the fourth place

I couldn't really see how much was acheived in Lebannon during the recent conflict, and I had come to the depressing conclusion that another war will be required to eliminate Hizbullah militarily and to disable the tactical role they play for Iran:

Last May, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Rear Adm. Muhammad-Ebrahim Dehqani stated, "We have announced that wherever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel." He didn't mention Hezbollah or Lebanon, but it didn't take much discernment to see that Iranian retaliation would at least partly come from [there].

As I said, I couldn't see how the latest conflict changed that situation much. Hizbullah were not destroyed and it seems unlikely that the UN or Lebannon will disarm them. Should Israel choose to insist that Hizbullah disarm (which I beleive was part of the ceasefire agreement) immediatley then we could see Israeli troops still in Israel being reactivated and war resuming.

But if disarming is part of the ceasefire, then why would Israel tolerate the retension of arms? Perhaps the threat has already been reduced to acceptably low levels for a long term disarmament process to be an option:

Hezbollah is believed to have many more rockets in storage and its network of bunkers in south Lebanon is probably mostly intact. However, it cannot initiate a conflict without facing the political fallout of imposing new suffering on its already traumatized Shiite community. Almost a million Shiites were thrown into the streets by Israeli bombardments between July and August.

Nasrallah would likely obey an Iranian request to attack Israel once again if the Tehran regime deemed that to be necessary. However, Shiites making up Hezbollah's base of support may not be so eager to be turned into cannon fodder for a country thousands of miles away. That's why the party's deterrence capacity has suddenly become very costly.

So while the loss of civilian life in Hizbullah areas, whether deliberate or collateral, is certainly horrid could it be that it was this precise harm that made a toothless disarmament promise acceptable to Israel and brought about the early ceasefire?