After 13-months of war, Hezbollah entered a cease-fire with Israel on Wednesday that it will struggle to convince anyone, other than its most fervent loyalists, is not in fact a defeat.

The 60-day truce, which is supposed to lay the groundwork for a more lasting cease-fire, comes after three months of withering Israeli attacks that have thrown the organization into disarray.

Deep intelligence infiltration enabled Israel to assassinate many senior leaders, including Hezbollah’s secretary general of 32 years, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel bombarded the group’s most loyal communities, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee and blowing up dozens of villages, ensuring that many people have no homes to immediately return to.

And Hezbollah’s fateful decision to consult no one before firing rockets at Israel, setting off a conflict that grew into Lebanon’s most deadly war in decades, has left it isolated in the country and in the wider Middle East, with Lebanon facing an exorbitant bill for reconstruction.

Many of Hezbollah’s opponents in Lebanon and elsewhere hope that the war has weakened it enough that it will no longer be able to impose its will on the country’s political system. But it remains unclear whether Lebanon’s other parties will now feel empowered to stand against it.

Hezbollah still has many thousands of fighters in Lebanon and commands the loyalty of a large share of the country’s Shiite Muslims.

After the cease-fire took hold on Wednesday, thousands of them poured back into Beirut’s southern suburbs to inspect the damage. Many honked their horns, waved yellow Hezbollah flags and said the fact that Hezbollah’s survival amounted to a win.

“Morale is high and there is victory,” said Osama Hamdan, who was cleaning out the shop where he sells water pumps. His family’s apartment had been damaged and would cost more than $5,000 to fix so they could move back in, he said.

“None of this is important,” he said. “What is important is the victory and the resistance. We are with them to the end.”

Yet Israel’s battering of Hezbollah will likely echo in Lebanon and across the region for years.

The group, which was founded in the 1980s with Iranian guidance to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, grew into the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. It also served as a senior proxy force in the Iranian-backed network of anti-Israel militias known as the “axis of resistance.”

At Iran’s behest, it sent fighters to Syria to help quash a rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, joined battles in Iraq against the Islamic State and sent experts to Yemen to enhance the capabilities of the Houthi militia there.

At the height of its power before the war, it was perceived to be such a military threat that Israel and the United States feared that a war with the group could set the region ablaze and devastate Israel.

But as the war escalated, Hezbollah’s allies failed to come to its aid in any effective way, undermining the credibility of Iran’s network. And Israel stepped up its attacks so fast — incapacitating thousands of Hezbollah members by detonating wireless devices and heavily bombing their communities — that Hezbollah found itself unable to mount a response close to what it had threatened for years.

Securing the cease-fire required the group to make serious concessions.

Hezbollah began firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas after that group’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. For months, as Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, Hezbollah’s leaders swore that the battle would end only when Israel stopped attacking Gaza.

That demand is nowhere to be found in the new cease-fire, leaving Israel free to continue its quest to destroy Hamas.

The new cease-fire also gives an oversight role to the United States, which Iran and Hezbollah have long railed against for its staunch support for Israel. Iran and Hezbollah would have only accepted such an arrangement if they were desperate to stop the war, analysts said.

“It indicates the degree to which Iran is concerned and worried about its new vulnerability and the incoming Trump administration,” said Paul Salem, a Lebanon expert at the Middle East Institute, a think tank.

Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s border also deterred Israel from attacking Iran, because of fears that Hezbollah would bombard northern Israel in response. That threat has been drastically reduced, depriving Iran of a key defense. Iran and Israel have exchanged direct fire in recent months but Iran has yet to respond to Israel’s most recent bombardment, apparently to avoid a broader war.

“The shoe that hasn’t fallen yet is the obvious fact that there is a huge imbalance between Israel and Iran,” Mr. Salem said. “Israel can attack Iran at will and Iran cannot do the same.”

In Lebanon, too, Hezbollah is likely to face an array of economic, social and political challenges if the cease-fire holds.

