The resurrection of Hezbollah

The Lebanese party has been defeated, degraded and written off. Yet it has managed to resuscitate itself despite pressure from enemies all around. This is the inside story of how it happened

There was a moment, in late September 2024, when Hezbollah was in complete disarray.

Eighty Israeli bombs had obliterated the Lebanese movement’s headquarters. Several of its most senior leaders were dead, including Hassan Nasrallah, who it appeared had been tracked down by the Israelis and was not safe even 60 feet underground.

Not only did Hezbollah commanders suspect the Israelis had hacked their phones and were aware of everything they were saying and doing, but Israel had also booby-trapped thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies to devastating effect.

So, the surviving commanders ditched their phones, mounted motorbikes and scooters, and sped around Haret Hreik, Chiah and other neighbourhoods that make up the southern suburbs of Beirut colloquially known as Dahieh.

Everything was compromised. If Nasrallah wasn’t safe, then no one was.

New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch

Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters

It was time for Hezbollah’s plan of last resort, one that the commanders never believed they would have to use: find each other at rendezvous locations across Dahieh, local landmarks such as bakeries, bank branches and phone shops.

Contact had to be made by sight. Communication solely in person.

Once assembled, they hatched a plan to rally the party and confront the imminent Israeli invasion of south Lebanon. It was the beginning of a Hezbollah fightback that brought the armed movement back from the brink and laid the foundations for a stark change in strategy.

Middle East Eye has spoken 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 spoke on condition of anonymity.

They revealed how Hezbollah was sucked into a war despite severe misgivings and detailed how the party managed to resuscitate its military wing after defeat.

MEE’s sources also shed light on the internal discussions about what the future holds for the party, Iran’s role in the two Israeli wars on Lebanon since 2023, Hezbollah’s economic woes and the discontent among the Shia community it says it represents and protects.

The sources also tell MEE:

• Why the walkie-talkie attack was almost a massacre
• How Hezbollah has repurposed redundant rocket technology
• How gamers turned the tide of the war
• That a frustrated Donald Trump demanded a direct call with Hezbollah

This is the story of Hezbollah’s 2024 defeat to Israel, its surprising resurrection in a new war 15 months later, and the state of the party today as domestic and international enemies seek to defang it for ever.

The lead-up to war

There is, behind closed doors, a general acceptance among members of Hezbollah that it was a profound and historic mistake to attack Israel in October 2023. At least, in the way that it did.

The decision, three sources say, was solely Nasrallah’s and faced opposing views within the party’s Shura Council, Hezbollah’s executive body.

Earlier this month, Israel’s Army Radio reported on discussions between Hamas and Hezbollah in the months and years leading up to the Palestinian group’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.

Citing internal documents purportedly uncovered by the Israeli military, Army Radio reported that Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, urged Nasrallah to join him in a coordinated surprise attack on Israel.

Nawaf Moussawi, a senior Hezbollah official, former MP and head of its border and resources department, dismissed the reports as “psychological warfare”.

“It's pure propaganda and not facts on the ground,” he told MEE.

But others in the party, speaking anonymously, suggested there was some truth in the Israeli reports.

For years, Iran and its partners in the Axis of Resistance alliance of states and armed groups have developed the “unity of fronts” strategy, where Israel is encircled by enemies threatening attacks from all sides.

The lynchpins of the strategy were Qassem Soleimani, the late Iranian general, and Nasrallah, whose charisma and military and political successes had made him an influential regional figure.

Fluent in Arabic and a veteran of countless battles, Soleimani was responsible as head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s elite overseas unit, the Quds Force, for overseeing and occasionally directing Iranian allies such as Iraqi paramilitaries and Ansar Allah, the Yemeni movement commonly known as the Houthis.

He also commanded respect at the very top of the Iranian leadership and his gravitas could compel Tehran to take proactive and risky moves when it was naturally inclined towards a more circumspect policy of “strategic patience”.

To illustrate the pair’s matching dynamism, one source recounted a conversation between Soleimani and Nasrallah in 2012, when the Iranian general suggested Hezbollah intervene in the Syrian war to back Bashar al-Assad.

“Nasrallah said, ‘You are right, we need to go in, but we should have been in Syria yesterday’,” the source recalled.

Soleimani’s killing in a January 2020 US drone strike in Baghdad was a game changer. The Axis lost the driving force behind the unity of the fronts plan, which began to drift, and three Hezbollah sources suggest this is what eventually prompted Hamas to take matters into its own hands on 7 October 2023.

