BEIRUT, Lebanon—On Oct. 8, 2023, as Israel was reeling from the deadly Hamas attacks of the previous day, Hezbollah launched mortar rounds against Israeli outposts dotting the skyline of the mountainous Shebaa Farms area alongside Lebanon’s southeastern border. A Hezbollah statement declared that the attack was a gesture of support for the group’s Palestinian ally Hamas. It was the opening salvo in what was to become a sustained effort to try and alleviate the pressure on Hamas as Israel prosecuted its war in Gaza.
A year later, however, Hezbollah has become embroiled in a debilitating war that has seen Israel decapitate its top political and military leadership, while leaving more than 2,000 Lebanese dead and many villages along the border so heavily damaged they have become uninhabitable.
Regardless of how the current war ends, Hezbollah’s fateful decision—alongside that of the group’s backer, Iran—to open what it called a “support front” for Hamas in October 2023 will go down as the greatest strategic blunder the organization has made in its 42 years of existence.
When Hezbollah fired those first mortar rounds, the leadership likely anticipated that the war in Gaza would be over in a matter of weeks, as in previous conflicts between Israel and Hamas, or at most a month or two. Hezbollah and Iran had no interest in engaging the full-blown war with Israel that Hamas had hoped to provoke. However, small-scale daily attacks against Israeli army posts along the border would allow Hezbollah to burnish its “resistance” credentials and demonstrate the “unity of the fronts” paradigm that links the organization with other Iran-backed militant groups in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Furthermore, Hezbollah may have calculated that the mutual deterrence established between the group and Israel after their 2006 war, which had allowed for 17 years of calm along the Lebanon-Israel border, was likely to hold, ensuring that Israel would not overreact to the group’s daily strikes. It may have been this sense of misplaced confidence that encouraged the party’s leadership to bind the fate of the “support front” to that of the war in Gaza. As long as the war in Gaza continued, they declared, so too would the strikes along the Lebanon-Israel border. Once that war ended, Hezbollah would also agree to a cease-fire.
It was a serious miscalculation, and as the weeks and then months went by, Hezbollah was left without a face-saving offramp to end the escalating hostilities along the border.
Frustration in the Ranks
By early 2024, fighting had already expanded beyond the Blue Line, the United Nations’ name for Lebanon’s southern border where a U.N. peacekeeping mission has been deployed since 1978. Israeli jets were striking Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, even as the group’s rockets inched deeper into Israel with each passing week. Some 90,000 residents of southern Lebanon’s border villages fled the violence, as did more than 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the northern Galilee region.
Alarmingly for Hezbollah, Israel had seemingly found a way to track down and kill the group’s senior field commanders. One of them, Wissam Tawil, a top commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Brigade, was killed on Jan. 8, when a roadside bomb exploded beside the car in which he was traveling near his home village of Khirbet Silm in southern Lebanon. The next day, another senior field commander was killed on his way to attend Tawil’s funeral.
In early April, a veteran Hezbollah member and friend of Tawil’s vented his frustration to me at what he called a “futile war.” The Israelis were killing Hezbollah fighters and causing serious damage to border villages. And in exchange, Hezbollah was firing relatively short-range unguided legacy rockets into Israel that barely left a mark, he said. His anger was chiefly directed at Iran. “We have weapons systems that can inflict real pain on the enemy, but the Iranians won’t let us use them,” he said. He was referring to the group’s arsenal of precision-guided missiles, some of which have the range to cover the entire territory of Israel, the power to carry 500-kilogram warheads and the accuracy to strike within 10 to 50 meters of their targets.
Irrespective of how efficiently and successfully Hezbollah can confront Israel in the current conflict, the intelligence penetration of the party’s ranks is a serious vulnerability that will be difficult to reverse.
The reason for Tehran’s veto was not hard to decipher. Iran had no problem, at least initially, with Hezbollah opening a “support front.” But it had no desire to see its prize asset become embroiled in a major war with Israel. As a factor of deterrence for Hezbollah and Iran against Israel, the guided missiles were also weapons of last resort. And so they remained locked up in Hezbollah’s deep underground arsenals.
The sense of frustration at how the conflict was proceeding was widely felt among the rank-and-file party members and Hezbollah’s supporters, and it may have been detected by the party leadership. Beginning in mid-April, Hezbollah escalated its actions, carrying out more daily attacks, striking military targets deeper into Israel and making far greater use of its suicide drones, which more effectively evaded Israel’s missile defense systems.
On July 27, however, during a Hezbollah attack on an Israeli army base in the northern Golan Heights, a rocket with a 50-kilogram warhead slammed into a soccer field in the Druze village of Majdel Shams, killing 12 children and teenagers and wounding 19 others. Hezbollah denied firing the rocket, although it did admit to the attack on the nearby army base. It was in all likelihood a targeting error. Nevertheless, Israel warned that Hezbollah “will pay a heavy price for it, a price it has not paid before.”