For years, it justified its arsenal to other Lebanese as essential to defend the country against Israeli attacks. Now, it has not only failed in that defense but must answer to fellow Lebanese who are angry that it single-handedly dragged the country into a costly war that no one else wanted.

“Hezbollah is worried about the internal dynamics in the country,” said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “There are many people who are not happy with what happened, and not just opponents but people in Hezbollah’s orbit.”

The war has displaced 1.2 million people, the government says, mostly Shiite Muslims from Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley.

Many of them are now sheltering in areas dominated by other sects — Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druse — many of whom do not want them to stay and fear that Hezbollah members could draw Israeli fire.

Caring for the displaced and repairing the war’s damage will pose a major challenge to Lebanon, whose economy was in crisis before the fighting began, and to Hezbollah, whose supporters have been the hardest hit.

A World Bank report this month estimated that nearly 100,000 housing units had been damaged or destroyed and about 166,000 people had lost their jobs in the war. It estimated the total physical damage and economic losses at $8.5 billion.

Given Iran’s own economic troubles and Hezbollah’s unpopularity with other Middle Eastern governments, it is unclear who may contribute funds for reconstruction, and with what conditions.

Nevertheless, Hezbollah’s remaining public figures have already begun marketing the cease-fire as a victory, saying their fighters kept firing missiles, rockets and drones into Israel and valiantly confronted the Israeli troops who invaded southern Lebanon.

“From now, we confirm that the resistance will remain, will continue, will carry on,” Hassan Fadlallah, a Lebanese parliamentarian from Hezbollah, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

In fact, Hezbollah’s social service arms were already prepared to help the displaced return home, he said.

“When Israel’s aggression against Lebanon ends, then the resistance that was fighting in the battlefield will itself be working to help its people to return and to rebuild,” he said.

“France will comply with its international obligations,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. But it added that while the Rome Statute — the 1998 treaty that established the I.C.C. — demands “full cooperation” with the court, it also says that a state “cannot be required to act inconsistently with its obligations under international law with respect to the immunities of States not party to the I.C.C.”

The foreign ministry said: “Such immunities apply to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the other ministers concerned and will have to be taken into account should the I.C.C. request of us their arrest and surrender.”

The court’s warrant accuses Mr. Netanyahu of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Some countries, like Ireland, have taken a firm line on the arrest warrants, saying Mr. Netanyahu would be arrested on their soil. But others, like Italy, have also raised questions about the feasibility and legality of an arrest.

President Emmanuel Macron and Mr. Netanyahu have a strained relationship, but France has played a key role in trying to keep the conflicts in the Middle East from spiraling out of control, especially in Lebanon. The French foreign ministry’s statement came a day after France and the United States helped broker a cease-fire to stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

France and Israel are “two democracies committed to the rule of law” that have a “longstanding friendship,” the French foreign ministry said, adding that France would continue to work “in close cooperation” with Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli authorities.

Some of Mr. Macron’s opponents criticized the foreign ministry’s position and suggested it was politically motivated, with the aim of securing the cease-fire in Lebanon.

“France has once again bowed to Benjamin Netanyahu’s demands, choosing him over international justice,” Marine Tondelier, the head of France’s Green party, said on X.

Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, said on Franceinfo radio on Wednesday that “France is very attached to international justice” and that “France, as always, will apply international law.”

But Mr. Barrot did not directly answer when asked if Mr. Netanyahu would be arrested on French soil, and he also said that the Rome Statute provided “immunity for certain leaders.”

“The final decision rests with the judicial authorities,” he added — suggesting that Mr. Macron’s government would let French courts rule on the validity of the arrest warrant before potentially enforcing it.

French officials have not publicly laid out which parts of the I.C.C.’s founding treaty were applicable to Mr. Netanyahu’s situation. The foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

Article 27 of the Rome Statute says that it applies to all officials, including heads of state or government, and that “immunities or special procedural rules which may attach to the official capacity of a person, whether under national or international law, shall not bar the Court from exercising its jurisdiction over such a person.”