According to two sources, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, then Iran’s foreign minister, made it clear to Nasrallah when he visited Beirut after the attack that Tehran was prepared only to support the war morally.

Nasrallah, who like the Iranians feared provoking a ferocious American response, had already decided to intervene in a contained manner. On 8 October, he ordered a barrage of rockets to be fired at Israel, opening a “support front” as bombs rained down on Gaza.

Yet some of his key advisers, most notably Ibrahim Aqil, the head of the Radwan Force special operations unit, disagreed with the decision. They thought Hezbollah should either go all in or not at all.

A spectacular near miss

For a year, Hezbollah and Israel exchanged cross-border strikes. Seven thousand rockets, missiles, drones, and air and artillery strikes were traded across the Blue Line, a UN deconfliction boundary that serves as the de facto border.

The losses on the Lebanese side dwarfed those in Israel: 2,000 killed compared with 70 south of the border.

But Hezbollah nonetheless tied down a large number of Israeli forces, drawing resources from Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and displaced 60,000 of its citizens from the north.

The foes operated within parameters, an understanding that certain attacks or targets would be responded to in kind. An attack on Dahieh, Nasrallah warned, would be met with a strike on Tel Aviv.

But Israel began pushing the boundaries and testing Hezbollah’s resolve. In January 2024, an Israeli strike killed senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri in Dahieh.

Hezbollah responded with a large rocket attack on an Israeli base on Mount Meron. Sources in the party say this was targeted instead of Tel Aviv because Arouri was Palestinian, not Lebanese, so the response was calibrated differently.

When Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top military commander, was killed six months later, the party planned to fire a thousand rockets at Israel in response – but the Israelis pre-empted the attack and destroyed most of the launch sites instead.

The Israelis, two Hezbollah sources say, had been listening to the leadership plan its response the whole time.

It wasn’t until mid-September that the extent of Hezbollah’s security and intelligence breach became clear.

Israel’s detonation of thousands of pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies on 17 and 18 September 2024 has been hailed by its supporters as “historic”, something out of James Bond.

By intercepting Hezbollah’s supply chain using shell companies, Mossad inserted explosives into the communications devices, killing around 40 people and wounding thousands more.

David Barnea, then the 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 do not deny it was a shocking blow. Yet, they insist, the operation was a failure.

Though the pagers, which were detonated on 17 September, have stolen the headlines, it was the walkie-talkies – larger, packing more explosives and used by fighters in the field – that were the real target.

Hezbollah’s pagers were used as a summoning mechanism and mostly by non-combatants, and Israel began to supply the group with compromised devices in 2022. Around 2,500 were in circulation at the time of the attack.

But the walkie-talkie operation had reportedly been going for a decade. According to two sources, 15,000 of the radios were in storage when Israel moved to that phase of the operation on 18 September. Crucially, they were turned off.

That number tallies with comments previously made by a Mossad agent, who claimed that a secret Israeli shell company supplied Hezbollah with 16,000 walkie-talkies.

Just a few hundred exploded the day after the pager attack, compared with thousands of pagers, but their potency is clear: at least 25 people were killed in the second attack compared with 12 the day before.

The reason that Israel decided to move early, two Hezbollah sources say, is Mossad was listening to the party’s internal deliberations and knew time was running out.

By early September, Hezbollah and Iran realised the war could not be contained, and the Lebanese movement decided to go all in.

A meeting was set for the 19th, where Hezbollah’s leadership would formally sign off on a huge escalation that would have included a ground offensive.

But a Hezbollah inspection team kept doubting the pagers that it had been supplied.

The devices had managed to pass two tests already, yet nonetheless raised suspicions, so it was decided that some samples should be sent to Iran for further tests.

That, the sources say, forced Israel’s hand.

“If the pagers hadn’t exploded then the radios would have been switched on and distributed to thousands of fighters before they were detonated,” one said.

Hezbollah defeated

For 66 days, Israel waged a brutal air and land campaign on Hezbollah, inflicting blow after blow.

Israel not only killed Nasrallah, but his cousin and successor Hashem Safieddine, too.

Most of the party’s military leadership was wiped out, including Aqil and the commanders of his Radwan Force, who were struck as they met in the command centre previously used by Nasrallah in the 2006 war with Israel.

Whole units were destroyed, as well as ammunition stores and other targets the Israelis knew were set to be used in Hezbollah’s assault.

As sources previously told MEE, commanders who survived the onslaught were largely spared because they didn’t pick up their phones.

