Speaking to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 3 June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described both delegations as seated at the State Department for a second consecutive day “for the first time in many, many years,” and said he hoped the session would produce a joint statement and an action plan covering security in Lebanon independent from Hezbollah. The statement was notable as much for its framing as its substance. Rubio was not announcing a deal. He was announcing hope, from a congressional chamber, while the talks were still in progress.

The talks are the first sustained direct negotiations between Israeli and Lebanese government representatives in more than 30 years, a diplomatic reality that Rubio has cited repeatedly in previous hearings as evidence of progress. The current round, the fourth, opened on 2 June with what Lebanese sources described as a preparatory session focused on process. Wednesday’s session was expected to tackle the substantive issues: a timeline for Israeli troop withdrawal from Lebanese territory, the deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces in the south, and the mechanism by which Hezbollah would be disarmed or neutralised as a military actor.

None of those questions has an easy answer. Israel has captured Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon, extended its ground presence deeper than at any point since 2000, and showed no sign on 3 June of halting air operations while talks proceeded. The Lebanese army does not have the political clearance, the equipment, or the manpower to disarm Hezbollah even if a deal were signed. And Hezbollah, which controls the actual weapons at the centre of the dispute, is not represented in the room.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 2 June, Rubio made the analytical connection explicit: Israel has no territorial claims in Lebanon, he said, and therefore Hezbollah is the impediment, and there is no Hezbollah without Iran. The formulation is clean diplomatically and accurate strategically. It also carries an implication the administration has been reluctant to state too plainly: that the Lebanon file cannot be resolved without Iranian agreement, which makes the Lebanon file a function of the US-Iran nuclear track.

Rubio acknowledged that Tehran is actively attempting to interfere with the Washington talks so that any eventual arrangement could be credited to Iranian pressure rather than to direct negotiation. Iran’s parliament speaker and nuclear negotiating lead, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, warned in the same period that continued Israeli attacks on Lebanon could cause Iran to halt its dialogue with the US entirely. The warning was a lever. Whether it is a credible one depends on whether Iran calculates that the Lebanon war is more useful as ongoing pressure or more useful resolved.

The US position, as Rubio has described it, is that Washington wants the Lebanon and Iran files treated separately. Iran’s position is that they are inseparable. This is not a new dispute; it has characterised every diplomatic effort in the Lebanon theatre since March. What is new is the accumulated death toll, now past 3,468 by the Lebanese health ministry’s count as of 2 June, and the mounting pressure on Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam to show something tangible from the Washington process before the extended ceasefire framework frays further.

On 2 June, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to halt their attacks, citing separate phone calls with Netanyahu and Hezbollah intermediaries. He stated that Israel would not send troops into Beirut and that Hezbollah would stop its attacks on Israeli territory. The announcement raised expectations briefly. Neither Israel nor Hezbollah publicly accepted its terms, and both continued military operations within hours.

The US had been working toward this outcome for several days. Before the Trump announcement, Rubio spoke separately with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss a proposed phased roadmap: as a first step, Hezbollah would stop all attacks on Israel, and in return Israel would refrain from further escalation in Beirut. Aoun reportedly tried to advance the proposal, but Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri placed the burden on Israel to stop firing first. The sequencing dispute meant the proposal stalled before it produced an agreed pause.

Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon continued on 3 June with strikes targeting what the IDF described as Hezbollah positions. Hezbollah claimed missile launches into northern Israel the same day. The pattern since the April 16 cessation of hostilities has been consistent: announcements of pauses, agreed extensions, and constructive atmospherics at the State Department, with military activity proceeding in parallel and neither side materially constrained by the diplomatic process.

While Rubio was speaking to Congress on 3 June, Lebanon’s health ministry was reporting that an Israeli strike on an ambulance in southern Lebanon had killed two paramedics, raising the total number of emergency and health workers killed since the war began in March to at least 130. The figure encompasses doctors, nurses, paramedics, and civil defence workers killed in attacks on healthcare facilities, ambulances, and rescue operations across southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

The systematic targeting of medical infrastructure has been a documented feature of the conflict since March. An Israeli strike on a health centre in Burj Qalaouiyah in the Bint Jbeil district killed 12 medical workers in a single incident in mid-March. The World Health Organization has recorded hundreds of attacks on emergency medical services in Lebanon during the course of the conflict. Israel has described its strikes as targeting Hezbollah military infrastructure. The Lebanese health ministry and international humanitarian organisations have disputed that characterisation in case after case.

More than 1.2 million people have been displaced inside Lebanon by Israeli strikes and evacuation orders since March, per figures cited by multiple relief agencies. The southern and eastern Bekaa regions of the country have absorbed the heaviest bombardment. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has described the Washington talks as the “best opportunity” for Lebanon and its people, and has framed a stable nationwide ceasefire as the principal objective of his delegation. What that delegation can credibly deliver on Hezbollah disarmament, and what Israel will accept as a security guarantee in its absence, is the gap that the fourth round is attempting to close.

The Israeli delegation is led by Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. The Lebanese delegation is led by Nada Hamadeh Moawad, Lebanon’s ambassador to Washington. On the US side, the principal lead is Deputy National Security Adviser Mike Needham, with State Department Counsellor Daniel Holler also attending. A similar military-level meeting took place at the Pentagon the previous week, per Rubio’s congressional testimony.

The structure of the talks reflects the ceasefire’s own architecture. The April 16 arrangement applies formally between the sovereign states of Israel and Lebanon, not between Israel and Hezbollah. Hezbollah has rejected direct participation in the talks, describing any negotiation as capitulation. It has also rejected calls for disarmament. The Lebanon government’s position is that it is committed to extending state authority and limiting non-state armed actors, but Lebanese officials acknowledge that the timetable and mechanism for doing so in a country where Hezbollah retains deep political and military infrastructure is a matter of years, not weeks.

Israeli officials have pointed out that Hezbollah’s continued fire since the April cessation of hostilities demonstrates that the Lebanese government cannot enforce any security undertakings it makes. Some Israeli officials suggested after the 2 June session that the two sides had found common ground on the desire to see Hezbollah disarmed, and raised the possibility of trade and tourism links as a future state. The distance between that aspiration and operational military reality on the ground in southern Lebanon is the core problem that no round of talks in Washington has yet resolved.