assessed by mediators, and resolved. Hamas’s non-compliance was coercive — using hostage timing as leverage — rather than military in character.
The ceasefire formally entered what one analysis described as a “twilight zone” on March 1, when the first phase ended without Phase 2 negotiations having begun. Israel declined to enter those talks on the grounds that Hamas remained in control of Gaza — a condition not specified in the written agreement. Hamas, for its part, had not released all living hostages and continued to hold out on terms for the remaining captives. On March 18, Israeli forces launched airstrikes on Gaza, killing more than 400 people in one night. Mediators were holding ceasefire talks with Hamas when the strikes began.
Netanyahu’s office said the strikes were carried out in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages and its rejection of proposals to extend the ceasefire. Not all senior Israeli voices accepted that framing. Haaretz defense columnist Amos Harel, one of Israel’s most respected military analysts, wrote: “There’s no other way to explain it: Israel knowingly violated the cease-fire agreement with Hamas — with American approval — because it didn’t want to fully meet the terms it had committed to two months ago.” NPR reported that the agreement required Israel to enter permanent ceasefire talks on the 16th day of Phase 1 — February 3. Those talks did not take place.
More than half of the living Israeli hostages freed under the ceasefire — 14 of 25 — publicly said the resumption of strikes endangered the lives of the remaining hostages still in Gaza.
The Gaza ceasefire architecture contained no explicit “imminent threat” language of the kind that would appear in the Lebanon agreements. Its expiry mechanism served a related structural function: it provided a legal basis for resuming operations without requiring either party to formally declare a violation, while leaving the question of who bore responsibility for the collapse contested and unresolved.
AGREEMENT TWO: LEBANON, NOVEMBER 2024
The November 27, 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon is where the self-defense carve-out language appears explicitly, in the primary text of the agreement.
Clause 4 of the cessation of hostilities document reads: “These commitments do not preclude either Israel or Lebanon from exercising their inherent right of self-defense, consistent with international law.”
A US side letter — not formally published but reported by Israel’s Channel 12, confirmed by multiple outlets — went further. It reportedly committed that Israel has the right to act in response to threats from inside Lebanon “in accordance with international law,” and that should the terms of the agreement be broken in southern Lebanon, Israel reserves the right to act at any time. The letter was described as giving Israel operational latitude that the public ceasefire text itself did not spell out.
On the question of Hezbollah’s standing: Hezbollah did not sign the agreement. The formal parties were Israel and the Lebanese state. But the record shows Hezbollah was consulted throughout. US envoy Amos Hochstein negotiated in Lebanon with Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, who had Hezbollah’s explicit backing. On November 20, Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem approved the deal. Hezbollah was not excluded from this agreement — it chose not to be a named signatory, while endorsing the terms through the Lebanese state structure. The obligation to prevent Hezbollah from operating south of the Litani River fell on the Lebanese government, not Hezbollah directly, which is the legal architecture a non-state actor agreement typically requires.
Independent monitoring bodies documented the following in the months after the ceasefire took effect.
The Norwegian Refugee Council reported that UNIFIL documented more than 7,500 Israeli airspace violations and nearly 2,500 ground violations since November 2024 — what the UN Special Rapporteur called “a total disregard for the ceasefire agreement.” Lebanese authorities reported 331 people killed and 945 injured. More than 13 children were killed. Israel continued to occupy five positions within Lebanese territory in clear breach of the withdrawal terms.
Against that: UNIFIL and OHCHR documented four incidents of projectiles fired from Lebanon toward Israel during the entire ceasefire period — none of which resulted in casualties. The first documented Hezbollah fire — two mortar rounds on December 2, 2024 — was explicitly characterized by Hezbollah as a defensive response to repeated Israeli ceasefire violations by the IDF.
The IDF’s standard framing for each strike was consistent: it was targeting Hezbollah military infrastructure, weapons storage, or personnel that violated the prohibition on armed groups south of the Litani River. Each strike was categorized as enforcement, not aggression. Each was justified by reference to the self-defense carve-out.
