After 49 years and $6 billion in US taxpayer funding, UNIFIL, the so-called UN peacekeeping force in Southern Lebanon, is disbanding.
Under a U.S.-led compromise in the Security Council, UNIFIL’s 10,000 troops will exit by the end of 2027. This is UNIFIL’s first obituary.
Over its nearly half-century tenure UNIFIL has not saved lives. Its weakness, incompetence, corruption, and complicity with terror have cost lives, including 47 Israeli civilians and 82 soldiers in the war sparked by Hezbollah’s October 7, 2023 attacks.
UNIFIL’s mission under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 was to demilitarize southern Lebanon and permit the Lebanon Armed Forces (LAF) to regain control.
How did UNIFIL perform?
When UNIFIL first reoccupied southern Lebanon in 2006, Hezbollah was a recently-defeated force of about 900 full-time fighters with a depleted arsenal.
On the eve of October 7, 2023, Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies had become the ninth-largest army in the Middle East with 105,000 armed men. They had a weapons stockpile of over 150,000 rockets, 10,000 anti-tank guided missiles, 1,000 drones, anti-ship missiles, and even a rudimentary air defense system.
That's how UNIFIL performed.
During the next 13 months, Hezbollah and its partners fired 16,000 rockets, missiles, and drones into Israel, surpassing the number of V1s and V2s fired by Germany at Britain during World War II.
It is implausible that Hezbollah’s epic rearming - right under UNIFIL’s nose - could occur without complicity.
For nearly two decades, UNIFIL failed to report Hezbollah’s military encroachments, tunnels, and growing weapons caches.
During Operation Northern Arrows, the IDF uncovered Hezbollah tunnels and weapons caches just 100 meters from a UNIFIL base. Video footage shows Hezbollah launching rockets beside a UNIFIL battalion.
In October 2024, UNIFIL staff accepted bribes from Hezbollah, inviting terrorists onto a UNIFIL base near the Israeli border and giving them access to surveillance equipment to monitor and target IDF forces.
A 2024 Danish whistleblower and UNIFIL soldier said they were “totally subject to Hezbollah.” They even needed permission to move their forces.
In 2018, two anonymous UNIFIL commanders came forward. They warned that Hezbollah had infiltrated parts of UNIFIL. A Finnish commander said that UNIFIL soldiers were “reporting Israeli movements to various Lebanese actors.” An anonymous Irish UNIFIL officer said Hezbollah had managed to embed members in UNIFIL.
Chaim Avraham was the father of St. Sgt. Benny Avraham, one of three IDF soldiers abducted by Hezbollah terrorists near the Israeli border on October 7, 2000. He obtained a photograph of the vehicle used in his son’s abduction. It had UNIFIL license plates.
UNIFIL troops watched and filmed the 2000 abduction of Benny Avraham, Adi Avitan, and Omar Souad, but refused to intervene. All three were murdered soon after.
UNIFIL denied seeing anything. Next, they denied having a videotape. It was almost a year before an embarrassed UN Secretary General Kofi Annan turned the tape over to Israel. Outrage might have ended there had the UN not blurred key evidence, including vehicle license plates.
The scandals did not stop the Nobel Committee from awarding Annan and the UN the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.
“Downright shameful disgrace,” said Avraham of the award.
UNIFIL has not done much actual peacekeeping since the early 1980s. Then, UNIFIL occasionally interdicted terrorists attempting to enter Israel, recounted then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon in his 2001 memoir, Warrior. Even then UNIFIL returned attempted murderers to terror bases, not to the LAF, in violation of their UN mandate.
In another case, UNIFIL gave shelter to a group of fleeing PLO fighters during an actual firefight with the IDF, he wrote.
Since about 30% of UNIFIL’s half-billion-dollar-a-year budget is paid by U.S. taxpayers, no UNIFIL obituary can omit its waste, fraud, and corruption. UNIFIL’s budget is a snakes’ nest and a grab-bag for malevolent actors.
From 2007 until 2016, UNIFIL was twice embroiled in scandals after staff stole and resold millions of liters of fuel.
Between 2010-2015, corrupt UNIFIL employees skimmed $6 million by selling their food - everything from noodles to frozen shrimp - often to Hezbollah.
UNIFIL even hires Hezbollah terrorists directly, said the Finnish UNIFIL commander. Civilian employees working for UNIFIL “do not hide their Hezbollah membership,” he said. Terrorists work in nearly every department.
Despite being on notice, the UN Office of Internal Oversight failed to address the terrorists-on-the payroll issue in a pre-war audit of UNIFIL’s hiring and HR practices. What did its audit focus on? “Gender perspectives in its recruiting.”
In June, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget described UNIFIL’s operation as “fraught with waste and abuse,” recommending defunding.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his team successfully negotiated UNIFIL’s slow death on August 28, 2025.
Even if UNIFIL were a model of honesty and efficiency, its presence provides political cover for LAF and Lebanon’s government, who have failed to exercise effective control over southern Lebanon since the radical Islamist infiltration took root in 1982.
Two months before Northern Arrows, UNIFIL Force Commander, Major General Aroldo Lázaro Sáenz, posted a photo of UNIFIL soldiers marching nervously with LAF troops. He wrote: “together we play a vital role to preserve stability in south Lebanon and working towards the full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701.”
Sáenz’s parade was a sham. It was a performance in the shadow of Hezbollah, southern Lebanon’s de facto power. Hezbollah ruled the streets.
The war started 73 days later.
Rami Chris Robbins writes about Middle East issues, history and foreign policy.
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