But Article 98 of the statute says that the I.C.C. “may not proceed with a request for surrender or assistance” that would require a state to “act inconsistently with its obligations under international law” relative to the diplomatic immunity of a person.

It was not immediately clear whether France believed that the same legal reasoning would apply to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Putin is the target of an I.C.C. arrest warrant tied to the war in Ukraine, and Russia, like Israel, is not a member of the I.C.C.

But French authorities voiced full-throated support for the arrest warrant against Mr. Putin when it was issued last year, calling it a “landmark” decision and adding that “no one responsible for crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, whatever their status, should escape justice.”

Philippe Dam, the E.U. director for Human Rights Watch, said on X that the ministry’s statement about Mr. Netanyahu was “absurdly insane.”

“Does this also apply to Russia’s Putin??” he asked, adding that French officials were “weakening France’s commitments to justice and its credibility on the world stage.”

Palestinians there say they have lost hope that the war will ever end.

Majed Abu Amra, a 26-year-old displaced from his home and living in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, said he was frustrated that the international community had managed to secure a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, while Gazans were still trying to survive relentless Israeli bombardment.

“There is no global pressure to achieve an agreement here,” he said. “It is not only the occupation that is killing us — the world is complicit in what we are suffering,” Mr. Abu Amra added, referring to the presence of Israeli forces in Gaza.

“The blood of Gazans has become cheap,” he said.

A lasting cease-fire has proved harder to reach in Gaza because the hostages held by Hamas give it more leverage in negotiations, and because any deal with the group could create political peril for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

That leaves Gazans heading into a second straight winter of war. United Nations agencies have repeatedly warned that Gazans face a worsening crisis, with falling temperatures adding to the plight of hundreds of thousands living in makeshift shelters. The war in has displaced the majority of the enclave’s 2.2 million people, many of them multiple times.

“Another winter in Gaza. How to describe misery on top of a human tragedy?” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, wrote on social media on Tuesday, renewing his pleas for a cease-fire in Gaza and for more humanitarian aid to be allowed into the territory.

Mohammed Ahmed, a 23-year-old businessman displaced from Gaza City to Deir al Balah with his family, said they felt “betrayed by the truce” reached between Israel and Hezbollah, which began attacking Israel in October 2023 in support of Hamas. He said he believed it would lead to an escalation of the bombardment in Gaza, as Israel’s military would intensify its focus there.

“We’re disappointed with this news because we will be alone in facing the occupation without anyone to support us or relieve the pressure from us,” he said.

Ahmed Al-Mashharawi, a 26-year-old father of two in northern Gaza, said he had similar fears.

“Last night it felt like an earthquake,” he said of the intensity of the Israeli airstrikes. “My children woke up from the bombardment and were terrified. I thought the cease-fire had happened and they had withdrawn the army from Lebanon and brought it to Gaza.”

Abdul Aziz Said, a 33-year-old social worker, said that he was glad a cease-fire had been reached in Lebanon, and that Hezbollah should never have started its hostilities in support of Hamas.

“I want to see war in Lebanon end, even though that might not be the best thing for the Gaza war, as Israel will be freed up to focus on Gaza,” he said. “But let’s hope lives can be saved in Lebanon at least.”

Rawya Ahmed Al-Nabih, a 42-year-old who has been displaced multiple times, also welcomed the news but said she saw no end in sight to the plight of Palestinians.

“We need the attention of all Arab countries and the whole world to turn to the tragedy of the Palestinian people, because our suffering has become enormous,” she said.

She said she hoped that “a cease-fire will be achieved in Gaza as well, because we have the right to live in peace like the rest of the peoples of the world.”

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.

At one bakery along the highway, employees gave out Lebanese flags and small cookies with tiny banners that said “Smile, better days are coming” to customers. Songs by the Lebanese singer Nouhad Wadie Haddad, known as Fairuz, blasted from the speakers.

“The songs we’re playing today are especially for this occasion,” Abdullah Daher, the manager of the bakery, Al Forno, said. “Even a week ago I couldn’t have imagined this war would end. Now, look, all these people are returning home.”

