Hezbollah was in complete disarray in late September 2024 after 80 Israeli bombs obliterated the Lebanese movement's headquarters, several of its most senior leaders were killed, and Israel booby-trapped thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies to devastating effect. Surviving commanders ditched their phones, mounted motorbikes and scooters, and moved around Haret Hreik, Chiah and other neighborhoods in Beirut's southern suburbs to meet each other in person at rendezvous points such as bakeries, bank branches and phone shops.
Middle East Eye spoke to seven figures with intimate knowledge of Hezbollah, as well as sources close to the party, Lebanese politicians and officials and Arab diplomats, almost all on condition of anonymity. The sources said Hezbollah was sucked into a war despite severe misgivings and later managed to resuscitate its military wing after defeat. They also discussed Iran's role in the two Israeli wars on Lebanon since 2023, Hezbollah's economic woes and discontent among the Shia community it says it represents and protects.
The Decision to Attack
The decision to attack Israel in October 2023 was, three sources said, solely Hassan Nasrallah's and faced opposing views within Hezbollah's Shura Council, its executive body. Nawaf Moussawi, a senior Hezbollah official, former MP and head of its border and resources department, dismissed reports about Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar urging Nasrallah to join a coordinated surprise attack as "psychological warfare" and said, "It's pure propaganda and not facts on the ground."
Qassem Soleimani and Nasrallah were the lynchpins of the "unity of fronts" strategy, with Soleimani overseeing and occasionally directing Iranian allies such as Iraqi paramilitaries and Ansar Allah, the Yemeni movement commonly known as the Houthis. Soleimani was killed in a January 2020 US drone strike in Baghdad. According to two sources, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, then Iran's foreign minister, told Nasrallah when he visited Beirut after the 7 October 2023 attack that Tehran was prepared only to support the war morally.
Nasrallah ordered a barrage of rockets on 8 October, opening a support front. Ibrahim Aqil, head of the Radwan Force special operations unit, disagreed and thought Hezbollah should either go all in or not at all. For a year, Hezbollah and Israel exchanged cross-border strikes, with 7,000 rockets, missiles, drones and air and artillery strikes traded across the Blue Line. The Lebanese side lost 2,000 people, compared with 70 south of the border, and Hezbollah displaced 60,000 of Israel's citizens from the north.
The Pager Operation
On 17 and 18 September 2024, Israel detonated thousands of pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies, killing around 40 people and wounding thousands more. David Barnea, then head of Mossad, said it was "a clear example of the realisation of our mission." Benjamin Netanyahu gave Donald Trump a gold pager to commemorate the attack.
Hezbollah sources said the operation was a failure. Around 2,500 pagers were in circulation at the time of the attack, and 15,000 walkie-talkies were in storage when Israel moved to that phase of the operation on 18 September. Just a few hundred walkie-talkies exploded, but at least 25 people were killed in the second attack compared with 12 the day before.
By early September, Hezbollah and Iran realized the war could not be contained, and Hezbollah decided to go all in. A meeting was set for the 19th to sign off on a huge escalation that would have included a ground offensive, but a Hezbollah inspection team doubted the pagers and sent samples to Iran for further tests, which the sources said forced Israel's hand.
Israel's Air and Land Campaign
Israel then waged a 66-day air and land campaign on Hezbollah, killing Nasrallah, his cousin and successor Hashem Safieddine, and most of the party's military leadership, including Aqil and the commanders of his Radwan Force. Whole units, ammunition stores and other targets were destroyed. Surviving commanders were largely spared because they didn't pick up their phones.
Hezbollah's military structure mirrors that of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with each commander having an Iranian counterpart. When Hezbollah leaders were assassinated, Iranian versions came to Lebanon to help fill the vacuum, including Esmail Qaani, Soleimani's successor as head of the Quds Force. Abbas Nilforoushan, who led the Quds Force's Lebanon division, was killed alongside Nasrallah.
Hezbollah believed its resilience surprised Israel, which eventually agreed to a ceasefire. Sources in the party said Benjamin Netanyahu thought Hezbollah could be killed off politically through domestic and international pressure. It became received wisdom in Lebanon and abroad that Hezbollah had been decimated and that its military strength was 20 percent of what it used to be, if that.
