Still reeling from the stunning loss of its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, amid a string of seemingly devastating blows, the Lebanese Hezbollah movement now faces what may prove to be its most consequential battle to date with Israel as it contends with new challenges, both external and internal.
The setbacks have been severe, even by the group’s own admission. Yet Hezbollah continues to mount significant resistance to the ground offensive launched on Lebanese soil by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) just days after Nasrallah’s death last month in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut while inflicting casualties on both sides of the border.
On Thursday, the group officially announced a “new and escalating phase in the confrontation with the enemy.”
Now, observers familiar with Hezbollah tell Newsweek that the group, long considered to be one of the world’s most powerful paramilitary organizations, remains a resilient and adaptive foe and that more surprises may be in store as a conflict that has spread across much of the Middle East over the past year continues to escalate.
“When you look at the bigger picture and you see in relative terms how Hezbollah has survived all this and been able to conduct such fierce resistance to an ongoing attempted invasion by the most powerful army in the Middle East, one can only conclude that Hezbollah is actually stronger than what we assumed it was,” Amal Saad, a lecturer in politics and international relations at Cardiff University in Wales who has specialized in research into Hezbollah, told Newsweek.
“And it might be even stronger post-Nasrallah than it was during his tenure,” she added. “This might be a more ferocious Hezbollah that we’re seeing.”
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Defying Expectations
While Nasrallah’s slaying has shaken not only Hezbollah but the broader region, particularly the Iran-aligned Axis of Resistance coalition of which the Lebanese group stood as a vanguard against Israel, Saad said that “his assassination has been something that Hezbollah has been preparing for many years,” with regularly updated contingency plans.
Nasrallah first assumed leadership of Hezbollah upon the assassination of his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, in an Israeli airstrike in 1992. His accession came amid an ongoing war with Israel, which had invaded Lebanon a decade earlier to uproot Palestinian militias operating out of the civil war-torn country.
When Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, Nasrallah emerged as a leading military and political figure who would play an influential, if not controversial, role in shaping the complex landscape of Lebanese governance.
He led Hezbollah through a second month-long war with Israel in 2006, violent clashes against rival Lebanese factions in 2008 and Syria’s still-ongoing civil war that first erupted in 2011, all the while forging closer ties with fellow Shiite Muslim Iran and amassing a vast stockpile of more powerful weapons.
Now, in addition to taking out much of the group’s core command, including Nasrallah’s widely believed successor, Hashem Safieddine, Israeli officials say they have destroyed up to half of this arsenal since Hezbollah joined the war launched by the Palestinian Hamas movement last October.
In response to a report last week claiming that Iran was covertly sending weapons to Lebanon, a Hezbollah spokesperson told Newsweek that the group “has enough equipment and numbers to repel the aggression” and that it does “not need any military support.”
Newsweek has also reached out to the IDF for comment.
The true extent of damage dealt to the group remains difficult to discern, largely due to the rampant information operations being run by both sides of the conflict and the fog of war that lingers over the still-raging battlefield. Even before Nasrallah’s death, however, Hezbollah suffered one of its most devastating setbacks to date when a series of blasts tore tour through communications devices primarily used by the group, illustrating Israel’s capability to infiltrate and strike from within.
Yet orders still appear to be coming through as Hezbollah claims dozens of operations per day. Saad, for her part, said Hezbollah has so far managed to defy the expectations even of its support base in its capacity to regroup and resist the Israeli incursion.
She pointed to the words of Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem, potentially the highest-ranking member of the group known to be still alive, who, in a speech Wednesday, asserted that “the task of the resistance is not to prevent a regular army from advancing, but to carry out operations against it.”
While Qassem declared that the only solution would be a ceasefire, he also spoke of a “new equation” in which Hezbollah would be “harming the enemy,” with the group’s rockets and missiles now targeting major Israeli cities such as Haifa and Tel Aviv while fighters simultaneously clashed with the IDF on the ground.
In this way, Saad said that Hezbollah has “already surpassed the requirements of a resistance movement” at this stage of the conflict. She said it was uncertain whether the group would ultimately be able to continue to prevent Israeli forces from advancing deeper into Lebanon as they have in past wars, but should the IDF again assume control of parts of southern Lebanon, “I think Hezbollah will be able to prevent an occupation again.”
As Hezbollah spokesperson Mohamed Afif told reporters last week, even if Israeli forces succeed in seizing additional territory in Lebanon, “Do not worry and do not weaken your morale, because the resistance will not fight a fixed positional defense, but a flexible defense compatible with the requirements of the front.”