Hezbollah’s military structure mirrors that of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: each commander has an Iranian counterpart

Down in the south, small, isolated units of Hezbollah fighters bought their party time, grappling with invading Israeli troops with no knowledge of the carnage wreaked on Hezbollah’s leadership to the north.

While Hezbollah fighters tied down the Israeli soldiers in the south, Iran stepped in to shore up its ally.

According to two sources, Hezbollah’s military structure mirrors that of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: each commander has an Iranian counterpart.

When the heads of various Hezbollah units and departments were assassinated, as well as their deputies, the Iranian versions came to Lebanon to help fill the vacuum. That included, one source said, 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 in the attack on Hezbollah’s headquarters.

Hezbollah believes its resilience surprised Israel, which eventually decided to agree to a ceasefire.

Sources in the party say Benjamin Netanyahu was convinced that Hezbollah could now be killed off politically through domestic and international pressure, which would not risk any more soldiers’ lives.

Indeed, it became received wisdom in Lebanon and abroad that Hezbollah had been “decimated”, that its military strength was 20 percent of what it used to be, if that.

A momentum was building behind the idea that Hezbollah needed to end if Lebanon were to be saved from total destruction.

According to an Arab diplomat, the Saudis were ecstatic to see Hezbollah so degraded. The Egyptians, the diplomat said, followed the French in trying to explain to the party that its time as the most heavily armed non-state actor was over, and its leaders should let them provide a dignified exit.

Hezbollah, sources in the party say, was in survival mode and open to serious concessions.

The fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria only undermined Hezbollah further.

How war in Syria changed the image of Hezbollah

Read More »

For a decade, the party lost men, treasure and much Arab public goodwill fighting Syrian rebels to prop up the loathed autocrat. When a shock rebel offensive began the day the ceasefire in Lebanon started, Hezbollah was in no position to save the Syrian president once again.

Assad’s ousting emboldened Hezbollah’s enemies. While the ceasefire deal had specified that the party would withdraw all its forces south of the Litani River, now various countries and Lebanese parties began insisting it retreat further.

“Once Assad fell, the messaging changed and the demand became north of the Litani as well, even though we all knew that wasn’t the original agreement,” an Arab diplomat tells MEE.

This maximalist approach towards the party promoted a hardening, more bullish stance from Hezbollah itself. Israel’s near-daily strikes on the party, repeatedly violating the ceasefire agreement, only served to do the same.

“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,” said a source close to the party.

“But the continuation of Israeli attacks and the state’s unwillingness to offer a way out meant it could no longer be lenient.”

From defence to attack

From the outside, Hezbollah’s military wing appeared to be bleeding out during the 15-month ceasefire period.

With incessant Israeli attacks, it was not so much death by a thousand cuts as 3,000 air, drone and artillery strikes.

Having killed most Hezbollah commanders and their replacements, now Israel was picking off their replacements’ replacements, too.

Meanwhile, Israeli troops and contractors fortified and expanded five military bases, and levelled every Shia-majority town and village along the border.

“The border area is now like a football pitch – completely flat, not a single building standing, not a house, not a mosque,” said one Hezbollah source.

The party’s utter lack of meaningful response suggested it was too weak, or timid, to stand up for itself any more.

Ceasefires and construction: Satellite images reveal how Israel is cementing its presence in Lebanon and Syria

Read More »

In fact, Hezbollah was going through a significant military restructure, putting it on a footing where it could hold its own against Israel once again.

Two senior sources told MEE that the military wing had grown overlarge and unwieldy, too weighty and slow moving to be effective, and had been crippled by war.

The answer was to dismember the wagon piece by piece.

According to the sources, the units and departments were made totally independent of each other, following the model of guerilla combat so effective under the leadership of the late Hezbollah commander Imad Mughnieh.

Each unit was given a set of guidelines, a sort of playbook of pre-planned scenarios so that they could operate effectively without orders from a central command in the heat of battle.

The most important new instruction was that fighters did not have to fight until the last bullet, encouraging units to relinquish territory if necessary.

This new model was put to the test in March this year, after the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran and killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Khamenei was a major spiritual figurehead for Hezbollah, which follows the Islamic Republic’s wilayat al-fakih doctrine, and many Shia Lebanese. Six rockets were fired across the border in response to his killing.

But the way Hezbollah tells it, the party was also convinced the Israelis were about to launch a new assault on Lebanon under the cover of the Iran war, and decided to pre-empt the attack. That assessment has been supported by subsequent reports in the Israeli media.

