US indicates PM quietly agreed in principle to Lebanon truce yesterday

The White House indicates that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already agreed on Wednesday night, in principle, to a ceasefire with Hezbollah during a phone call with US President Donald Trump.

The ceasefire wasn’t announced until Thursday evening and caught Israel’s security cabinet off guard, given that they had ended a meeting about a potential truce the night before without making any decision on the matter.

Sharing how the ceasefire came about from Washington’s perspective, a White House official tells The Times of Israel that momentum began building following the trilateral meeting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio held at the State Department with Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors to Washington this week.

During the meeting, the first of its kind in decades, Lebanon “acknowledged Hezbollah is a mutual problem for both Israel and Lebanon,” the White House official says. The next day, Trump held a phone call with Netanyahu during which the premier “agreed to a ceasefire with certain terms.”

Later on Wednesday, Rubio held a phone call with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun where he coaxed him to agree to Israel’s terms for a ceasefire, which apparently included allowing Israel to maintain a buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

On Thursday morning, Trump spoke separately with Aoun and Netanyahu in order to finalize the agreement, which was then announced by the US president on Truth Social.

While those calls took place, the State Department worked with Lebanese and Israeli officials to craft a memorandum of understanding for the ceasefire, the White House official says.

The official expressed hope that the truce would help accelerate talks on a permanent peace deal between the two countries.