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Maintaining the Homefront
Such reassurances are crucial to Hezbollah’s standing not only on the battlefield but within Lebanese society.
“This is, I would say, is Hezbollah’s real Achilles’ heel,” Saad said. “It’s the domestic front, it’s internal stability. That has always been the case. And that’s because Lebanon isn’t like Gaza, it’s a sovereign state, but also, it’s one that’s very polarized.”
As the IDF intensified its bombardment earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a direct warning to the Lebanese people to disempower Hezbollah or face “a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”
Since the Hamas-led attack that Israeli officials estimate killed around 1,200 people last October, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza has recorded more than 42,000 people killed in the Hamas-held territory, along with the destruction of much of its infrastructure. Amid growing civilian casualties, the IDF has managed to eviscerate Hamas’ leadership as well as seize control over a large part of Gaza.
As Netanyahu shifts his focus to Lebanon, the Lebanese Health Ministry has so far recorded more than 2,400 deaths due to Israeli attacks over the past year. The growing conflict, paired with mounting devastation to southern Lebanon and other parts of the country, including the southern suburbs of Beirut, has also displaced more than a million people, including scores of Shiite Muslims.
The developments come as a seismic shock to Lebanon’s precarious post-civil war political landscape.
Few openly support the Israeli campaign. But discontented opposition parties such as the Kataeb and Lebanese Forces, both dominated by Christians, have called on the Lebanese government and its military, the non-sectarian Lebanese Armed Forces, to rein in Hezbollah in a bid to put an end to the war, which comes amid the existing crises of financial collapse and political paralysis that has prevented the election of a new president for two years.
“There are voices known to be against Hezbollah that have criticized the movement,” Ali Rizk, a journalist and analyst who has covered closely covered the developments in the region, told Newsweek.
At the same time, however, Hezbollah counts some key advantages on the home front, and Rizk noted that “the movement enjoys more support domestically today than it did in 2006 and certainly more than it did during the Syrian war.”
When the month-long 2006 war erupted following a deadly cross-border raid conducted by Hezbollah, the makeup of the Lebanese government was far less favorable to the group than it is today. And the traditional grievances against Hezbollah within Sunni Muslim communities that Rizk said reached “dangerous levels” as a result of the group’s intervention in Syria has been tempered by Hezbollah’s current support for Sunni Muslim Hamas in Gaza.
Influential figures in Lebanon long opposed to Hezbollah, including the majority-Sunni Muslim Future Movement leader Saad Hariri and majority-Druze Progressive Socialist Party head Walid Jumblatt, have also more recently voiced greater support for Hezbollah and condemnation of Israel.
Meanwhile, the ongoing tempo of operations against the IDF continues to challenge expectations of a looming demise for Hezbollah.
“While Hezbollah has been dealt some unprecedented heavy blows, it has proven that it remains not only a very capable ground fighting force but also of conducting sophisticated operations deep into the Israel home front,” Risk said.
“The recent drone operation that targeted an Israeli military base south of Haifa refutes the notion that Hezbollah’s command and control has been severely degraded,” he added. “This operation demonstrated high-level intelligence capabilities and served as a warning that the movement’s ability to hit Israel’s home front remains very much intact.”
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A Test of Resilience
Matthew Levitt, a former United States intelligence official now serving as a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, also felt that Hezbollah would likely emerge from the able to retain its position at home, though not without new challenges.
“I really think that what’s going to happen moving forward is that when the dust settles, Hezbollah is going to be in a position where it has to defend this position in Lebanon,” Levitt told Newsweek. “And I think it will be able to do that because, for all the rockets and tunnels and such that the Israelis have taken out, they’re not going to go take out all of the operatives, and they are not going to be taking out all of the small arms.”
“And that’s going to leave Hezbollah with the ability to fight domestically in Lebanon,” he added, “and they’re going to fight for their position.”
He emphasized, however, that the damage done to Hezbollah as a military force should not be understated in the wake of Nasrallah’s death and the effective gutting of several layers of commanding ranks, even if the group is able to continue conducting operations.
“I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that the Hezbollah that we knew two weeks ago no longer exists,” Levitt said. “Some people refer to what’s happened as a decapitation strategy. I see this more as open-heart surgery. It should not surprise that Hezbollah is able to continue firing some number of rockets.”
Now, he argued that Hezbollah is “very much on the backfoot,” and their main focus would be to “remain relevant in the moment and show that they can still up the fight.”