Regional Pressure and Assad's Fall
According to an Arab diplomat, the Saudis were ecstatic to see Hezbollah degraded, while the Egyptians followed the French in trying to explain that its time as the most heavily armed non-state actor was over and its leaders should let them provide a dignified exit. The fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria further undermined Hezbollah. For a decade, the party had lost men, treasure and Arab public goodwill fighting Syrian rebels to prop up Assad. When a shock rebel offensive began the day the ceasefire in Lebanon started, Hezbollah couldn't save him again.
Assad's ousting emboldened Hezbollah's enemies, who demanded the party retreat north of the Litani River even though that wasn't the original agreement. Israel's near-daily strikes on Hezbollah and the state's unwillingness to offer a way out hardened Hezbollah's stance. A source close to the party said, "The Lebanese state and the US missed an opportunity to absorb Hezbollah. After November 2024, it signalled it was open and it didn't even participate in the June war with Iran. But the continuation of Israeli attacks and the state's unwillingness to offer a way out meant it could no longer be lenient."
Ceasefire Violations and Reorganization
During the 15-month ceasefire period, Hezbollah faced 3,000 air, drone and artillery strikes. Israeli troops and contractors fortified and expanded five military bases and leveled every Shia-majority town and village along the border. One Hezbollah source said, "The border area is now like a football pitch – completely flat, not a single building standing, not a house, not a mosque."
Hezbollah then reorganized its military wing into independent units following the model of guerrilla combat under the late commander Imad Mughnieh. Each unit received guidelines and pre-planned scenarios, and fighters were told they didn't have to fight until the last bullet. The new model was tested in March 2026 after the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran and killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Hezbollah fired six rockets across the border in response to Khamenei's killing. One source said the decision was purely Naim Qassem's and was supported by Iran. Another source said Iran had advised Hezbollah to attack Israel in response to ceasefire breaches long before Khamenei was killed, but Hezbollah calculated otherwise.
Gamers and Drones Turn the Tide
Gaming cafes have become ubiquitous in the Middle East, from Jerusalem to Tehran to Cairo, where youths gather in smoky rooms to play Fifa or first-person-view shooting games. Seasoned Hezbollah members had despaired at the hours Gen Z wasted on fictional wars, but those same kids later turned the tide.
When war broke out again in March 2026, Israeli troops fanned out across Lebanese territory south of the Litani and beyond, establishing around 300 positions in private homes, abandoned military bases and a Crusader castle. Hezbollah relinquished urban areas such as Bint Jbeil under its new guidelines, but Israeli troops were constantly harried and around 20 soldiers were killed in south Lebanon since 2 March.
Hezbollah turned to drones, with Lebanese gamers making up the bulk of its drone pilots. Netanyahu described the cheap aircraft as a "central threat." Hezbollah also repurposed fibre-optic cable stored for the Almas-1 missile program for FPV drones. Hezbollah used the Almas-1 in 2024, and that the missile had been reverse engineered from an Israeli Spike missile.
The Current Ceasefire
Technically, Israel and Hezbollah are observing a ceasefire in force since 16 April, but attacks have continued. The Lebanese state has sought to decouple Lebanon from the US-Israeli war on Iran through direct negotiations with Israel, and a framework negotiated in Washington has so far resulted in the Lebanese army being allowed to deploy in just one southern town in a pilot scheme. Iran has underwritten the truce and threatened shipping on the Strait of Hormuz if Israel violates the ceasefire. Hezbollah sources and Lebanese officials said the pause isn't an end to the war.
Around 600,000 people remain displaced from their homes in south Lebanon. One source close to the party said there are rising questions within Shia society. A visitor at a cemetery for slain fighters in Dahieh said, "I come to pay my respects to my friends who were killed fighting the enemy. But I have serious issues with everything that has happened."
Tarek Mitri, Lebanon's deputy prime minister, said it was "a war that Lebanon did not want, did not seek." Nawaf Moussawi said, "Rather than identifying the occupation as the problem, this media campaign seeks to claim that the resistance is the problem." He also said, "Let us suppose that Hezbollah did not exist. There would still be an organisation expressing the will of the Lebanese people to liberate their land. That organisation would then become the problem, even if it were called the Democratic Party of America."
Financial Crisis and Community Pressure
Hezbollah is unable to provide the welfare services it once did because of a severe financial crisis and because funds are prioritized for military matters. One source said, "The party used to pay for housing, renovation, welfare. Now that has stopped," and said this was because there's no longer a land route to Iran through Syria and aviation between Iran and Lebanon is restricted.
