Distorted State: How Hezbollah Survived, And What It Means For Lebanon

Even if most never reach their targets, Hezbollah has fired waves of rockets and drones into Israel in steadily increasing frequency. Its fighters are engaging Israeli ground forces in direct clashes across southern border towns, launching guided missile strikes on Israeli armour and holding Israeli troop advances to a crawl. Notably, almost all this action is taking place south of the Litani River, an area over which the LAF had declared “operational control” in January, after a year-long effort to seize Hezbollah tunnel networks and hidden weapons depots.

While it is unclear how long the group can sustain this military tempo, particularly if Israel launches a full-scale ground invasion, the current fighting has spurred a marked shift from the previous conflict’s dynamics. Israel, for instance, in both rhetoric and action, has broadened its attacks against Lebanese infrastructure and appears to be targeting its military strikes in response to battlefield developments. This, as opposed to pre-emptively hitting Hezbollah positions, an implicit admission that its previously vast reservoir of military targets has run low.

While the military confrontation plays out, Lebanon’s body politic is also fraying. On the one side, the narrative amongst the more anti-Hezbollah segment is that that the state should take on the party now that it’s at its weakest, even if that means a confrontation with the LAF and, by extension, some civil strife. The other side of the political spectrum, including many who are not pro-Hezbollah figures, seeks to adapt pragmatically to the evolving circumstances and avoid the risk of civil strife.

How these dynamics came to pass—and how they now collide with the endgame calculations of both Hezbollah and Israel—will shape Lebanon’s trajectory for decades. To trace the arc from Hezbollah’s near collapse in 2024 to its unexpected military resurgence today, Badil spoke to four senior officials: two close to the party’s political wing and two with direct insight into its military operations. All agreed to separate interviews on condition of anonymity, given the ongoing war and the sensitivity of the subject.

A Near-Death Experience

Hezbollah’s ultimate goal in the current fighting is to restore military deterrence with Israel, according to the first official close to Hezbollah’s political wing. The previous deterrence posture was definitively lost over a roughly two-week period in late September and early October 2024, when Israel hit Hezbollah with a surprise military escalation involving the so-called pager and walkie-talkie attacks, thousands of Israeli airstrikes, and a ground invasion. This saw the assassination of long-time leader Hassan Nasrallah, the decimation of Hezbollah’s senior political and military ranks, the killing or permanent incapacitation of thousands of fighters, and the destruction of weapons depots and military assets across the country.

These two weeks brought Hezbollah to the brink of disintegration as a fighting force, according to both officials close to the group’s military operations. They identified two factors as pivotal in buying the party time to regroup: first, Israel’s ground invasion was not launched until October 1, rather than immediately after the massive bombing campaign of September 23 and 24, in which Israel struck some 1,600 Hezbollah sites and killed roughly 500 people. Second, once the ground invasion began, hundreds of Hezbollah fighters along the border, amid an organization-wide communications blackout, died fighting rather than retreating, stalling Israeli troop advances long enough for an organized defence to reshape behind them.

Israel’s decision not to continue the full-scale offensive and agree to a nominal ceasefire on November 27, 2024, was then critical for the party to begin rebuilding. The “ceasefire” was, however, one-sided, with Hezbollah facing near-daily Israeli airstrikes throughout 2025 and early 2026, killing almost 400 members. At the same time, the Lebanese government tasked the LAF to bring all arms in the country under state control, leading to hundreds of Hezbollah weapons caches being uncovered and infrastructure dismantled in South Lebanon. According to the first official close to Hezbollah’s political wing, while these losses were significant, the party’s leadership calculated that a lack of response was worth the sacrifice to allow the party’s restoration campaign to take hold relatively undetected.

Hezbollah 2.0

Another pillar of the party’s reorientation has been to shed its grand ideological ambitions for pragmatic ones, according to the first official close to its political wing: rather than aiming to liberate Jerusalem and support the oppressed worldwide, Hezbollah’s focus is now limited to forcing a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon and establishing the necessary military deterrence to allow southern Lebanese to return to their villages. In practical terms, the 15-month ceasefire saw, on the one hand, Hezbollah engage in widespread rehabilitation of its arsenal and infrastructure, and, on the other, reforms to its internal security architecture designed to prevent a repeat of the intelligence catastrophe that nearly destroyed it. For example, the party assessed that its electronic communications networks had been utterly compromised and used by Israeli intelligence to target members, according to the first official close to its military wing. To address this, Hezbollah now carries out sensitive military communications strictly through couriers, face-to-face meetings, and written notes, he claims.