As people filled their carts, their sense of relief was mixed with nervous anticipation: Did they still have homes to return to? Would the temporary peace last?

Hanna Trad, 39, was displaced from her home in Maarakeh, a village in southern Lebanon, in late September and had spent the past two months in a school-turned-shelter in Beirut with her husband and three children. She heard that many of her neighbors had been killed in a bombardment and that the windows of her house were completely shattered. But as she made her way back on Wednesday her mind was not dwelling on that.

“We can finally go home. We’re so happy, thank God,” Ms. Trad said. “I didn’t think I would be able to go back home.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

“We don’t know what we will be returning to,” said Mr. Arbel, 77. Families who left temporarily and enrolled their children in schools elsewhere, he noted, might choose to stay away permanently.

The cease-fire agreement has cast a light on what lies ahead for tens of thousands of displaced residents of northern Israel who have been moving between hotels, rentals and friends’ and relatives’ homes for more than a year.

It has made those residents wonder about the social fabric of their communities and whether they should return home at all. Some express worry that it is still not safe to go back, while others sound more hopeful.

Orly Gavishi-Sotto said that she, her husband and three daughters hoped to return to Hanita, a hilltop kibbutz with a view of the Mediterranean Sea, but added that she was worried the deal would leave Hezbollah in a position in which it can still threaten Israelis.

“Do I believe in UNIFIL and the Lebanese military? No,” Ms. Gavishi-Sotto, 46, said, referring to the United Nations peacekeepers and the U.S.-backed Lebanese armed forces, the entities that the agreement makes responsible for keeping Hezbollah out of the border region in Lebanon.

Referring to the aftermath of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict, she added: “When we tried that after the last war, Hezbollah armed itself and built tunnels. What will be different this time?”

Hezbollah started firing at Israeli positions in northern Israel more than a year ago in solidarity with Hamas, its ally that ignited the war in Gaza. In the succeeding months, Israel and Hezbollah exchanged cross-border fire, but Israeli forces exponentially increased their attacks against the Lebanese militant group in September and invaded southern Lebanon in October. Hezbollah responded by firing deeper into Israel.

The cease-fire deal calls for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon and for Hezbollah to move north, in effect creating a buffer zone between the two sides.

Avichai Stern, the mayor of Kiryat Shmona, a city near the border, criticized the agreement and predicted that many residents would elect not to return.

“I don’t dispute that we’ve achieved a lot in the war. But what happens the minute we withdraw?” Mr. Stern said in an interview late Tuesday. “They’ll return to the same place, just a minute from the border, with a clear line of sight — ready to conquer northern Israel.”

Mr. Arbel, however, said he believed that Israel would be making a mistake if its forces pushed deeper into Lebanon, risking becoming entangled in a war of attrition. The most important thing, he said, was whether Israel would act with force against any attempt by Hezbollah to reconstitute itself near the border.

“This is the main question now,” he said.

Lior Shelef, 42, a resident of Kibbutz Snir in the Galilee Panhandle, said the Israeli military had achieved as much as it could in Lebanon.

“We have accomplished what we came in to do,” he said. “Nothing matters more to me than bringing my family back to Snir, back to our home.”

Still, he said that his family would not return to the kibbutz immediately, and he predicted that it would take at least a few months to make the transition back.

Idan Ishach Erez returned months ago to Betzet, a moshav, or cooperative village, just over a mile from Lebanon, but she said that she hoped the cease-fire would finally bring quiet for her family.

“We would like to hear the birds chirping outside, not rocket sirens,” said Ms. Ishach Erez, 42, an owner of a dried fruit factory.

Rockets and drones fired by Hezbollah have set off air raid sirens in northern Israel for more than a year, sometimes several times in the same town in a single day.

Ms. Ishach Erez said that she was conflicted about whether Israel had made the right decision in agreeing to a cease-fire.

“If you ask me in general, I think we still could have accomplished more,” she said. “But if you ask me as a mother, it was time to bring our kids home.”

Myra Noveck and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting to this article.