“The decision to launch those rockets in March was purely a Naim Qassem decision,” one source said of Nasrallah's replacement as secretary general. “But it was supported by Iran.”

Iran’s advice, another source said, was that Hezbollah should have attacked Israel in response to its breaches of the ceasefire long before the killing of Khamenei, “but Hezbollah calculated otherwise”.

Death from above

Gaming cafes have become ubiquitous in the Middle East.

From Jerusalem to Tehran, to Cairo, you can find youths in dark rooms thick with tobacco smoke, gathered around screens to challenge each other on Fifa or the latest first-person-view (FPV) “shoot ’em up”.

In Dahieh, seasoned members of Hezbollah despaired at the hours Gen Z wasted on fictional wars cooked up by American programmers. For veterans of combat with the Israelis, it appeared the youth were getting soft.

Little did they know that these same kids would turn the tide of their next battle with the enemy.

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 places like private homes, abandoned military bases and even a Crusader castle.

Urban areas that had been bitterly fought over in previous rounds of fighting, such as Bint Jbeil, were relinquished by Hezbollah, as mandated by the new guidelines provided to units. But nowhere was Israel safe.

Israeli troops have been constantly harried, harassed and targeted, with around 20 soldiers killed in south Lebanon since 2 March.

The aim is to make sure they do not have the opportunity to fortify any positions that could become permanent, as happened with five bases along the border in 2024. For this task, Hezbollah has turned to drones.

Hezbollah has a propensity to mark each round of fighting with Israel with a new weapon – a trick up its sleeve to signal a certain sense of ingenuity.

In 2006, it was the Kornet anti-tank missile, which penetrated Israeli armour and provided a major tactical surprise. This time around it has been FPV drones, which are operated using fibre-optic cables to protect them from interference.

Netanyahu has described the cheap and lethal aircraft, which swoop down on the enemy while recording the attack on video the whole time, as a “central threat”.

As in Ukraine, the expertise to fly these attack drones has been drawn from video game culture. Lebanese gamers, two sources say, now make up the bulk of Hezbollah’s drone pilots.

The tech is not particularly novel. Hezbollah used the drone in the 2024 war. But production has since stepped up massively, and the drones have been adapted, with the aircraft now able to carry more explosives and therefore a greater threat to Merkava tanks.

Luckily for Hezbollah, it already possessed the materials most crucial for their production.

During the 2024 war, Hezbollah debuted the Almas-1, an advanced fibre-optic anti-tank guided missile with combined television and thermal imaging guidance system. It was reverse engineered from an Israeli Spike missile that previously fell into the party’s hands.

The problem was the fibre-optic cable was just 8-10km long, and so the missiles were only moderately useful during the cross-border clashes.

In 2026, with the conflict largely played out on Lebanese soil, such a range was no longer an issue, and the reams of cable stored up for the Almas were repurposed for the more discreet FPV drones instead.

“Hezbollah grew its military wing to give it a qualitative advantage in battle with Israel, but now it has changed tactics and relies on technology instead. The drones are the best example,” says a source close to the party.

Technically, Israel and Hezbollah are currently observing a ceasefire, which has been in force since 16 April but has failed to eradicate attacks between the foes.

The Lebanese state, through direct negotiations with Israel, has sought to decouple Lebanon from the US-Israeli war on Iran.

A much-maligned framework between the two countries negotiated in Washington has so far resulted in the Lebanese army being allowed to deploy in just one southern town in a “pilot scheme”, despite the Israelis not even occupying it in the first place.

Meanwhile, contrary to the best efforts of the Lebanese state and Israeli government, the truce essentially continues to be underwritten by Iran, which has threatened shipping on the Strait of Hormuz if Israel violates the ceasefire.

There is no indication that life will return to normal in south Lebanon any time soon. Hezbollah sources and Lebanese officials suggest this is a pause, not an end, to the war.

Questions among Lebanon's Shia

There is something uncanny about the Lebanese-Israeli border lands. On the Lebanese side lie rambling fields of citrus and tobacco, and terracotta-topped villas built with money wired over from diaspora successes abroad. Banana leaves reach into the winding roads like hitchhikers catching a lift.

To the south, Israeli homes and crops are laid out in neat, uniform rows down the coast and jigsaw puzzles that swirl around plains below Qiryat Shimona.

Elevated areas on both sides allow curious residents to peer across the fences and UN-patrolled dirt tracks and into each other’s lives and worlds.

The land is like identical twins, separated by the cataclysm of the Nakba and now carrying utterly separate personalities.

