Everything feels different this time in Beirut’s southern suburb. It is not like the earlier moments of grief. The mourning is darker, the wailing deeper, and the uncertainty far greater. From time to time, convoys of cars appear, yellow flags rise, and songs begin only to fade again. Everyone seems to be walking towards an unknown future after Hezbollah chose to enter the current war against Israel despite the immense cost.
The assured presence once projected by Hassan Nasrallah no longer hangs over the suburb. That changed after tonnes of Israeli bombs managed to reach the party’s former secretary-general. The new leadership now faces a long list of demands, from rebuilding an organisation that has absorbed painful blows to restoring public confidence in the resistance project, especially as Hezbollah’s political opponents in Lebanon have begun using its weakness as an opportunity to challenge its weapons more directly.
The old slogans that once recalled victory are no longer the dominant sound in the background. In their place are messages urging the party to rise again after the multiple blows it suffered in the latest war. Inside and outside Hezbollah, everyone understands that Israel will never waste an opportunity to finish it off. That is especially true when Israel also seeks to strike at Iran itself, the Islamic Republic that has been Hezbollah’s main source of arms and political support since the 1980s.
A Late Awakening
On Wednesday, 13 August 2025, Hezbollah secretary-general Naim Qassem received Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, in the presence of Mojtaba Amani, Tehran’s ambassador to Beirut. Larijani was later assassinated by Israel. The visit came only days after Tehran had firmly rejected any attempt to disarm Hezbollah, following the Lebanese government’s insistence that all weapons must be held by the state. In an earlier meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, Larijani heard directly that لبنان would not accept interference in its internal affairs and that its relationship with Iran must rest on sovereignty and friendship.
The message behind Larijani’s visit to Beirut was unmistakable. Iran had no intention of abandoning Hezbollah and was working to restore its ranks and capabilities in preparation for future rounds with Israel. That was before Tel Aviv resumed its fire against both Iran and Hezbollah. After the war, Tehran continued sending signals of support to its Lebanese ally, most recently through the new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who said the Islamic Republic would continue backing the resistance against the enemy.
Tehran concluded that Hezbollah needed to recover at least part of its strength in order to resume its role as a deterrent force in the regional balance.
Iran understood that Hezbollah had to regain some of its strength to continue playing its role in regional deterrence. Yet, as many had predicted, Israel did not allow Iran the time to rebuild. Together with the United States, it launched strikes on Iran and killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Revolution and head of the state, at a time when negotiations between Washington and Tehran had been moving towards a new agreement.
Once the war resumed, all eyes turned to Beirut’s southern suburb, waiting for Hezbollah to move, especially since the party had shown prolonged restraint in the face of a ceasefire with Israel that was effectively one-sided. A new round therefore felt inevitable. It did not take long to arrive. In the early hours of Wednesday 4 March, Hezbollah announced 15 attacks using drones and missiles against sites and military bases in the north and centre of the occupied territories. Its forces also clashed with an Israeli unit attempting to advance towards the town of Khiam in southern Lebanon.
The party then announced that it had targeted an Israeli troop concentration in the settlement of Kiryat Shmona with rockets, claiming direct hits that required helicopters to evacuate the wounded. It also said it had struck the Tel HaShomer base, headquarters of the Israeli general staff, southeast of Tel Aviv, and targeted Iron Dome radar systems in Kiryat Eliezer in the north of the occupied territories using a drone swarm.
Hezbollah’s rhetoric did not change. Naim Qassem again presented Israel as an existential threat to everyone, in Lebanon and beyond.
At the end of that day, Qassem delivered a televised speech declaring that the party’s patience had limits and that the Israeli enemy had gone too far. According to Hezbollah’s own documentation, the Israeli army had killed 500 civilians and committed more than 10,000 violations since the ceasefire agreement came into force on 27 November 2024. Under those conditions, he said, resistance remained a legitimate right for as long as Israeli occupation continued.
Hezbollah’s discourse, then, did not fundamentally change. Qassem reminded his audience that Israel represented an existential danger not only to Lebanon but to the wider region. He criticised the Lebanese government for adopting policies aligned with Israeli demands because it wanted to strip the party of its arms. He also spoke openly of the fact that Hezbollah would not abandon its weapons except over the body of its last fighter, a radical political stance that came late. Since then, the party has been engaged in open war with Israel on the Lebanese front, where it has shown notable military performance given the scale of the blows it suffered over the previous two years.
Hezbollah After 7 October
After 7 October, everyone waited for Hassan Nasrallah’s speech and for Hezbollah’s position. Expectations ran high, but the speech brought little new and felt underwhelming, even though the party later opened a northern front to partially distract Israel from Gaza and paid a heavy price for it. Hezbollah was one of the actors most deeply affected by Al Aqsa Flood. Israel’s heavy strikes managed to reduce it to something closer to a local resistance movement after it had become a regional fighting force.
Since 2006, Israel had been preparing for war against Hezbollah, waiting for the right moment after years of building a target bank. During that period, the party was distracted and consumed by its regional role, especially in supporting the Assad regime and crushing the uprising in Syria. After 7 October, Hezbollah failed to read the moment properly. It did not fully grasp that the region had entered an unprecedented historical turning point. Israeli actions revealed a clear shift towards the elimination of its adversaries, something that became especially visible in the pager attacks and the assassination of Nasrallah.
Hezbollah and Iran eventually realised that the party had no option but to stand up again and fight to the last breath in a battle for survival.
After that round, Hezbollah was left with a damaged structure, a torn society, and crumbling infrastructure. This was not like 2006, when Tehran took responsibility for rebuilding the party’s military capabilities while Gulf states rebuilt the destroyed towns and cities. This time, Iran did not have sufficient resources to help Hezbollah restore its former strength, while its popular base in the southern suburb was itself living under daily Israeli targeting.
