Hassan Nasrallah is dead. The influential head of Hezbollah was killed by an Israeli strike in Beirut on Friday. Nasrallah’s death is a tremendous blow to both the Lebanon-based terrorist organization and its benefactors in Tehran.
But Hezbollah is down — it’s not out.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets at Israel for nearly a year, resulting in dozens of deaths and the evacuation of an estimated 70,000 Israelis from communities in the country’s north. For months, Israel responded with surgical precision, taking out top Hezbollah operatives throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah, however, didn’t get the message, forcing Israel’s hand.
In the last few weeks, Israel has carried out what is arguably the most successful counterterrorist campaign in recent history. In mid-September, Israel allegedly carried out a remarkable attack on Hezbollah’s communications network, blowing up pagers and walkie-talkies used by the terrorist group. Israel also eliminated top operatives of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force. On Friday, Israel landed a crushing blow, with a massive strike at Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut taking out Nasrallah and other important commanders.
Nasrallah’s death is a seminal moment for the modern Middle East. The 64-year-old cleric led Hezbollah for 32 years, transforming it into the largest, best-armed, terrorist group in modern history. Under his leadership, Hezbollah planned and perpetrated terrorist attacks on multiple continents and amassed more armaments than some European nations.
Nasrallah’s death, and those of his top henchmen, is significant. Hezbollah has been severely degraded. The group is in disarray, its longtime leaders dead and its communication systems suspect. Hezbollah’s credibility is damaged. Hezbollah is diminished, but it remains a grave threat for several reasons. The first is Iran.
The Islamic Republic is loath to lose its crown jewel. Hezbollah is Tehran’s foremost proxy and has been instrumental in carrying out the Iranian regime’s foreign policy. Iran used Hezbollah to ensure Bashar Assad’s survival during the Syrian Civil War, and it has used the group to menace the Gulf Arab monarchies whose overthrow is part of the Islamic Republic’s objectives. Tehran has used Hezbollah operatives to plot and carry out attacks on foreign soil, including in the United States and Europe. Hezbollah has been caught doing everything from running tobacco smuggling rings in North Carolina, to casing JFK Airport in New York, to trafficking in ivory in Africa and drugs in the Middle East. It is, in every sense, a global terrorist network, with a reach unrivaled by other Islamist movements.
Further, Hezbollah acts as insurance for Islamic Republic. Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s border is meant, in part, to deter Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear weapons program. In effect, Hezbollah has been a dagger held at Israel’s throat.
Hezbollah itself has conceded that the group is reliant on Iranian support. Hezbollah as it exists now is truly Iran’s creation, its pretensions to being a Lebanese national movement notwithstanding. Tehran is unlikely to let go of an organization that it spent years building — particularly an organization that de facto controls an entire country.
Hezbollah is the preeminent power in Lebanon, a country riven by nearly 50 years of sectarian conflict, corruption, and terrorist rule. Other factions exist, but none are likely to be able to challenge Hezbollah, much less fill the vacuum left in its wake. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise, and suggestions to the contrary are but wishful thinking in a region where optimism often runs counter to reality.
Indeed, apparatuses of the Lebanese state, such as it is, have often been corrupted by Hezbollah. The terrorist group famously has minders at ports of entry and airports, some of which have allegedly been used to ferret and hide weapons caches. Numerous top Lebanese politicians have links to Hezbollah. In 2017, the country’s then-president, Michel Aoun, who also served as commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces, declared that Hezbollah’s arsenal “is not in contradiction with the state.”
Moreover, on several occasions, some LAF members have been caught collaborating with the group. United Nations Security Resolutions 1701 and 1559, both decades old at this point, call for Hezbollah to be disarmed and disbanded. Yet, neither the U.N. nor the LAF have enforced these resolutions. The LAF and ruling Lebanese politicians have shown that they don’t have the will to challenge the group, even if they had the capability to do so. In the Middle East, arguably more than anywhere else in the world, who holds the gun holds the power. And it is Hezbollah who has the guns — and they still have them.
Israeli strikes have taken out top Hezbollah commanders, and Israel has spent years working to target the group’s arsenal, including hitting weapons caches being smuggled from Syria and elsewhere. Yet, Hezbollah continues to possess a considerable number of weapons. By some accounts, the group has more than 150,000 missiles, many of them precision-guided. The IDF has worked hard, especially in recent weeks, to eliminate these weapons, including Russian-made DR-3 cruise missiles that are capable of hitting “any location in central Israel,” according to the Alma Center, an Israeli think tank that focuses on Lebanon.
Hezbollah has been hiding the DR-3s in houses that have been specifically prepared to store and fire them. Homes (indeed, entire communities in southern Lebanon) have been outfitted to store missiles, launchers, and unmanned aerial vehicles. “This,” the Alma Center notes, “is part of a long-standing trend where Hezbollah places advanced weaponry inside civilian homes in Lebanon, exploiting the local population as human shields and turning civilian areas into potential battlefields.” This problem, a war crime, has been occurring for years and is but another example of the fecklessness of the U.N. and the ineffectiveness of the Lebanese government. In short: Hezbollah has been accumulating hostages, while many Lebanese officials either look the other way or are complicit themselves in the hostage-taking. In calling for residents of these areas to evacuate, the IDF has done more to protect civilians living under Hezbollah rule than either the U.N. or the Lebanese state.
Nasrallah’s death led to celebrations throughout the Middle East, with many Arabs remembering Hezbollah’s role in butchering Syrians to keep Assad in power. Yet, publicly anyways, many Lebanese leaders lamented the loss. Sleiman Frangieh, the leader of Lebanon’s Christian political party, Marada, exhorted: “The symbol is gone, the legend is born, and the resistance continues.” Aoun called Nasrallah “a distinguished and honest leader who led the national resistance on the paths of victory and liberation.”
Of course, Nasrallah was nothing of the sort. He was a murderer who was good at organizing and inspiring other murderers. And he hasn’t brought “victory” to Hezbollah. Instead, his decision to continue to escalate after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack has brought decimation and disaster to the terrorist group — and possibly to the Lebanese people themselves. Whether their leaders have the good sense to realize that fact is, at best, in doubt.
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Iran’s desire to destroy Israel, and its willingness to fight to the last Arab to do so, is not, however.
Degraded and severely wounded, Hezbollah nonetheless remains powerful and potent, its ultimate ambition unwavering.
The writer is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.