It is here that Hezbollah’s first members and core support were drawn, Shia Lebanese displaced in the early 1980s by Israeli invasion and tempted away from the Amal movement by anti-establishment rhetoric and a commitment to armed resistance.

Today, these are the same communities that have suffered most from Hezbollah’s last two wars, and the social contract they shared with the party is fraying like never before.

Around 600,000 people remain displaced from their homes in south Lebanon, many of which no longer exist after Israel decided to transplant its policy of erasing towns and villages in Gaza onto Lebanon.

“There are definitely rising questions within Shia society,” said one source close to the party.

Grumblings of discontent can even be heard in a cemetery for slain fighters in Dahieh. Here, quiet prayers are offered for fallen sons, siblings and husbands while toddlers dart between graves that hold up to four fighters at once.

“I come to pay my respects to my friends who were killed fighting the enemy,” says one visitor. “But I have serious issues with everything that has happened.”

The past two wars have been far graver than any conflict the Shia have suffered through since the 1975-1990 civil war.

While there was some sympathy for Hezbollah’s intervention in the Gaza war, even among communities in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region traditionally hostile to the party, its decision to attack Israel in March and seemingly provoke another harsh response has caused rancour and bafflement.

As Tarek Mitri, Lebanon’s deputy prime minister, told MEE, it was “a war that Lebanon did not want, did not seek”.

Nawaf Moussawi, the senior Hezbollah official, argues however that the Israelis will never leave Lebanon through negotiations alone, and that blaming the party for the war is part of a “media campaign to try to turn facts upside down”.

“Rather than identifying the occupation as the problem, this media campaign seeks to claim that the resistance is the problem,” he told MEE.

Lebanon’s Mitri says divisive Israel framework still lacks government approval

Read More »

“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.”

Either way, half a million Shia are homeless, and neither the state through its negotiations with Israel, nor Hezbollah through force, have managed to get them back to where they belong.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah is simply unable to provide the welfare services it once did. Partly, sources say, this is due to it suffering a severe financial crisis. But also, funds it does have are prioritised for military matters.

“The party used to pay for housing, renovation, welfare. Now that has stopped,” says one source. “This is because there is no longer a land route to Iran through Syria and restricted aviation between Iran and Lebanon. To some extent the vacuum has been filled by personal or institutional charitable initiatives from within the Shia community.”

It remains to be seen whether this discontent can crystalise into a more formal, significant and organised Shia opposition to Hezbollah.

The openly sectarian targeting by Israel, which described south Lebanon residents as the “Shia enemy population”, has only served to drive the community closer to the party.

As has hostility from some Lebanese of other faiths, who have shown little empathy for their Shia compatriots and almost seemed to enjoy the downfall of a sect that was historically marginalised before the rise of Amal and Hezbollah.

“There is a feeling among the Shia that they are under existential threat,” said a source close to Hezbollah, who pointed to the recent behaviour of the Amal movement and its leader, Nabih Berri, as an example of the community converging under pressure.

“Amal is not ideologically close to Iran, but in his eulogy for Khamenei, Berri said Amal has a strategic partnership with Iran. This was not mere poetry.

“In private settings you hear discontent born out of frustration. But we have not seen anything more than limited opposition, nothing significant that suggests new dynamics,” the source added.

'Not the same party as it was'

Where does Hezbollah stand today, in August 2026?

Militarily it is severely degraded, even if its pivot to a more nimble, guerilla-style force has proved effective.

There are no official numbers of members killed over the past two wars, but sources in the party suggest the death toll could be anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 people. Most of those were killed in 2024.

“It is not the same party as it was in 2023,” says a source close to Hezbollah’s inner political circle.

“Hezbollah used to have huge rocket power, a presence on the border and posed a real and genuine threat to Israel. It had backing and supplies that stretched continuously through the region all the way to Afghanistan.”

Any ideas Hezbollah might have had about invading the Galilee have disappeared. One source in the party notes today’s slogans are all about protecting Lebanon instead of Jerusalem.

'Despite everything that was said about Qassem, that he has a lack of charisma, he is building back the party in a transitional phase'

– Source close to Hezbollah

Under intense strain, its leadership, meanwhile, has proved resilient and resourceful.

Naim Qassem’s elevation to the position of secretary general prompted some degree of scorn at first.

He has none of Nasrallah’s magnetism, or the religious and political authority of Safieddine, who like Nasrallah was a sayyed and so descended from the Prophet. Yet Qassem has nonetheless navigated Hezbollah through extremely choppy waters, all while being a target for Israeli assassination.