An analyst cited by NPR in the first days of the ceasefire identified the core problem precisely. Nicolas Noe observed that the Israelis would be able to define an “offensive” action on their own terms. “It seems as if we’re just going to continue to see sort of Israeli military strikes in Lebanon in the coming period,” he said, “as they see fit.” That prediction proved accurate. The self-defense clause, with no independent arbitration mechanism for individual strikes, functioned in practice as an open authorization for operational continuity.
In January 2026, Lebanon filed a formal complaint with the UN Security Council, documenting 2,036 Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty across the final three months of 2025 alone — 542 in October, 691 in November, 803 in December. The Lebanese government called on the Security Council to compel Israeli withdrawal and an end to strikes. Israel has not fully withdrawn. The strikes have not stopped.
AGREEMENT THREE: THE CURRENT CEASEFIRES, 2026
The current Lebanon ceasefire — brokered in April 2026 as part of the broader Iran war diplomacy — contains the same structural DNA.
The 2026 Israel-Lebanon ceasefire text, which took effect April 16 for an initial ten-day period since extended by three weeks, reads: “Israel retains the right to act in self-defense against imminent or ongoing threats, while refraining from offensive military operations in Lebanon.”
The language is almost identical to the 2024 agreement’s Clause 4 — with one addition: the word “imminent.” That word does real legal work. Under international law, imminent threat is one of the narrow conditions that justifies anticipatory self-defense, meaning a state can act before an attack occurs if the threat is genuine, specific, and immediate. What the agreement does not specify is who determines whether a threat meets that threshold, by what evidence, with what review mechanism, and within what timeframe.
The pattern from previous agreements predicts how this will function. The IDF will make that determination unilaterally, in real time, and report it as a defensive action. The monitoring mechanism will receive the report. Lebanon will dispute it. The Security Council will be unable to act.
The Iran ceasefire declared on April 8 introduced an additional complication that illustrates the problem in real time. When Pakistan’s Prime Minister Sharif announced the ceasefire, he said it included “Lebanon and elsewhere.” Netanyahu immediately said it did not include Lebanon. The morning after the announcement, the Israeli army continued strikes in Lebanon, issuing a new forced evacuation order near Tyre. King’s College analyst Andreas Krieg was blunt: “The greatest threat to any ceasefire in the region remains Israel,” adding that Israel prefers “ambiguous ceasefire” deals that allow it to return to fighting “when it feels the situation favours the Israeli army.”
On April 23, Trump announced a three-week extension of the Lebanon ceasefire following Oval Office talks with Israeli and Lebanese envoys — Hezbollah was not present. The following morning, Israeli forces struck multiple sites across southern Lebanon, killing at least six people. Netanyahu’s statement the same day removed any ambiguity about how Israel interprets the self-defense carve-out in the extended agreement. He said: “We are maintaining full freedom of action against any threat, including emerging ones. We struck yesterday and we struck today.” The ceasefire had been extended less than twenty-four hours earlier. The strikes continued regardless. CNN confirmed the operative language in the extended agreement: Israel is permitted to take “all necessary measures in self-defense.”
The same language appeared in a different context that same week. When Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike on April 22 while reporting in southern Lebanon, the Israeli military said it had been responding to an “imminent threat” — the precise carve-out terminology — and was reviewing the incident. Press freedom organizations called for an international investigation.