The truce in Lebanon was possible in part because Hezbollah — weakened by months of assassinations and battlefield losses — had lost its leverage at the negotiating table. On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could afford to compromise because a deal in Lebanon would not significantly weaken his grip on power at home.

A breakthrough in Gaza is harder to achieve because Hamas still holds roughly 100 hostages, a significant trump card that allows the Palestinian group to maintain its hard-line negotiating position. Secondly, Mr. Netanyahu cannot compromise with Hamas because doing so might collapse his ruling coalition, forcing early elections.

Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition allies, many of whom hope to settle Gaza with Jewish civilians after the war, have threatened to abandon his alliance if the conflict there ends without Hamas’s complete defeat. When it came to Lebanon, Mr. Netanyahu was under less domestic pressure to deliver a knockout blow to Hezbollah, even if many Israelis remained deeply concerned about the long-term threat of the group.

“The Lebanon deal happened because Netanyahu wanted it and Hezbollah needed it — and because it wasn’t a deal breaker for Netanyahu’s coalition,” said Aaron David Miller, an American analyst and former negotiator in previous Mideast peace talks. “The Gaza deal is different,” he said.

Still, both U.S. and Israeli leaders expressed optimism that the Lebanon deal could be a turning point.

In announcing the Lebanon truce on Tuesday, President Biden said he hoped the agreement would lead to renewed momentum in parallel negotiations over Gaza. In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the fight might isolate its ally Hamas and force the group to also back down.

“Hamas was counting on Hezbollah to fight by its side,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech. “With Hezbollah out of the picture, Hamas is left on its own. We will increase our pressure on Hamas and that will help us in our sacred mission of releasing our hostages.”

But Palestinian analysts said that Hamas, having already weathered many serious setbacks over the past year, was unlikely to suddenly give up the hostages or relinquish power in Gaza. Though Hamas’s leadership has been decimated and ordinary Gazans yearn for an end to the suffering, the group’s remaining leaders are holding out for a deal that would allow the group to survive the war intact.

To that end, Hamas is expected to continue to push for an arrangement in which Israel permanently withdraws from Gaza, allowing the group to reestablish full control in the enclave.

“I really do not think the cease-fire in Lebanon will have any impact on Gaza,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political scientist displaced by the war. “There is no light at the end of the black tunnel for Gaza.”

On Tuesday, in anticipation of a new deal, UNIFIL said in a statement that it supported a truce and would fulfill its mission “impartially,” noting that “responsibility for implementing the mandate rests with the parties involved.”

The force, which has been in Lebanon for more than four decades, has a stake in keeping the peace, beyond doing its job. Peacekeepers are in personal danger and have come under fire from both sides over the last two months of fighting.

On Tuesday, Israel kept up intense airstrikes in southern Lebanon, including in the town of Naqoura, where the peacekeeping mission is based. The UNIFIL spokesman, Andrea Tenenti, who was sheltering in a bunker as bombs pummeled the area, affirmed that the peacekeepers had no intention of leaving.

Last week, UNIFIL said four Italian peacekeepers had been injured by rockets that were “likely launched by Hezbollah or affiliated groups,” and it blamed “non-state actors” for an earlier strike that had injured four Ghanaians. In October, Israeli soldiers fired on UNIFIL members at an observation post, the group said. And earlier this month, the force accused the Israeli military of taking a series of “deliberate and direct actions” against peacekeepers and their positions.

“Despite the unacceptable pressures being exerted on the mission through various channels, peacekeepers will continue to undertake our mandated monitoring and reporting tasks under Resolution 1701,” UNIFIL said, referring to the 2006 truce deal.

The U.N. Security Council created UNIFIL in 1978 to monitor Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and help the Lebanese government restore security and authority after a three-month invasion by Israel. The incursion was partly in response to an attack in Israel by Palestinian militants based in Lebanon who had landed by sea and commandeered a bus, killing 35 Israelis and an American. When Israel withdrew, it handed control of southern Lebanon to a Lebanese Christian militia, and oversight was given to the U.N. peacekeeping force.