The openly sectarian targeting by Israel, which described south Lebanon residents as the "Shia enemy population," has driven the community closer to Hezbollah. Amal leader Nabih Berri's eulogy for Khamenei was cited as an example of the community converging under pressure.
In August 2026, Hezbollah was described as militarily severely degraded but effective in its pivot to a more nimble guerrilla-style force. Sources in the party suggested the death toll across the two wars could be anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 people, most of them in 2024. A source close to Hezbollah's inner political circle said, "It is not the same party as it was in 2023."
Qassem's Leadership
Naim Qassem's elevation to secretary general was initially mocked, but he has navigated Hezbollah through the crisis and carried out a restructuring earlier this year that remolded the party and sidelined influential figures. A source close to the political circle said, "Despite everything that was said about Qassem, that he has a lack of charisma, he is building back the party in a transitional phase," and added, "He proved that he could hold ground and restructure the entire party and consolidate."
Members of the founder generation like Qassem and Mohammed Raad, the head of Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc, remain in place, as do second-generation figures like Hassan Fadhlallah. Nawaf Moussawi said, "Because we are a resistance movement and are at risk of being killed, there must be, in every position, a replacement for every official who might be killed or martyred." He also said, "Yes, it can be said today that the first generation was killed, as was the second generation, along with many of the third generation. Nevertheless, continue the resistance."
There are fewer Iranian advisers on the ground than before, but political and strategic coordination remains strong. Hezbollah's relations with the Lebanese state are at a nadir after Hezbollah's 2 March attack on Israel, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam's outlawing of Hezbollah military activity and President Joseph Aoun's overtures to Israel.
Sources said there were serious discussions after Israel's 2024 invasion about whether Hezbollah could transition from an armed movement to a purely political one. Hezbollah is the largest party in parliament and has long been a pillar of the Lebanese state. A source close to Hezbollah's political circle said, "There are discussions in the background within the party about disarmament and what that might look like or mean, but no proposals can be put forward in a moment of war." The source added, "Importantly, Naim Qassem has no red lines."
Another source said Hezbollah should "enter a state of madness with bombing and killing. Transition back to the Hezbollah of the 80s," but added, "But it's not that easy. We are now embedded in society."
The Economist wrote last month, "Fear is understandable, but must not be an excuse for inaction. The army needs to exert control." Tarek Mitri said neither the army nor Hezbollah were willing to fall into the trap of fighting each other. Moussawi said no one in Lebanon could take up arms against the resistance against the occupation because that would mean their own destruction before Lebanon's.
Trump's Frustration
According to two party sources and a Lebanese diplomatic source, Donald Trump grew so frustrated during some recent ceasefire negotiations that he telephoned the Lebanese ambassador to Washington and demanded a direct line to Hezbollah. Officials then tried to find a phone number for anyone in Hezbollah, calling anyone they knew who was Shia, even random sheikhs. The request was denied.
Despite the hammer blows and premature obituaries, Hezbollah and the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance remain alive, armed and influential. The US-mediated framework between Lebanon and Israel has given Hezbollah political breathing space, and one source said it strengthened Hezbollah's position against the government because it has been criticized by many of the party's enemies.
Why This Matters:
Hezbollah's ability to reconstitute after devastating Israeli strikes demonstrates the fundamental challenge Israel faces in securing its northern border: an Iranian proxy force that can absorb catastrophic losses, reorganize under a new guerrilla model, and continue threatening Israeli territory with drones and rockets. The death toll of around 20 Israeli soldiers since March 2026 and Netanyahu's description of cheap drones as a "central threat" reveal that Israel's tactical victories haven't translated into strategic security. Iran's continued political and strategic coordination with Hezbollah, despite fewer advisers on the ground, shows Tehran's proxy network remains functional even after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The 3,000 strikes Hezbollah endured during a supposed ceasefire period, combined with Israel's expansion of five military bases and the leveling of every Shia-majority border town, illustrate the security vacuum that persists. Hezbollah sources and Lebanese officials say the pause isn't an end to the war. As long as Hezbollah remains armed, embedded in Lebanese society as the largest parliamentary party, and backed by Iran's willingness to threaten shipping on the Strait of Hormuz, Israel faces an enduring threat that military campaigns can degrade but not eliminate.