Israel and Lebanon slip Rome talks to October as the border war keeps a 10-kilometre buffer

Israel and Lebanon will not sit in Rome next week. A US State Department official told Reuters the next round of talks on a security arrangement has moved to October. The same official said the two countries' ambassadors will still meet in Washington next week to discuss how the June framework is being carried out. Implementation, the official said, remains the only workable way to restore Lebanese sovereignty and Israeli security.

The seventh Rome round ended in August with no movement on the land questions that matter. Israel holds what it calls a buffer about 10 kilometres deep along the length of the frontier. Israeli officials say the strip is required to keep Hezbollah fire off northern towns. Lebanon calls the same ground an occupation. Hezbollah and Israel went back to open war on 2 March as the wider regional conflict spread. Lebanon's health ministry says Israeli strikes have killed more than 4,300 people in Lebanon since that month.

A US-brokered framework signed in late June sketched a sequence: the Lebanese Armed Forces would move into designated pilot areas as Israel pulled back, provided Hezbollah was disarmed in those areas. That sequence has not happened at the scale the paper described. A Lebanese official told The Times of Israel that Israeli strikes in the south undercut Beirut's effort to take weapons out of Hezbollah's hands. Jerusalem's reply is that the Lebanese army is not yet able to do the job.

Scheduling is the public reason for the slip. The UN General Assembly, a Paris conference in support of the Lebanese army, and the Jewish holiday calendar all sit on the same weeks. An Israeli official used the word conflicts. Diplomats use calendars when they do not want to say that the file is stuck. The Washington ambassador meeting is the device that keeps the process from being declared dead for a month.

The military facts on the ground will not wait for October. Israeli forces have cut gates and roads into the barrier so that armour can move. Hezbollah has not accepted the disarmament clause. Each strike that kills civilians in the south, including a reported 13 dead in one southern town this week with children among them, makes the Lebanese cabinet's task with Hezbollah harder and gives Israel a new argument that the army cannot police the border.

Italy hosts because Rome has been the venue for this track and because neither capital wants the talks branded as an American diktat even though the United States wrote the framework. The October date now collides with Israel's election calendar. That collision is the under-covered point. A government that is asking voters for another term is less likely to trade a 10-kilometre buffer for a promise from an army it does not trust. A Lebanese government that is trying to keep Hezbollah inside a political system is less likely to force a disarmament timetable while funerals are still being held.

The ambassadors can meet in Washington and read the same June text again. The text does not move the line on the map. The line on the map is what October will have to discuss, or postpone once more.