Hezbollah’s documented violations under the current 2026 agreement are more substantial than under the 2024 ceasefire. PBS NewsHour, reporting from southern Lebanon on April 24, confirmed that Hezbollah has claimed responsibility for ten attacks on Israeli troops — both inside Lebanon and in northern Israel — characterizing each as a response to repeated Israeli violations. The April 21 incident, in which Hezbollah launched rockets and a drone toward northern Israel, is illustrative: Hezbollah said it fired toward a site that had been shelling a Lebanese town, and characterized its action as retaliation for Israeli ceasefire violations. Hezbollah has expressed conditional acceptance of the current ceasefire — conditioning continued compliance on Israeli military withdrawal from Lebanese territory and cessation of strikes. That conditionality mirrors its posture under the 2024 agreement: willingness to observe terms that Israel is also observing, resistance to a framework in which Israel strikes while Hezbollah is bound.
THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE AND ITS LIMITS
The self-defense right codified in these agreements is grounded in Article 51 of the UN Charter and customary international law. That right is real. No serious legal analysis disputes that states — and in some interpretations, parties acting in state-like capacities — may use force to defend against armed attack or its imminent threat.
What international law also requires, and what these agreements do not enforce, is that the exercise of self-defense be subject to necessity and proportionality — and that it not be used as cover for offensive operations framed defensively. Scholars writing in Lawfare have documented that Israel’s use of force has, in their assessment, gone beyond what is permitted under jus ad bellum proportionality — not because a self-defense right does not exist, but because the scale and objectives of the operations exceed what the right authorizes.
The monitoring mechanisms in each of these agreements share a structural defect: they require reporting to a committee, which develops procedures, which reports to the Security Council. At no stage does any mechanism have authority to halt a specific strike in real time, or to make a binding ruling that a given operation exceeds the self-defense carve-out. The architecture places self-restraint obligations on Israel with no enforcement lever beyond diplomatic pressure — which the United States has, in the case of the Gaza ceasefire collapse, explicitly declined to apply.
OHCHR human rights experts were direct: “We are particularly dismayed by the swift endorsement by some States and regional organisations of Israel’s justification to cut off aid to Gaza as a reaction to Hamas’ alleged violations of the ceasefire, while Israel’s numerous infringements of the ceasefire went largely unreported.”
APPLYING THE SAME STANDARD
Equitable analysis requires applying the same framework to each party. When that is done, the picture across three agreements is as follows.
Hamas was a full signatory to the January 2025 Gaza ceasefire. Its documented violations were real. They were coercive — using hostage timing as leverage — rather than military. The primary documented violation, the suspension of hostage releases on February 10, was triggered by Israeli humanitarian aid shortfalls that the mediation mechanism subsequently assessed as legitimate grievances. Hamas revoked the suspension after mediators intervened. Its overall conduct during Phase 1 operated within the agreement’s dispute resolution process. Hamas also bore responsibility for the conditions that made the ceasefire’s collapse plausible — it had not released all living hostages, continued to hold out on Phase 2 terms, and remained an armed governing force in Gaza, which Israel cited as its central justification for declining to enter permanent ceasefire talks.
Hezbollah was not a signatory to either Lebanon agreement, but endorsed both through the Lebanese state structure and was consulted on terms in both cases. Its documented military violations under the November 2024 ceasefire consisted of four projectile incidents over more than a year, none fatal. The first was explicitly characterized by Hezbollah as a response to Israeli violations. Under the current 2026 agreement, Hezbollah has claimed responsibility for ten attacks on Israeli troops — a more significant record, but one Hezbollah has consistently characterized as reactive. PBS NewsHour’s on-the-ground reporting from southern Lebanon on April 24 corroborated that framing, describing Hezbollah’s attacks as responses to continued Israeli strikes. Hezbollah’s conditional acceptance of both agreements — compliance contingent on mutual observance — means its commitment was qualified from the outset, which is itself a form of non-compliance with the unconditional cessation both agreements required.