A key test was a wide restructuring he carried out earlier this year, remoulding the party in his own image and sidelining influential figures in the process. That seemed to go off largely without a hitch.

“Despite everything that was said about Qassem, that he has a lack of charisma, he is building back the party in a transitional phase,” said the source close to the political circle.

“He proved that he could hold ground and restructure the entire party and consolidate.”

While all senior military leaders have been killed, members of the founder generation like Qassem and Mohammed Raad, the head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, remain in situ.

So, too, do heavyweights from the second generation, like Hassan Fadhlallah, who have stepped forward and become more influential.

“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,” said Moussawi.

Naim Qassem: Hezbollah's strategist, ideologue and now leader

Read More »

“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,” he added.

“Israeli intelligence had strong intelligence on the first, second and third generations. But now, it is fighting with a new generation that it does not know.”

At this moment of weakness, it is tempting to imagine that Iran is playing a larger role in directing Hezbollah than it did under Nasrallah. Yet sources suggest there are far fewer Iranian advisers on the ground than ever before.

“I think in this era, the Iranian presence is at its lowest because of logistical difficulties. Syria is no longer open to the Iranians and aviation is more difficult,” says the source close to the political circle.

“But there is definitely coordination on the political and strategic level. This might be the strongest time for that.”

The future of the region, as well as the party, rests on Iran and its negotiations and clashes with the United States, he noted.

The Iran war has only fortified the link between Tehran and Hezbollah, with the Iranians refusing to negotiate an end of the conflict that does not include Lebanon.

Shifting political sands

As for relations with the Lebanese state, they are currently at a nadir.

Hezbollah’s 2 March attack on Israel, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s subsequent outlawing of Hezbollah military activity and President Joseph Aoun’s overtures to Israel have driven the party and the state apart.

Sources say there were serious discussions within the party in the aftermath of Israel’s 2024 invasion about what the future might hold for Hezbollah, and whether it could transition from an armed movement to a purely political one.

Hezbollah is already the largest party in parliament, and for years has been a pillar of the Lebanese state.

Though it was founded as an anti-establishment organisation that countered the sectarian fiefdoms created through Lebanon’s “confessional” power-sharing system, Hezbollah has adapted over the years to survive and thrive by replicating the parties and personalities it said it loathed.

During the 2019 anti-establishment popular protest movement, it even insulated the political system, depicting the demonstrations as a foreign plot and sending its supporters to break up protest camps.

'There are discussions in the background within the party about disarmament and what that might look like or mean'

– Source close to Hezbollah's political circle

Hezbollah could, said the source close to the political circle, adapt again as the sands of domestic politics shift beyond its control.

“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,” he said.

“Importantly, Naim Qassem has no red lines.”

There are, naturally, figures who bristle at the idea of disarmament and concessions to the state or the West.

“This is just my opinion, and definitely not that of the party, but I think Hezbollah should enter a state of madness with bombing and killing. Transition back to the Hezbollah of the 80s,” said one source.

“But it’s not that easy. We are now embedded in society.”

One complicating factor is the pressure that Israel and some internationally and in Lebanon are placing on the Lebanese army to confront Hezbollah, which many in the country fear risks sparking a civil war.

Even the Economist published an article urging a more forceful military intervention.

“Fear is understandable, but must not be an excuse for inaction. The army needs to exert control,” it wrote last month.

Mitri told MEE that it is possible that the Israelis would be happy to see this happen. “But I think neither the army nor Hezbollah are willing to fall into the trap of fighting each other."

Moussawi, meanwhile, said he doesn’t think “that anyone in Lebanon could take up arms against the resistance against the occupation, because that would mean their own destruction before the destruction of Lebanon”.

Despite the hammer blows and premature obituaries, Hezbollah – and indeed the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance – is alive. It is armed, influential and currently enjoying a renaissance as a resistance force while Israeli troops are embedded in large swathes of Lebanese territory.

The US-mediated framework between Lebanon and Israel, widely viewed as a capitulation and openly mocked by Netanyahu, has even given Hezbollah some political breathing space.

“It strengthened Hezbollah’s position against the government because it has been criticised by many of the party’s enemies,” one source said.

Hezbollah, the source noted, is still at the heart of every conversation and negotiation taking place in the region. Even in the Oval Office.

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 began to panic and try and find a phone number for anyone in Hezbollah. They were calling anyone they knew who was Shia, even random sheikhs, to try to find the right person to speak to,” one source alleged.

Trump's request, all three sources say, was denied.