As for Israel, however, he also said that “society is tired” as the country, for all the many wars it has fought since winning independence in 1948, “has never fought a year-long war.” But he was confident in Israel’s capability to press on with the conflict until its goal of restoring security on the northern front was achieved.
“While Israeli society is indeed tired, it’s shown resilience, I think, because when you’re pushed against the corner, you do what you got to do, and they now have a situation which is not status quo ante-October 6,” Levitt said. “Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter, are a fraction of what they once were.”
However, Tamir Hayman, former chief of the IDF Intelligence Directorate and now executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, also spoke of Hezbollah’s resilience.
“Hezbollah is a very large organization; it has quite good resistance and resilience,” Hayman told Newsweek. “It will probably know to revive and resurface after those blasts, but it will take a few days. I imagine we are in the process of its recovery.”
As Hezbollah declared it was undergoing a transition in its strategy, Hayman envisioned the group would likely shift the focus away from acting as a supportive front to Gaza to battling Israeli forces on the Lebanese front so as not to risk “a long war” that would deprive it of an opportunity to regroup.
“Eventually, it needs some form of ceasefire in order to recover quickly,” Hayman said. “I imagine it will continue in the fighting against Israel in the north, but there is more chance of it accepting a ceasefire deal after those amazing strikes that the IDF did.”
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What Comes Next
To date, neither Israel nor Hezbollah has been able to achieve a decisive, undisputed win against one another. Both sides declared victory following their latest war in 2006, which ended with a United Nations-mediated ceasefire that ultimately did little to ease dueling accusations of violations across the international peacekeeper-patrolled Blue Line.
Then, too, Israel had sought to effectively neutralize the power of Hezbollah, only for the group to drastically increase its strength in the years to come.
Hayman, who served as the operations officer the IDF’s Northern Command during that conflict said that “this war is completely different from the war of 2006” as “both sides escalated their capabilities.”
Israel also counts some key advantages this time around. As Hayman explained, the IDF entered this conflict after a year of active combat in Gaza with more experience, a higher tolerance for casualties and a more focused set of objectives.
“Israel is eliminating the strategic threats, disrupting the command-and-control chain and destroying the infrastructure along the border that was prepared [by Hezbollah] for a raid similar to the 7th of October raid,” Hayman said. “So, I think, it’s more accurate and the capabilities are different.”
Hamze Attar, a defense analyst, also spoke to some of the advanced tools acquired by the IDF over the past 18 years, including the Iron Dome air defense system and major leaps in the weaponization of artificial intelligence that have provided a massive boost to Israel’s intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities.
On the side of Hezbollah, he said, the group has managed to acquire drones, ballistic missiles and precision-guided munitions as well as Iranian Amas Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs) reversed engineered from Israeli Spike NLOS systems captured in 2006. The group has also utilized a unique dual-launch setup of the Russia-built Kornet ATGM known as Tharallah to overwhelm the Trophy and Iron Fist active protective measures used by Israeli tanks and other armored vehicles.
Hezbollah has also mirrored Hamas in expanding an intricate underground tunnel network to lay ambush on the IDF, even as Israeli troops rush to uncover and eliminate the subterranean system. And, like the IDF, Hezbollah enters this fight with greater combat experience given the group’s years of battles on the front lines of Syria, even if, as Attar said, “the Syrian civil war is what exposed all Hezbollah assets to Israeli intelligence.”
“Hezbollah fights better, but Israel knows better, so far,” Attar said.
In continuing the fight despite Israel’s seismic successes, Attar said that “Hezbollah surprised most analysts, not only me, in their ability to recover that quickly.” He said the group has “managed to collect its pieces and move from gray zone warfare to all-out war.”
“Losing field commanders during any war is predictable, and that prediction also includes senior members, especially when you are fighting against an intelligence machine such as Israel,” Attar said. “And Hezbollah, as they proved, they took this into consideration in how they manage the absence of critical field and senior commanders including Hassan Nasrallah himself.”
At the same time, he said there were great uncertainties ahead, particularly as Hezbollah awaits Israel’s promised response against Iran for its latest direct missile attack earlier this month conducted in retaliation for the killing of Nasrallah as well as a senior Iranian military official in the Israeli strike in Beirut, along with the killing of Hamas Political Bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.
With both sides threatening to inflict pain on one another outside of the traditional shadowy framework of their decades-long rivalry, the risk of an all-war looms that could see even greater involvement from the Axis of Resistance as well as Israel’s superpower ally, the U.S.
“Many surprises are ahead of us,” Attar said, “on both sides.”
