What is Hizbullah?

Editor’s note (September 25th 2024): This article has been updated since it was published.

SINCE OCTOBER 8TH 2023, the day after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Hizbullah, an Iran-backed Shia militant group based in Lebanon, has been exchanging fire with Israel. In the year since the war began, the two sides have aimed mainly at military positions and at depopulated border towns.

But on September 17th pagers belonging to thousands of Hizbullah members exploded simultaneously across Lebanon, marking a new phase in the conflict. The next day hundreds of walkie-talkies also exploded. Those incidents killed 39 people and injured hundreds; Hizbullah blamed Israel. Since then the militant group has fired more than 100 rockets at northern Israel, and on September 25th it launched a long-range missile towards Tel Aviv, deep inside the country. Israeli strikes—which it says are aimed at Hizbullah’s infrastructure—have killed more than 500 people in Lebanon, including women and children. Thousands of civilians have fled from areas close to the border. The Israeli army says it will continue its campaign until civilians that have been evacuated from northern Israeli towns can return home; Hizbullah says it will keep going until there is a ceasefire in Gaza. The group has gone to war in support of Hamas before. What is Hizbullah, and how great is the threat of wider regional war?

After Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943, political power was divided on the basis of sect. The three religious groups with the most adherents—Sunni Muslims, Maronite Christians and Shia Muslims—agreed to allocate government positions in proportion to their size. Political representation for smaller sects was also guaranteed. After 1948 an influx of Palestinians caused a shift in Lebanon’s demography; in 1975 sectarian tensions sparked a 15-year civil war. During that time Israel twice sent troops into Lebanon to repel raids by Palestinian militias based in the country. By 1982 it occupied most of southern Lebanon and parts of the capital, Beirut.

Hizbullah, or the “Party of God”, as its name means in Arabic, emerged during that period. In 1982 Iran began training young Shia militants to harass the Israeli soldiers then occupying southern Lebanon and to fight for the Shia cause in the civil war. By the mid-1980s Hizbullah was a coherent organisation, backed by both Iran and Syria. In an open letter published in 1985, it promised to fight Israel and the West—and urged its countrymen to establish an Islamic state. The group honed its guerrilla tactics, including the use of car-bombs and assassinations.

The civil war ended in 1990. Hizbullah and some allied non-Shia parties won 12 parliamentary seats in elections in 1992. The group helped to force Israel out of southern Lebanon in 2000, and gained political clout among its countrymen as a result. By 2008 various Lebanese factions agreed that Hizbullah and its allies should be guaranteed just over a third of cabinet seats, giving the group a veto on government policies. In 2009 it published an updated version of its manifesto, calling for “true democracy” rather than the establishment of an Islamic state. (It did not change its stance towards Israel.) In 2018 Hizbullah and its allies won a majority in parliament. They lost it in 2022, but retained 62 of the 128 seats.

The militia remains an important regional actor. Iran continues to supply it with weapons. Hizbullah maintains good relations with Syria, its other longtime ally. It has periodically fired rockets into northern Israel and conducted several cross-border raids in the past two decades. In 2006 it went to war with Israel. During that war it fired more than 4,000 (largely inaccurate) rockets into Israel over a month. When civil war broke out in Syria in 2011 Hizbullah sent thousands of fighters to support the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In Syria it began to resemble a regular trained army, using drones for both intelligence and attack purposes, and winning and holding territory.

Neither side has yet unleashed its full firepower. All-out war would be a worrying prospect. In a speech to the United Nations on September 24th, Joe Biden, America’s president, said that “a diplomatic solution” was still possible, and that war “is not in anyone’s interest”. But Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, seems intent on destroying the group, vowing to “continue to hit Hizbullah”. If the conflict continues to escalate, it is not yet clear how the militants will respond. ■

Correction (October 29th): In an earlier version of this article, we incorrectly said that in 2006 Hizbullah went to war with Israel in support of Hamas. Sorry.