Israel’s retaliation came on July 30 with the assassination of Fouad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top military commander, in a missile strike on a building in the southern suburbs of Beirut. During a speech at Shukr’s funeral on Aug. 1, then-Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed a “real and fully considered response” for the commander’s death. However, it took more than three weeks for Hezbollah to retaliate. The attack, when it came on Aug. 25, saw 340 122mm Grad rockets and an unspecified number of drones launched at military bases across northern Israel. Israel claimed to have shot down all the drones and reported no casualties, in what many Hezbollah supporters considered a disappointing response to the death of such an important member of the group.
Blow After Blow
In retrospect, it may have been at this moment that the Israeli government surmised that Iran and Hezbollah really were desperate to avoid a major war and that their reluctance offered an opportunity to escalate actions in Lebanon to further degrade the organization. Over the next three weeks, Israel increased the number and intensity of air strikes in southern Lebanon, hitting multiple targets in single sorties. Then on the afternoon of Sept. 16, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah members—to avoid more easily traceable cellphones—exploded, killing 12 people and wounding some 3,000 people. The next day, a second wave of explosions occurred, this time targeting walkie-talkies used by the group, claiming the lives of 20 people and wounding 450. Both attacks were the result of sophisticated Israeli operations to booby-trap the devices.
Taking advantage of the chaos among Hezbollah’s ranks, on Sept. 20, Israel bombed a building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing veteran commander Ibrahim Aql, head of the Radwan Brigade and Hezbollah’s operations chief, as well as 11 other senior Hezbollah officers. Three days later, Israel launched Operation Northern Arrow, a massive series of air strikes against Hezbollah targets across southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, with a reported 1,600 targets struck on the first day. Nearly 500 people in Lebanon were killed in the first 24 hours of the raids, the largest loss of life in the country in a single day since the 1975-1990 civil war.
But the blows kept coming. On the evening of Sept. 27, Israel dropped 80 bunker-buster bombs on what it said was Hezbollah’s underground command headquarters, killing Nasrallah and other senior officials who were holding a meeting there. The next day, Sheikh Nabil Qaouk, deputy head of the party’s executive council, was killed in another air strike. On Oct. 4, Israel bombed what it said was Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters in southern Beirut. The target of the attack was Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, a senior Hezbollah official who was tipped to be Nasrallah’s successor. Just last week, Hezbollah confirmed that Safieddine had in fact died in the strike.
But Israel’s strikes were no longer limited to the air. On Oct. 1, Israeli ground troops crossed into Lebanon for the first time in 18 years for a series of targeted raids against Hezbollah military infrastructure along the Lebanon-Israel border. Israel’s stated goal is to allow the 60,000 Israeli evacuees from the north to return to their homes. To achieve this goal, Israel wants to destroy the bunkers, tunnels, weapons stashes and other infrastructure that Hezbollah could use to launch rocket attacks, but also to mount an incursion into northern Israel similar to the Hamas assault in October 2023 and the cross-border kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that triggered the 2006 war. There have also been reports of entire neighborhoods in border villages being dynamited in what seems to be a plan to create a depopulated strip of Lebanese territory that Israel would treat as a free-fire zone.
Hezbollah’s fighters on the ground are now confronting the Israeli troops through close-quarter ambushes and using standoff munitions such as mortars and anti-tank missiles. Since the Israelis entered Lebanon, Hezbollah has also increased the rate of rocket attacks into Israel and begun using some of its precision-guided missiles, albeit in small numbers, to target military bases as far as the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Intelligence Penetration
A key takeaway at this stage of the conflict is that it is now clear that Hezbollah has been thoroughly penetrated by Israeli intelligence. Earlier in the year, in conversations with Hezbollah members and supporters of the group, there was a sense of concern verging on paranoia at how the Israelis were able to track down and kill senior field commanders, including the leaders of two of the group’s main fighting formations. The detonation of the pagers and walkie-talkies followed by the spate of assassinations at the end of September that decapitated the political and military leadership is unprecedented in Hezbollah’s existence.
Perhaps the main reason for the ability of Israeli intelligence to work its way inside Hezbollah is that, after the 2006 war, the organization grew too big, and too quickly, for its own good. In the 1990s, during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah was just about impenetrable to Israeli intelligence. The organization was much smaller in those days, numbering just 3,000 to 5,000 part-time and full-time combatants, and there was a deep-rooted sense of internal security among all the cadres.