Resolution 1701 expanded the peacekeepers’ mandate. UNIFIL was to monitor the cease-fire; support the Lebanese Army, which is not a party to Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel; and help provide humanitarian assistance to civilians and displaced populations.

That deal called on Israeli troops to withdraw from southern Lebanon to an area in the Golan Heights below what is known as the Blue Line. Hezbollah was to withdraw north of the Litani River in Lebanon. The area in between would become a buffer zone that the peacekeeping force would monitor for violations by either party.

The latest deal is based on a similar arrangement, and it will still require UNIFIL to oversee and report violations. But there are new developments meant to address the failings of Resolution 1701, which was never fully put into effect, largely because the Lebanese Army did not or could not force Hezbollah — also a political party with significant power in the Lebanese government — out of southern Lebanon.

Among the new twists, an international committee, including two countries that helped broker the latest deal, the United States and France, will report any violations of the commitments that the countries have made in the latest agreement. Israel and Lebanon will report violations to both UNIFIL and this committee.

The agreement will “create the conditions to restore lasting calm and allow residents in both countries to return safely to their homes,” President Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a joint statement announcing the cease-fire on Tuesday. They pledged that their countries would “work with Israel and Lebanon to ensure this arrangement is fully implemented, and enforced, and remain determined to prevent this conflict from becoming another cycle of violence.”

Euan Ward, Eve Sampson and Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.

For nearly a year after it began, the conflict appeared to be limited with casualties gradually rising as Hezbollah and Israel exchanged fire in a contest of wills adjacent to Israel’s war against a Hezbollah ally, Hamas, in Gaza.

Then, in September, Israel went on the offensive in Lebanon.

Exploding wireless devices

Israel’s offensive did not begin with tanks rolling over the border or fighter jets above Beirut, the Lebanese capital. Instead, it started in people’s pockets.

On a quiet Tuesday afternoon in mid-September, thousands of pager devices belonging to Hezbollah members began exploding across Lebanon, killing dozens of people and maiming thousands more. The country’s hospitals were swamped, with many of the patients women and children. The attack dealt a serious blow to Hezbollah’s rank-and-file fighters, incapacitating many.

The next day, walkie-talkies began exploding, causing more casualties and spreading panic. Many people began shutting off all manner of devices, including baby monitors, televisions and laptops.

Airstrikes on leaders

Days later, an Israeli airstrike targeted the Dahiya, the densely populated southern outskirts of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway. The strike, a rare case of an attack just miles from downtown Beirut, killed at least 37 people, among them more than a dozen Hezbollah commanders. One was Ibrahim Aqeel, the commander in chief of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit that Israel has accused of plotting an operation similar to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks.

Israel then unleashed a wave of airstrikes across Lebanon, attacking what it called Hezbollah weapons and ammunition stockpiles. The day of strikes, which experts called even more intense than Israel’s early bombing of Gaza, forced hundreds of thousands to flee the country’s south. By the day’s end, more than 500 people had been killed in Lebanon, making it the deadliest single day since the country’s civil war, which ended in 1990.

Then, in late September, an Israeli airstrike killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, a figure widely considered untouchable.

It was a tectonic shift for Lebanon: The most powerful man in Lebanese politics, who led the country’s most powerful military force for more than 30 years, was abruptly gone. The killing sent Hezbollah into disarray and thwarted a U.S.-French cease-fire proposal.

An Israeli invasion

With Hezbollah’s leadership decapitated and much of its arsenal destroyed, the Israeli military began a ground invasion of southern Lebanon on Oct. 1, targeting what it called Hezbollah military infrastructure in villages close to the border. It was the first such incursion by Israel into Lebanese territory in nearly two decades.

Days later, another Israeli strike killed Mr. Nasrallah’s expected replacement, Hashem Safieddine.

Since then, Israeli troops have fought a slow-moving offensive in a narrow stretch of southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah has fought with guerrilla tactics in response, killing dozens of Israeli soldiers and firing rockets at Israeli cities.

