The scale and severity of the attacks has called into question the very reason for the organization’s existence, which was predicated on its ability to deter Israeli attacks against Lebanon and also Iran, its sponsor and creator, analysts say. In the years since Hezbollah fought Israel to a draw in their last war in 2006, Hezbollah accumulated such a vast arsenal of weapons, including precision missiles capable of striking deep into Israel, that it was widely assumed by its supporters that Israel would not dare wage war on Lebanon again.
But Hezbollah appears to have gravely overestimated its own strength and underestimated Israel’s willingness to take it on, along with the extent to which Israeli intelligence had penetrated the organization.
“Hezbollah had an inflated sense of itself that has now been exposed to be a facade, and it was a facade that it had constructed around itself,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at London’s Chatham House think tank.
Hezbollah will likely keep fighting and will survive as both a political and military player in Lebanon, where it faces no serious challengers, Khatib said. But its standing and reputation may never fully recover from the humiliations of the past 10 days, she said.
“This is the beginning of the end of Hezbollah as we have known it for the past several decades,” she said.
As Israeli warplanes continue to pound Lebanon and Hezbollah fires rockets into Israel, the Middle East is on a knife edge, poised between the potential for an all-out war that draws in Iran and the United States and the prospect of the collapse of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Either way, it is a pivotal moment for the balance of power in the region and for Hezbollah. Nasrallah had led the organization for three of the four decades since it was formed in 1982 by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with the goal of ejecting the Israeli troops then occupying Lebanon. It has since gone from strength to strength, forcing the departure of Israeli troops in 2000 with its guerrilla attacks, facing down Israel again in 2006, then expanding into the wider region by sending fighters into Syria to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s and advisers to help Iran’s militia allies in Yemen and Iraq.
Hezbollah can’t be counted out, analysts say. It is still the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon, where the collapse of the economy and the state have left no serious challengers to Hezbollah. It will retain the loyalties of Lebanese Shiites, many of whom revered Nasrallah and will remember him as the leader who empowered their community and expelled the Israelis, said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center.
“It is still a wide-ranging, powerful and well-funded organization” wrote Phillip Smyth, an expert on Shiite militant groups, on X, cautioning against premature predictions of Hezbollah’s demise.
Much will depend on how Hezbollah responds to Israel in the coming days. The expectation among Hezbollah supporters is that the group will embark on a more forceful retaliation using bigger and more precise missiles.
Yet its ability to do so after the setbacks of recent days is unclear. The attack on Hezbollah’s pager network, in which thousands of pagers exploded, demonstrated the reach of Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah’s ranks — to the extent that it was able to sell booby-trapped devices for distribution to the group.
The drumbeat of assassinations against top Hezbollah military commanders in recent days, culminating with the one that killed Nasrallah, has wiped out a generation of Hezbollah expertise dating back to the earliest days of its formation as a guerrilla force in the 1980s. In the 11 months since Hezbollah first launched rockets against Israel in a show of solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, Israel had also picked off a parade of lower ranking Hezbollah commanders at meetings and as they moved around, bringing a dawning realization that Israel has entirely penetrated Hezbollah’s communications networks and probably its personnel as well.
“Hezbollah’s ability to command and control a significant confrontation with Israel in the near future is in severe doubt,” said Firas Maksad, a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute in Washington. “The Israeli capability and level of penetration have exceeded everyone’s expectation.”
The attacks that Hezbollah has launched in response to the Israeli escalation have reached deeper into Israel than any in the previous 11 months, but they have also been largely ineffectual. Most of the missiles fired have been intercepted by Israeli defenses, and although there has been damage to Israeli property, there have been few casualties. Nearly 70,000 people have been displaced from northern Israel because of the fighting.
In contrast, Israel’s strikes around Lebanon have exacted a huge toll on Lebanon and the Lebanese, mostly Hezbollah’s Shiite constituents living in the Hezbollah controlled areas of the south and the eastern Bekaa Valley. More than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed in Israeli strikes over the past week, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, and although the ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties, it said at least 87 were children. In addition, more than 110,000 have been displaced, fleeing their homes in the south and east to Beirut and to Syria and further denting Hezbollah’s claims to be protecting Lebanese against Israeli aggression.
Nasrallah’s strategy, clearly articulated in multiple televised speeches since the Hamas attack on Israel unleashed the Gaza war, has clearly backfired, Maksad said. Hezbollah initiated the conflict by firing rockets into Israel in a show of support for Hamas in Gaza. As Nasrallah boasted on numerous occasions, the rocket fire diverted thousands of Israeli troops from the Gaza front and helped Hamas fight on. But Nasrallah also telegraphed Hezbollah’s desire to avoid triggering a wider war by confining the attacks to Israel’s border region, thereby making the organization vulnerable to escalatory Israeli attacks to which it was reluctant to respond.
An Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon might help Hezbollah salvage its reputation by playing to Hezbollah’s strength as a guerrilla army, said Hage Ali.
“People are really shocked and there are many questions as to what happened,” he said. “But I don’t see it as a total Israeli victory yet, especially if there’s a ground invasion because that unleashes other dynamics. For now this was Hezbollah launching a war in support of Gaza. But if Israel launches a ground invasion, it becomes an Israeli occupation and in the minds of the people that means it’s a war of resistance.”