Nothing lasts forever. Hezbollah's self-proclaimed "Era of Victories"—which the group inaugurated after the May 2000 Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon—appears to have run its course. Its new Secretary-General Naim Qassem just confessed in a televised address that Hezbollah's lifeline through Syria is now gone, thanks to the downfall of the Assad regime.
The dreaded Third Lebanon War is over. The destructive capabilities that Hezbollah possessed before the war never came to fruition. Instead, Hezbollah took a beating. To add insult to injury, the group watched passively as Bashar al-Assad collapsed, bringing Hezbollah's weapons primary smuggling routes down with it. The group is thus battered badly, with immediate prospects of regaining its strength significantly complicated.
That path to this place was not easy for Israel. The country endured a war of attrition for almost a year. The pivotal moment occurred on July 27, an errant Hezbollah rocket killed 12 Israeli children in the Druze village Majdal Shams. Three days later, Israel killed Hezbollah's chief of staff in the heart of the Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyeh. The message was clear: Israel was no longer willing to absorb the attacks Hezbollah initiated on October 8, 2023. Unbeknownst to Hezbollah, a counteroffensive was underway.
In mid-September, beepers carried by thousands of Hezbollah operatives exploded. The next day, so did their walkie talkies. Dozens were killed, thousands more were wounded, and Hezbollah's communication network was severely compromised. By the group's admission, its command and control descended into chaos.
But Hezbollah's challenges were just beginning. Israel soon eliminated the top tier of the group's elite Radwan force and executed an aerial blitz against a whopping 1,600 targets to degrade the Iran-backed group's formidable arsenal. Hezbollah's Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was the target of the next spectacular strike, when the Israeli air force unleashed a barrage of 2,000 pound bombs in succession, killing him in his bunker deep underground. A week later, the Israelis then took out his successor Hashem Saffiedine and then other senior members of Hezbollah's military and political leadership.
Afterwards, Israel launched a ground operation against an imbalanced Hezbollah. The IDF systematically cleared Lebanese frontier villages of Hezbollah fighters and infrastructure, while the air force continued to pound its assets and arsenal deeper in Lebanon with airstrikes. The Israelis kept pressing their advantage, despite taking relatively heavy battlefield losses.
These two bitter foes have locked horns often in the past. But the contrast between this latest battle and Israel's prior campaigns against Hezbollah couldn't be greater. During the 1985–2000 South Lebanon Conflict, Israel didn't devote the time or energy necessary to understand Lebanon, let alone the country's Shiite population from which Hezbollah had spawned. The Israelis were also coming off the highly domestically unpopular 1982 Lebanon War, and therefore lacked the support at home to make the sacrifices necessary to confront what was then perceived as a minor threat. The IDF then withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000 under the weight of domestic pressure. As the last IDF tank crossed back into northern Israel, Hezbollah exploited the situation and its optics to claim victory.
The subsequent war in 2006 caught Israel off guard. What began with a surprise attack in Gaza gave way to the first significant coordination of fronts between Iranian proxies. Hezbollah followed up on the Hamas kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit with an offensive of its own. Suddenly, Israel had to transition to war for which it had not been prepared—its forces had focused primarily on policing duties in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the previous half-decade—squaring off against a foe that was better prepared and more formidable since their last encounter. Hezbollah had set about upgrading its arsenal and fighting capabilities, internalizing and implementing the lesson of the previous conflict to create a fighting strategy that exploited Israel's weaknesses.
With significant Iranian assistance, the group threaded south Lebanon's villages with "nature reserves"—previously unknown underground tunnels that allowed Hezbollah to transfer fighters and weapons surreptitiously to the scenes of battle. Hezbollah perfected the use of anti-tank guided missiles as a way to bog down and, at times, cripple the advance of Israel's armor-heavy and cumbersome army. Israel, meanwhile, relied heavily on its air force to strike an enemy whose hallmark was a small battlefield footprint and elusiveness, applied according to a doctrine that accentuated Israeli vulnerabilities. As the dust settled, a bruised Hezbollah had survived a confrontation with the far more conventionally powerful IDF, claiming yet another "Divine Victory."
In the 18-year interwar interregnum, Israel shifted to a strategy of preventing the outbreak of a major war. Employing its intelligence-gathering skills to maximum effect, the Israelis struck repeatedly at Iranian weapons transfers to Hezbollah, primarily in war-torn Syria. This became known in Israel as the "campaign between the wars." But the pinprick Israeli strikes, meant to slow Hezbollah's arms buildup—specifically precision guided munitions—never challenged Hezbollah's overall strength.
But in preparation for this war, the Israelis seem to have spent at least the past decade penetrating every level of Hezbollah's organizational apparatus. Indeed, when the time came to fight, no Hezbollah official and no Hezbollah asset was safe. Israel seized the initiative and crippled the group's military apparatus before it could even mobilize. The Israelis located and liquidated one Hezbollah "ghost" commander after the next, including the elusive mid-level Radwan force commanders who had invested heavily in anonymity. Israel's campaign this go-round even demonstrated a better understanding of the pressure points on Hezbollah's support base and the group's broader Lebanese environment. Hezbollah's path to regeneration, while not impossible, is more complicated than ever before.
On the Israeli home front, the Israeli public was steeled for this fight. The October 7 horrors and Hezbollah's ability to conduct its own identical attack created an unprecedented recognition among Israelis that Hezbollah would need to be defeated, no matter the price. Compounding this, Hezbollah's strikes drove an estimated 160,000 Israelis from their homes since October 8. According to one Israeli official who spoke on background to us, Hezbollah has destroyed $10 to $15 billion in Israeli infrastructure in the country's north.
The war may not be over yet. And more damage could still be sustained. But after nearly a year of indecision, the IDF gained the conventional upper hand, and this time employed it to maximum effect. Israel deployed its forces according to a combined-arms doctrine that was specifically developed over the past 18 years to confront Hezbollah. This included internal restructuring of the IDF to create forces like the Oz Brigade, which brought all the IDF's special forces units under one umbrella, to confront an irregular actor like Hezbollah. When Israel entered Lebanon this time, it favored powerful and agile ground maneuvers over armor or standoff firepower.
Israel had also invested in building a multitiered missile defense array, including the short-range Iron Dome and and mid-range David's Sling systems. These systems are defensive and not hermetic. They could not always neutralize Hezbollah drones and or "sniping" attacks on northern communities. There simply is no substitute for offensive action. Nevertheless, these systems blunted Hezbollah's attacks just enough to minimize the group's impact on the Israeli Home Front and to keep up public morale, a vital component of any democracy's war effort.
Predictably, Hezbollah is now attempting to claim victory. Merely surviving is the group's key metric in this regard. Admittedly, the group has scored several hits against Israel, killing 56 Israeli soldiers and wounding hundreds of others, and confounding Israeli defenses with anti-tank guided missile attacks and swarms of loitering munitions. But as the dust settles, a stark picture of the group's defeat emerges: at least 2,500 members killed, many of them elite and irreplicable leaders, a decimated arsenal, and flattened military infrastructure. All of this will take years to rebuild.