No one expected the Lebanese-Israeli negotiations in Washington, hosted by the US State Department, to produce a good agreement. Those of us considered moderates, without crossing into an endorsement of normalisation, might have accepted a painful bargain if it spared Lebanon, and large numbers of Lebanese civilians, from Israel’s daily violence.

But the agreement announced Friday evening is not merely bad. It is worse than the bad agreement many were prepared to tolerate. It crosses from the realm of the regrettable into the realm of the intolerable.

The document, described as a framework agreement, contains language that plainly moves Lebanon toward “ending the conflict” with Israel. It is therefore not alarmist to say that this agreement looks less like a technical arrangement than a political threshold: perhaps to a peace treaty, perhaps to a non-aggression pact, or perhaps to a photograph next month of President Joseph Aoun standing beside Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of the occupying state, under Donald Trump’s patronage at the White House.