Israel has been the party with the most documented violations across all three agreements, as measured by independent tracking bodies — UNIFIL, OHCHR, and Lebanon’s own government complaint filings. Israel’s stated rationale across all three agreements has been consistent: it faces genuine security threats that did not cease when ceasefires were signed, and the self-defense language it negotiated into each agreement permits responses to those threats. That rationale is not invented — Israel operates in a threat environment that includes armed groups with documented intent and capability to attack Israeli territory and personnel. The documented record shows, however, that Israel has determined unilaterally what qualifies as a threat warranting a response, without reference to the monitoring committees each agreement established. In Gaza, its own senior defense analysts described the March 2025 resumption of strikes as a knowing violation. In Lebanon, UNIFIL documented violations in the thousands while Hezbollah’s documented fire remained in the single digits.
None of this is equivalent to saying that Hamas’s October 7 attacks were justified, that Hezbollah rocket fire is acceptable, or that Israel has no legitimate security interests at stake. The factual record does not require any of those conclusions. It shows that across three agreements, a structural gap — self-defense rights with no real-time enforcement mechanism — has produced documented violations by all parties, at scales that differ significantly, under a system that each party has used instrumentally.
🇺🇸 WHAT AMERICAN READERS NEED TO KNOW
The United States helped write, negotiate, or broker all three of these agreements. The side letter accompanying the November 2024 Lebanon ceasefire — which reportedly confirmed Israel’s right to strike at any time if it determined the terms were being violated — was a US commitment. The Gaza ceasefire framework was presented to the world by President Biden as the deal he had proposed in May 2024. American officials publicly blamed Hamas for the March 2025 collapse, in language that echoed Israeli government statements, despite the Haaretz account of what the Israeli government had actually decided.
The self-defense carve-out is not an Israeli invention. It reflects genuine international law. But the agreements negotiated with US involvement have consistently failed to include mechanisms capable of adjudicating in real time whether a given strike qualifies — who has the authority to make that call, by what evidence, and within what timeframe. That absence is not an accident of drafting. It is the architecture. And it is an architecture the United States has helped build across three successive agreements, without resolving the central question each one leaves open: when a party invokes self-defense to continue military operations during a ceasefire, who decides whether that invocation is legitimate — and what happens if no one can.
Sources: Times of Israel (primary text — November 2024 Lebanon ceasefire agreement and US side letter reporting, confirmed this session); peaceagreements.org (primary document — November 2024 Lebanon ceasefire full text, confirmed this session); US Department of State (primary document — 2026 Israel-Lebanon ceasefire text, confirmed this session); Wikipedia, 2026 Israel-Lebanon ceasefire (secondary summary of current agreement terms, confirmed this session); NPR (US — Gaza ceasefire collapse reporting, Harel quote, confirmed this session); NPR (US — Lebanon ceasefire analysis and Nicolas Noe quote, confirmed this session); OHCHR (UN human rights office — Gaza ceasefire violation statement, confirmed this session); OHCHR (UN human rights office — Lebanon ceasefire violation statement, confirmed this session); Norwegian Refugee Council (Lebanon — UNIFIL violation figures, casualty counts, confirmed this session); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Lebanon UN complaint filing, confirmed this session); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — 2026 ceasefire terms, Krieg quote, confirmed this session); CNN (US confirmation — Netanyahu April 24 quote, ceasefire extension terms, confirmed this session); PBS NewsHour (US confirmation — Hezbollah ten attacks, southern Lebanon ground reporting April 24, confirmed this session); OPB/AP (US — Amal Khalil killing, IDF imminent threat invocation, confirmed this session); Lawfare (legal analysis — jus ad bellum proportionality, confirmed this session)
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
Rudy, I have to tell you that I have a substantial amount of free floating anxiety these days. This special report helps corral that anxiety a bit. I have not understood how ceasefire agreements gravitate to "ceasefires in name only" so quickly and so relentlessly. I get it now. The agreements are constructed with structural gaps. Those gaps may be manipulated or reframed to justify violations with supposed cause. Reporting mechanisms are slow and there is no accountability to hold any party responsible. And the most important piece of this - diplomatic pressure by the powers that be to keep the parties in compliance - may be non-existent, by choice. Depressing. But necessary to understand. Thank you.