A rising civilian toll

The war has driven a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, outpacing even the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006, the last major conflict between the two sides.

Nearly 3,800 have been killed in the current war, more than a quarter of them women and children, and over 15,000 others injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The country’s embattled health sector has been pushed to the limit, with hospitals forced to shut down and more than 223 health workers killed, according to the World Health Organization.

The war has also left more than a million people displaced, created compounding crises and sometimes inflamed tensions in Lebanon’s fragile patchwork of disparate communities. For many in Lebanon, the risk of potential civil unrest is a pressing concern even after a cease-fire.

Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure has been devastated, too. Much of Beirut’s once bustling southern outskirts have been destroyed, entire towns have been razed, and even the country’s treasured antiquities have not been spared damage.

The World Bank estimated this month that the conflict had caused $8.5 billion in damage and losses to Lebanon, which was already reeling from an economic crisis.

“This is a pivotal moment, and this is the moment when true friends stand shoulder to shoulder and fight for the state of Israel,” Mr. Cuomo said at an event in Manhattan held by the National Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education.

Last week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip. The court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Hamas’s military chief, Muhammad Deif, accusing him of crimes against humanity.

The prominent defense lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz said recently that he was putting together a “legal dream team” to defend Mr. Netanyahu in the “court of public opinion.” The group includes former U.S. attorneys general Michael Mukasey and William P. Barr.

The group will argue that “Israel’s actions in Gaza don’t violate any international law or laws of war over which the I.C.C. has jurisdiction,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Mr. Cuomo served as governor of New York from 2011 until 2021, when he resigned amid a wave of sexual harassment allegations. A House subcommittee recently referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, accusing him of lying to Congress about his involvement in a state Covid report on nursing home deaths. He denies all the allegations.

Mr. Cuomo is considering challenging Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted in September on federal corruption charges. Several prominent candidates have entered the race ahead of the primary next June.

If it holds, the Lebanon cease-fire by itself could make an important difference. It was designed to restore stability along the border between Israel and Lebanon, permitting hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians on both sides to return to their homes while providing a buffer zone to ensure Israeli security and offering an opportunity for Lebanon’s government to reassert control over its territory from a weakened Hezbollah.

But as he stepped out of the Oval Office into the Rose Garden on a sunny November day in the winter of his presidency to hail the agreement on Tuesday, Mr. Biden clearly had grander ambitions still in mind. “It reminds us that peace is possible,” he said. “I say that again: Peace is possible. As long as that is the case, I’ll not for a single moment stop working to achieve it.”

With just 55 days left in office, Mr. Biden is racing against the clock of history. He would prefer to be remembered as the president who set the Middle East on a path toward a lasting settlement of longstanding animosities than one who turned over a mess to his successor.

With the Lebanon accord in hand, Mr. Biden said he would now renew his push for a cease-fire in Gaza, working along with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, and he called on both Israel and Hamas to seize the moment. He described the cataclysmic violence that Palestinians have endured in Gaza in more visceral terms than he typically has over the past 14 months of war.

“They, too, deserve an end to the fighting and displacement,” Mr. Biden said. “The people of Gaza have been through hell. Their world has been absolutely shattered. Far too many civilians in Gaza have suffered far too much.”

Mr. Biden laid most of the blame for the continuing fighting in Gaza with Hamas, which “has refused for months and months to negotiate a good-faith cease-fire and a hostage deal,” he said. But he also called on Israel, which “has been bold on the battlefield,” to now “be bold in turning tactical gains against Iran and its proxies into a coherent strategy.”

An end to the fighting in Gaza accompanied by the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas — including seven Americans, four of whom are believed to still be alive — would be a gratifying final accomplishment for Mr. Biden and his team. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has made it his highest priority for the final weeks of his tenure. Mr. Biden’s advisers Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, along with the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, have all devoted much of the past year to the project.

At so many points along the way they thought they were on the cusp of a deal, only to have something blow it up — a new burst of violence, the targeted assassination of Hamas leaders, the killing of Israeli hostages. Yet they kept going back again and again, never giving up, perhaps naïve in the view of some, but certainly determined and relentless.