All four officials interviewed for this analysis describe a party that has implemented a protocol by which information is shared on a strictly need-to-know basis. This has included deliberately partitioning its political and military wings, and within the latter, loosening its chains of command and elevating local-level autonomy.

The political leadership below Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem, such party members who appear on television, participate in parliamentary politics, and attend public events, are given strictly the information needed to fulfill their public-facing role, but no details on military preparations, plans or capabilities. As the Hezbollah chief recently explained, party members deliberately sewed “ambiguity surrounding our capabilities” as part of their military preparations for the war they knew was coming.

Hezbollah’s rearmament efforts were also given an unexpected boost when Syria’s Assad regime, Hezbollah’s long-time ally, was overthrown in December 2024. In the chaos of regime collapse, Hezbollah was able to transfer large stockpiles of weapons and ammunition out of Syrian depots to resupply its own depleted arsenal “for a cheaper price” than during Assad’s rule, according to the first official close to the party’s military wing. This covert action was happening at the same time as all eyes were watching Israel’s massive bombing campaign against Syrian military sites. The same official also claimed that weapons transfers from Syria allowed Hezbollah to restock its anti-tank missiles to pre-war levels, and, to a lesser degree, its rockets and medium-range missiles. He added that while the security efforts of the new government in Damascus are complicating previous smuggling routes through Syria, they still exist but are more expensive. Hezbollah’s essential drone replenishment has largely depended on the party’s in-house production, according to the official, with drones coming to play a much greater role in its strategy.

With regard to the party’s tunnel networks and infrastructure, rebuilding efforts continued along several tracks, according to the first official close to the party’s military wing. The first concerned rehabilitating facilities Israel had bombed during the 2024 war but had not fully destroyed. This included, for instance, entrances to tunnel networks that had been blown up, sealing off access, but where the internal structures survived. Other high-value Hezbollah infrastructure escaped Israeli attack altogether. To figure out why, the official said party planners essentially reverse-engineered the Israeli army’s targeting process and came to the observation that air strikes had largely hit Hezbollah infrastructure built before a certain cutoff date, and hit almost none built after, indicating that a blind spot had emerged in Israeli intelligence gathering.

All the while, he claimed, Hezbollah did not impede the LAF’s efforts in South Lebanon, where the army uncovered and dismantled hundreds of Hezbollah positions and confiscated thousands of weapons. However, he claimed that vast labyrinths of the group’s infrastructure remained concealed, while party members became adept at working around the army’s efforts.

Lebanese Displaced and Divided

On February 28, the day an Israeli airstrike assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran and the US-Israel war against his country began, a written note arrived to Hezbollah’s frontline fighters in South Lebanon: they were to restart their rocket fire on March 2. They did, and the war rapidly escalated. The most immediate impact has been on Lebanese civilians. Hundreds have already been killed, and roughly one million people have been displaced from South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut – areas where the Shia community and Hezbollah’s popular support base is concentrated.

Many of the party faithful are, however, shocked and appalled that Hezbollah would drag them into another conflict and displacement crisis so soon after the last one, with discontent at the party being widespread. While the Lebanese government has opened hundreds of centres to house and support the displaced, anti-Shia sentiment is flaring among Lebanon’s other sects, particularly in areas where the displaced are sheltering.

Tensions are being further inflamed by the damage the war is doing to economic activity, which had just recently been clawing its way out of the grave of the 2019 financial collapse. Moreover, the nascent hope among many Lebanese that meaningful state sovereignty had begun to emerge in 2025 has been dashed, with the government shown to be nearly impotent in enforcing the string of recent decisions related to monopoly on arms.

In response to the war, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and his council of ministers officially banning Hezbollah’s military and security activities. Notably, among those voting in favour of the ban were ministers from the Amal Party, the traditional ally of Hezbollah as the second political party in Lebanon’s so-called “Shia-duo”. The ban, however, amounts to an aspirational decree, given that the army that would enforce it has itself pulled back from the border areas as Hezbollah fights on. Nevertheless, Lebanese government officials who spoke with Badil say the prime minister and those around him are pushing hard for the LAF to continue its campaign to disarm Hezbollah, even at the risk of a direct confrontation with the group. As Prime Minister Salam insisted during an interview with Al Hadath TV, the government “will not back down from its decisions regarding the monopoly of arms.”

