Weekly Commentary: Lebanon Must Declare State of Emergency To Facilitate
Sweeping Searches
Dr. Aaron Lerner 1 July 2026

As of this writing, the Lebanese Army does not have the legal authority to
conduct the kind of sweeping searches for weapons in private properties
which are required to get the job done.

Under Lebanese law, a citizen's home is constitutionally inviolable.

This legally limits the Lebanese Army to conduct searches of specific
locations which received judicial authorization based on intelligence
relating to those specific locations.

That's a gaping hole.

We don't have that kind of granular information.

In fact, sometimes we miss huge weapons stores and only find them when we
are at the site ourselves.

YNET reports, for example, that Israel Air Force Intelligence was certain
that the large Hezbollah underground complex in the village of Majdal Zoun
was abandoned and empty.

When we reached the site, we were stunned to find that the 200-meter-long
tunnel buried more that 25 meters underground was full of weapons,
explosives, rockets, anti-tank missiles, and drones.

But there is a work-around.

The declaration of a formal state of emergency.

And there is precedent for such a move.

The day after the August 4, 2020 Beirut port explosion, the Council of
Ministers declared a state of emergency, which Parliament subsequently
approved. That step dramatically expanded the legal authorities available to
the security forces.

A similar declaration, even if limited to the designated pilot zones of
Zawtar al-Gharbiya and Froun, could provide the legal basis for systematic
area-wide searches there rather than operations limited to sites identified
through prior intelligence.

Such a process would require authorization of sweeping searches by Military
Prosecutor Judge Claude Ghanem after the declaration of the state of
emergency .

It is noteworthy that Judge Ghanem is already prosecuting Hezbollah members
on illegal weapons charges.

If the Government of Lebanon is serious about disarming Hezbollah, they have
the votes to do this.

Declaring a state of emergency requires a two-thirds majority in the
24-member cabinet - 16 votes. Hezbollah and Amal control only four seats, so
only 16 of the remaining 20 cabinet members need to vote for the state of
emergency.

A simple majority of the Lebanese Parliament is needed to approve the state
of emergency. The Hezbollah-Amal bloc has only 30 seats, so only a fraction
of the other 98 MPs need to support the move for it to pass.

So the choice is clear: a farcical "hear-no-evil see-no-evil" operation or a
serious program of boots on the ground performing intensive and ongoing
broad searches to locate and destroy both the weapons now in place as well
as weapons which might be smuggled in in the future.

The pilot zones are thus far more than a test of the army's operational
capability.

They are a critical test of whether the Lebanese state is prepared to truly
assert sovereign authority in its own territory.

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IMRA - Independent Media Review and Analysis

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Arab-Israeli relations

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