BEIRUT—The Lebanese government’s decision to appoint former ambassador Simon Karam, a civilian with openly political positions, to lead the Lebanese delegation in the so-called Military Technical Committee meetings in Naqoura is not a procedural adjustment. Rather, it is a political landmine.

What was designed as a narrow, officer-to-officer framework under the November 27, 2014 cessation of hostilities is being quietly repackaged into a civilian-led negotiating track. U.S. envoy Morgan Ortagus, an Israeli lover, is chairing the committee.

Translation: a technical ceasefire mechanism is being weaponized to advance normalization under Israeli and American pressure.

For decades, Naqoura meant one thing: field arrangements, maps, coordinates, and UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) oversight. 

Naqoura is a coastal town at the southernmost edge of Lebanon, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and sitting directly on the UN-drawn “Blue Line” with occupied Palestine. 

Since 1978, it has hosted the headquarters of UNIFIL, making it the central venue for ceasefire talks, border disputes, and technical military meetings between Lebanese officers and the Israeli enemy under international supervision. 

In Lebanese political language, Naqoura is more than a place. It is a pressure point where wars pause, maps are redrawn, and every word at the negotiating table carries strategic weight.

Today, naming a non-military figure at the head of the delegation signals a profound shift. It hands the Israeli enemy precisely what it has sought for years—an overt political gateway disguised as a “security meeting.” 

Once the table turns civilian, the agenda shifts to politics: gas fields, joint investments, “economic cooperation,” and what Netanyahu unabashedly brands as “economic peace.”

The danger is not hypothetical; it is on record. Israeli Channel 14 political correspondent Tamir Morag reported that U.S. envoy Morgan Ortagus urged Israeli officials to strike the funeral procession of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah at Beirut’s Sports City, asserting that Resistance leaders would be in attendance.

The Israeli enemy ultimately did not execute the plan, but kept warplanes circling over the capital throughout the ceremony, a grotesque reminder of the contempt both Washington and Tel Aviv have for Lebanese lives.

This is the same mindset now posing as a mediator at Naqoura. Let that sink in. The party proposing to “organize negotiations” is the same party that floated the idea of bombing a million civilians in one strike. It is diplomatic theatre at its most cynical.

Even the Israeli enemy is no longer hiding behind euphemisms. The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement that dispensed with diplomatic camouflage altogether: “Sending a representative of Netanyahu to meet with Lebanese officials is an initial attempt to lay the foundation for relations and economic cooperation with Lebanon.”

This is not ceasefire language; this is annex language. It is normalization before demarcation, and diplomacy before de-occupation.

Israel is essentially announcing that Naqoura is no longer about the “Blue Line” but about breaking Lebanon’s political firewall.

Selecting Simon Karma, an openly anti-Resistance Maronite political scholar who has repeatedly dismissed Hezbollah as a “danger to Lebanese society”, is no coincidence. 

Naqoura negotiations is the perfect civilian foil for an Israeli agenda that thrives on “dialogue” code words and “cooperation” schemes. Once a civilian sits across the table, Israel will push: joint maritime projects, gas partnerships, international lending packages, and “economic reconstruction.”

Netanyahu has been advertising “economic normalization” for years. Now Lebanon is handing him a doorway.

All of this points to a blunt political equation: convert military pressure into political concessions. Washington and Tel Aviv are no longer mediating between two parties; they are co-writing the agenda. 

The Israeli occupation entity is telegraphing two choices to Lebanon, loudly and clearly: Take the “economic peace” deal or brace for an escalation any night of the week.

Naqoura is no longer a map room; it is a battlefield for Lebanon’s strategic identity. Will Lebanon surrender its sovereignty by allowing economic normalization to creep in through a ceasefire committee? Or will it demand negotiations under strict military parameters with no political bartering?

Let us dispense with illusions: these developments are not “confidence-building measures.” They are a slow-motion attempt to detach Lebanon from the axis of Resistance and absorb it into an Israeli-American economic project.

And the question that hangs over the entire charade remains brutally simple: How can anyone call this a “negotiation” when one of the so-called mediators was, just days ago, recommending the bombing of a funeral attended by a million people?