It’s no coincidence that the PM’s tougher stance comes at a time when Washington has been pressing Lebanese leaders towards direct negotiations with Israel, which now appear inevitable in some form. Under the prior assumption that Hezbollah was a moribund force, Israel would have been able to dictate terms to Beirut. Should Hezbollah be able to reassert itself as a credible threat to Israel, however, it would inherently provide the Lebanese side with cards to play at the negotiating table. Senior Hezbollah official, Nawaf Moussawi, put this explicitly in a recent interview, when he called on the Lebanese government to “be pragmatic and use the power of the armed resistance as a leverage card.”

Israel’s Vengeance

It is the nation itself, however, paying the tab for the leverage Hezbollah is offering. The nature of Israeli attacks and official statements have notably shifted relative to the 2023-24 conflict, when Israeli officials took pains to reiterate that their war was against Hezbollah, not the Lebanese state, and their bombing campaign largely avoided state infrastructure. In recent weeks Israeli officials are no longer making that distinction, bombing major bridges they have recast as “Hezbollah infrastructure,” with Defence Minister Israel Katz repeatedly declaring this is “only the beginning” and promising further destruction of Lebanese national infrastructure as the price for the government failing to disarm Hezbollah.

While this Israeli stance is ostensibly a projection of military strength, it has profound echoes of past misadventures. A central finding of Israel’s Winograd Commission, which investigated the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war and deemed it a “serious failure”, was that the military’s target bank entering the war had been insufficient and was expended in the first several days. This forced the Israeli military to shift to bombing Lebanese infrastructure, such as bridges, power stations, the airport and fuel depots, a pivot the commission implicitly identified as a sign of strategic failure rather than escalation from strength. The Israeli military had then spent close to two decades addressing this failure by the time the 2023 war broke out, penetrating Hezbollah’s communications and security apparatus to build and maintain a vast target bank. This was clearly demonstrated in the massive losses Israel inflicted on Hezbollah in such a short period between September and October 2024.

It does not appear, however, that between the 2024 ceasefire and the beginning of the current conflict, Israel built anywhere near the same target bank or intelligence penetration. Once a target bank thins, as Israeli Brigadier General Eran Ortal recently observed in regard to the Iran campaign, the logic of bombing shifts from military objectives to shaping perceptions, where, as he put it, “it matters far less where the bombs land” than “that people see them landing.” For Lebanon, this means that the more evasive Hezbollah is, the more Israel will strike everything else.

Endgame Arithmetic

For Hezbollah, this is an existential battle, with the group seeing reestablishing some form of deterrence with Israel as critical for its survival. The first official close to Hezbollah’s political wing described the group’s desired outcome as a return to the status quo pre-October 7, 2023, meaning a comprehensive ceasefire agreement and Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. If that proves unattainable, he said the fallback position is something resembling the April 1996 understanding that followed Israel’s Operation Grapes of Wrath. Back then, Hezbollah and Israel agreed not to conduct cross-border attacks on civilians or civilian targets, and to not use civilian villages or infrastructure as launch points for cross-border strikes. What will keep Hezbollah fighting on regardless of the cost, according to the second official close to Hezbollah’s political wing, is the post-November 2024 status quo, in which Israel struck Lebanon at will under the guise of a ceasefire.

For their part, Israeli officials have also stated their own desire to reestablish military deterrence, but on fundamentally different terms. Defense Minister Israel Katz and Israeli army spokespeople have described creating a “forward defense area” or “buffer zone” up to the Litani River. Israeli media reported that the country’s leadership has decided to seize Lebanese territory up to the outskirts of the southern city of Tyre, establish 18 military positions in south Lebanon, expand surveillance and firing ranges beyond the Litani, and maintain an occupation until Hezbollah is “completely disarmed.” Far right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has put forward a more bellicose vision of Israeli permanently annexing Lebanese land up to the Litani River.

The Lebanese government, for its part, continues to articulate a vision cantered on sovereignty: full control over its territory and a monopoly on arms. But it is advancing this path without resolving its own internal divisions over how to get there, and without the means to impose it on actors who have little interest in aligning with it. In practice, it is not government decisions but the balance of force on the battlefield—between Hezbollah’s attempt to restore deterrence and Israel’s campaign to reshape it—that will determine what Lebanon looks like when the fighting stops. In that sense, the country’s future is less likely to be decided in cabinet rooms than along the shifting frontlines of the south.