After so many close calls, it is hard to imagine that they could pull it off in the time they have left, especially if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel concludes that he would be better off waiting for President-elect Donald J. Trump to take office on Jan. 20. But Mr. Biden’s team insisted again on Tuesday that it was possible.

More elusive, yet endlessly attractive, for Mr. Biden is the broader realignment of the region represented by a long-sought agreement with Saudi Arabia that was derailed by Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, triggering the Gaza war. Even now, at this late hour, Mr. Biden said he might be able to nail down a deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia by providing American security commitments and civilian nuclear assistance to the kingdom and creating a credible pathway to a Palestinian state.

“I believe this agenda remains possible,” Mr. Biden said. “In my remaining time in office, I’ll work tirelessly to advance this vision for an integrated, secure and prosperous region, all of which strengthens America’s national security.” The chances seem remote, but if nothing else, he hopes he can set the table for the next administration to complete such a deal.

Administration officials said they were staying in touch with Mr. Trump’s team about their efforts. Mr. Hochstein briefed the president-elect’s national security advisers shortly after the Nov. 5 election and again in the past two days about the approach and came away feeling that the incoming team was supportive, according to a senior administration official who discussed the sensitive contacts on the condition of anonymity.

The official said that “the political and geopolitical stars both are aligned” for the Saudi deal, which would build on the normalization agreements that Mr. Trump helped seal between Israel and several smaller Arab nations during his first term. Mr. Trump has a close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who has made clear he is eager for a deal if one can be reached.

In the meantime, the Biden team has work to do to ensure the success of the agreement it has now negotiated in Lebanon, which could easily unravel given the fraught history of the benighted Arab state. Under the agreement, fighting was to halt at 4 a.m. local time on Wednesday, and over the next 60 days Hezbollah and Israeli forces are to make phased withdrawals from southern Lebanon while the Lebanese Army moves in to ensure the peace.

“This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” Mr. Biden said. “What is left of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations will not be allowed — I emphasize, will not be allowed — to threaten the security of Israel again.”

Mr. Biden said that the United States and France would work to ensure that the agreement was successfully enacted, but he repeated that no American combat troops would be involved in the effort. “We’re determined this conflict will not be just another cycle of violence,” he said.

That cycle has been hard to break. Among other things, the latest deal’s negotiators said that Israel would retain the right to respond to any new attacks by Hezbollah, raising the question of whether the cease-fire would really hold. Hezbollah is technically not a party to the agreement, but the Lebanese government ostensibly negotiated on its behalf.

The Biden team was mindful of the unsatisfying end to the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, when the international community brokered a cease-fire, only to essentially move on to other issues even as Hezbollah never really gave up its hold on the south. Mr. Biden’s aides said they had learned the lessons of 2006 and sought to craft this agreement to avoid the same pitfalls.

A “tripartite mechanism” created shortly after the 2006 war will be reformulated and enhanced to include France and to be led by the United States. The group will receive complaints about potential violations and work with the Lebanese Army to build its capacity to ensure security in the southern part of the country. A recently revived military technical committee will include other countries that can provide equipment, training and financial support for Lebanon’s security forces.

Mr. Biden in his televised speech on Tuesday made a point of guaranteeing that no American combat forces would be involved in securing the border. But officials separately said that noncombat American troops working out of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut could be involved in providing training and other support.

Those, of course, were important details, but they were details, best left to aides to describe. For a lame-duck president increasingly fading into the backdrop, the bigger picture loomed. Yes, his time at the top is coming to an end. Yes, his successor is now setting the tone. But for now, the Oval Office is still his. The final legacy is yet to be written.

It was almost possible to hear Mr. Biden trying to write it in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. “Today’s announcement,” he said, “brings us closer to realizing the affirmative agenda that I’ve been pushing forward during my entire presidency, a vision for the future of the Middle East where it’s at peace and prosperous and integrated across borders.”

Closer, perhaps. But not there, at least not yet.