Major Hitesh Bathla’s deployment to a peacekeeping mission on the volatile border between Lebanon and Israel last year, some 4,000 km from his home in India, was always going to be difficult. But now he and his colleagues at Unifil found themselves in the middle of an invasion.

Missiles, drones and warplanes roar overhead, while artillery shells often rain into Bathla’s base, forcing him and his colleagues into bunkers for up to 48 hours at a time.

“The threat to peacekeepers has increased,” Bathla said with the practiced understatement of a military officer. “We hear loud sounds of airstrikes and shelling. It happens day and night.”

The major is part of a force of 10,000 troops from 48 countries, from Ireland to Indonesia, which for decades has been stretched across the Lebanese hill country bordering Israel in an attempt to keep the peace.

This task earned Unifil the ire of both Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah. And since Israel launched its recent offensive in Lebanon, they have been under fire. The Israeli military repeatedly attacked Unifil bases, at least seven peacekeepers were injured and eight others were wounded by Hezbollah rocket fire. Unifil said Thursday that “two or three unknown persons” fired on a group of peacekeepers while on patrol.

Israeli critics, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, deride the force as a toothless waste of money.

Yet despite Israel’s and Hezbollah’s antipathy, politicians and diplomats trying to negotiate a cease-fire deal say Unifil — and the UN framework within which it operates, Resolution 1701 — is essential to ending the decades-old cross-border conflict.

Lebanon’s acting prime minister told a visiting Iranian envoy on Friday that Unifil would play a crucial role in bringing peace to the country, saying the government’s priority was “a ceasefire and the implementation of Resolution 1701 in full”. And even Israel has discussed the idea of ​​a much extended mission for the group that would include inspection rights across all of Lebanon’s borders, the Financial Times reported last month.

UN peacekeepers were deployed to the region after Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1978, when it was fighting Palestinian militants. Resolution 1701 ended Israel’s most recent war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, forcing both sides to withdraw and leaving the Lebanese army to control territory south of the Litani River, which runs about 30 km from the Lebanese border and Israel.

UN peacekeepers were supposed to assist the army in monitoring villages and the disputed border to look for any suspects, such as rocket launchers or tunnels.

But 1701 was never implemented. Unifil’s limited mandate, combined with the weakness of the Lebanese military, left them little chance against a politically ascendant and well-armed Hizbollah able to integrate into the local communities from which they drew support, former peacekeepers and military experts said.

In practice, Unifil’s mission is largely to “observe, record, report,” said Tom Clonan, an Irish commander who led a Unifil unit during the Israeli military’s 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath. “You’re literally a pig in the middle.”

Aram Nerguizian, senior program adviser at the Carnegie Center for the Middle East, said that whenever Unifil tried “stronger patrolling, it often encountered strong resistance not only from local communities but also from Hezbollah irregulars.” . Hezbollah members have killed Unifil soldiers when they are believed to have ventured into the wrong place, most recently peacekeeper Seán Rooney in 2022.

“There are no Hezbollah-marked wagons (or) armored cars,” said Colin Sheridan, a former peacekeeper in Lebanon and columnist for the Irish Examiner, which makes the militants harder to identify. Unarmed military observers on patrol “were disturbed, our maps, equipment, etc. were taken, and that was allegedly because we were in a place where they were not happy with us.”

The inability of Unifil and the weakened Lebanese army to force Hezbollah from the border has angered Israel, which has accused them of turning a blind eye to the militants’ activities.

But that condemnation misunderstands Unifil’s role, said Rym Momtaz, editor at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Unifil’s mandate is “not to prevent, using weapons, Israeli invasions and occupations of Lebanon,” Momtaz said, nor “to use weapons and force to disarm Hezbollah or force it to withdraw north of the Litani River.”

Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire since the militant group began firing rockets following the October 7 Hamas attack that displaced an estimated 60,000 Israelis. Vowing to return residents to their homes, Netanyahu launched Israel’s fourth invasion of Lebanon last month, which — combined with a devastating Israeli bombing campaign — displaced more than 1 million people.

The Israeli military has done it repeatedly attacked Unifil bases in process. In one incident last month, 15 peacekeepers were injured by suspected white phosphorus smoke. Netanyahu called on international soldiers to abandon their posts and accused Hezbollah of using them as human shields.

Although Unifil condemned the Israeli attacks, it also reprimanded Hezbollah after a rocket hit the force’s headquarters and caused “minor injuries” to some peacekeepers.

At the same time, UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix said this week that Unifil will work with various authorities to support a future settlement and is talking to contributing nations about its future needs.

Meanwhile, Bathla and his comrades, whose outpost was not directly attacked, have become all too familiar with their base’s flimsy, stuffy bomb shelter, which has no toilet, kitchen or adequate sleeping space. “It’s a bit of a crampon,” Bathla declined, careful not to complain.

Going out for monitoring has become dangerous. Last month, Unifil said Israeli forces opened fire on peacekeepers after they observed them failing houses in a village in southern Lebanon.

But Bathla and former peacekeepers say the war makes another mission, protecting civilians, more important than ever. Some have built ties with local communities despite the tumultuous relationship. Clonan, the former peacekeeper who is now an Irish senator, recalled Lebanese villagers adopting thick Irish accents and traders calling their stalls “Dunnes” after a popular Irish department store.

In October, it fell to Ghanaian peacekeepers to extract the last two residents of the village of Qawzah: a pair of elderly sisters who had tried to stay despite the danger.

“The security situation is challenging. It puts a lot of restrictions on us to move. But still, in whatever way possible, we try to help the locals,” said Bathla.

Recently, he said, there were some people “wounded during the bombings or airstrikes who came to us for medical assistance,” adding: “We were able to help them.”

Cartography by Steven Bernard and Bob Haslett