While the Lebanese tend to unite during times of war with Israel, or at least keep their criticism muted, a day of reckoning for Hezbollah may well come once the conflict is over.
Hezbollah remained at the same strength until the 2006 war, after which it undertook a sudden and extensive recruitment campaign, raising its numbers to tens of thousands. In a speech in 2023, Nasrallah boasted that Hezbollah’s fighting strength had reached 100,000. This was probably an exaggeration, but the figure could realistically be as high as 60,000 or 70,000.
There were two main reasons for the recruitment drive. One was to strengthen Hezbollah in anticipation of a second round of high-intensity combat with Israel, given the inconclusive results of the 2006 war. The second was related to the prevailing political dynamics in Lebanon at the time. The country was split between two parliamentary blocks, one backed by the West and the other led by Hezbollah and supported by Syria and Iran. Recruiting tens of thousands of fighters into Hezbollah’s ranks helped strengthen its domestic political position by binding more people—and their families—to the party. Hezbollah did not need 60,000 fighters for a war with Israel, nor even for its post-2012 intervention in Syria to save the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. After all, in 2006, when it was much smaller, only a few hundred fighters fought on the frontlines in southern Lebanon.
Furthermore, the traditionally high standards of the party’s recruitment and induction process were lowered after 2006. That was particularly the case for volunteers to fight in Syria, many of whom were drawn to the group by the salaries it offered rather than any ideological affinity. These recruits were given a month of basic training at camps in the Bekaa Valley before being deployed to the bloody battlefields of Syria. Once there, each fighter underwent a Darwinian process of selection in which the unlucky and inept were killed off, while the luckier and more skillful survived and learned.
This combination of a rapid expansion in numbers and less-stringent vetting of recruits led to cracks appearing in the party’s previously airtight security. Adding to the problem was that corruption began to take root in Hezbollah from around 2008, providing another point of entry for hostile intelligence agencies to infiltrate the party. Furthermore, Lebanon’s economic crash in 2019, in which many people lost their life savings, added yet another pecuniary incentive for collaborating with the Israelis.
The ability of the Israelis to find and kill not only senior field commanders but Hezbollah’s top leaders, as well as target and destroy its arms storage facilities across Lebanon, suggests that the intelligence penetration has reached senior levels within the party and operates at real-time capacity. Irrespective of how efficiently and successfully Hezbollah can confront Israel in the current conflict, the intelligence penetration of the party’s ranks is a serious vulnerability that will be difficult to reverse.
Looking Ahead
At this early stage of the conflict, negotiations to bring the war to an end have yet to begin in earnest. The Israeli government is in a triumphalist mood as it continues to pound Hezbollah targets across Lebanon and declare that it is in the process of destroying its longstanding enemy. However, Hezbollah is a resilient and structured organization that is not reliant on a single figurehead or small group of leaders. It appears to be functioning in a coherent manner on the battlefields of southern Lebanon, maintaining a steady flow of rockets fired into Israel each day and clashing with Israeli forces on the ground. The morale of the fighters remains high, to the extent that some of them are refusing to heed orders to withdraw from frontline villages where they live, preferring to stay and fight to the death.
Its strategy is probably similar to that of the 2006 war: to play for time and deny the Israeli government its goal of returning evacuees to the north by continuing to launch rockets across the border. The battering Hezbollah has taken in the past six weeks and the loss of much of its leadership cadre has caused some to think the moment is an opportune one to begin pushing back against the party’s pervasive influence in Lebanon. While the Lebanese tend to unite during times of war with Israel, or at least keep their criticism muted, a day of reckoning may well come once the conflict is over.
In 2006, the destruction Israel unleashed on the country was so severe that Nasrallah apologized to the nation, going so far as to state that had he known the extent to which Israel would go in its response ahead of time, Hezbollah would not have carried out the cross-border raid that triggered the conflict. Another apology this time around will fall on deaf ears. Few Lebanese will thank Hezbollah for triggering a conflict that has inflicted huge physical damage on the country, which is already suffering a debilitating economic crisis. However, it is unlikely that the war will weaken Hezbollah to the extent that it becomes vulnerable to its domestic opponents.
Indeed, if Hezbollah senses that its political opponents are rallying against the party, it could react with violence as it has done in the past. It would also certainly raise sectarian tensions due to the perception that is the Shiite community that is coming under attack, not just Hezbollah. Much will depend on the outcome of the war, which still has the potential to become a regional conflagration drawing in Iran. Hezbollah will in all likelihood survive, but in a weakened state that will have important, if uncertain, consequences for Lebanon.
Nicholas Blanford is a Beirut-based security consultant and senior nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. He is the author of “Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel” (2011) and “Killing Mr Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on The Middle East” (2006). He has lived in Beirut since 1994.