That did not mean surrender. Hezbollah, along with Iran behind it, came to understand that there was no alternative but to get back on its feet and fight to the last breath in a struggle for survival. Tehran therefore oversaw, through commanders in the Revolutionary Guard, the training and selection of a new generation of Hezbollah leaders, who now command the fierce battles against Israel in southern Lebanon.
A New Yet Old Foundation
The effects of that effort quickly became visible in the current war. On 5 March, Reuters reported, citing six informed sources, that Hezbollah had spent months rebuilding its missile and drone arsenal with Iranian support and through its own weapons factories in preparation for the new round of war with Israel.
One of the six sources, a Lebanese figure familiar with Hezbollah’s finances and military activities, said the party had been operating with a monthly budget of US$50 million, most of it from Iran and allocated to fighter salaries. Other sources, including foreign officials and an Israeli military official, said Hezbollah had replenished its stock of drones and missiles through local production, bringing its arsenal to around 25,000 rockets and projectiles, most of them short and medium range.
According to the report, Hezbollah knew clearly that a second round was inevitable and that it would not be easy, but would instead pose an existential threat. Yusuf al-Zein, head of Hezbollah’s media office, said the party would not comment on its military operations, but it would fight to its final breath. A study by the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre said Hezbollah had shown a significant ability to adapt and rebuild itself through organisational decentralisation, improving leadership survivability while maintaining Iranian support and using alternative methods to smuggle weapons and funds.
The same study said Hezbollah’s senior officials had changed their tone over the previous year. At first, the leadership had declared its commitment to the ceasefire and placed responsibility on state institutions to handle Israeli violations. But continued attacks and assassinations, along with growing pressure on the government to disarm Hezbollah and begin negotiations with Israel, pushed the party towards a more defiant tone towards the state and stronger threats to retaliate against Israel and any party seeking to undermine Lebanon’s security.
In reality, the present confrontation also gave the party an internal advantage by helping repair divisions that had begun to show more clearly. Before the current confrontation, there were three relatively distinct views inside Hezbollah on how to deal with Israel, according to the Israeli intelligence centre. The first was a moderate current led by Qassem, which declared commitment to the ceasefire and continued participation in government while still refusing to give up weapons.
The second view was held by a hawkish current led by Wafiq Safa, head of the liaison and coordination unit, and Mahmoud Qomati, deputy head of the political council. Both had directly threatened the Lebanese government if it continued adopting American directions. The third was a dovish current led by Hassan Fadlallah, which linked the disarmament of Hezbollah and other armed groups to an Israeli withdrawal from five points in southern Lebanon, the return of Lebanese detainees held in Israel, and reconstruction of the south.
According to the Israeli account, Hezbollah had three relatively different internal views on how to deal with Israel.
According to the same account, disagreements emerged between the party’s military and executive councils over who should succeed Haytham al-Tabatabai, Hezbollah’s chief of staff, after his assassination in November. Five possible candidates were discussed, including Talal Hamiyah, a long-serving Hezbollah figure who is also wanted by the United States. The list also included Mohammad Haidar, Khodr Yusuf Nader, known as عز الدين, who heads Unit 900, as well as Amin Fadl and Ali Ammar, both second-tier leaders in the Radwan force.
The dispute over this relatively secondary issue reflected a broader struggle between senior figures closely tied to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and second and third tier leaders who wanted greater representation in the military leadership, at minimum through the appointment of an acting deputy chief of staff. While those restructuring challenges were unfolding, the Israeli army continued violating ceasefire agreements. According to available data, Israel killed more than 370 fighters, most of them from Hezbollah, and carried out more than 1,200 field operations aimed at destroying the party’s infrastructure and damaging its military capabilities.
Even before the current war began, Hezbollah understood that Israel viewed it as a military problem that had to be eliminated completely. In the middle of restructuring its military organisation, the party therefore began returning to basic methods of communication and survival in order to withstand Israeli intelligence, technological, and electronic superiority. It resumed the use of couriers, signals, landline telephones, small-cell warfare, concealment, and close exploitation of terrain and geography, much as it had done in its early years in the 1980s. Sources inside the party say Hezbollah now possesses a new secret military structure under a younger and more dynamic leadership, with a clearer separation between military and political wings and shorter command chains than in the previous period.
The Southern Suburb Without “The Sayyed”
A black bus passed by, filled with masked men and carrying the phrase “We remain faithful”. Above it appeared two coffins, one for Hashem Safieddine and the other for Hassan Nasrallah, the most important figures the southern suburb had produced in Lebanon’s modern history. The moment the coffins emerged from inside Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium, a voice rang out through the loudspeakers saying, “O noblest of people”, taken from a recorded line that Nasrallah had made famous after the July 2006 war when he addressed what he called the resistance public as it returned to the southern villages with the pride of victory over Israel.
The crowd of 90,000 erupted in vows of eternal allegiance, shouting “At your service, Nasrallah”, and their fervour mixed with tears. No one could deny the scale of the scene. Hezbollah was bidding farewell to the spiritual father of the southern suburb and preparing to face a post-Nasrallah future filled with uncertainty, hesitation, and fear.
For years, Israel had never hesitated to kill those who openly opposed it. It assassinated some of the finest leaders of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas, yet despite the killing of Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh, and before them Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, Hamas remained firm, difficult to break, and able to regenerate its cadres with speed and efficiency. In Lebanon, however, Nasrallah’s assassination created a vacuum that has not been filled. Hezbollah’s secretary-general had played a complex political, military, intellectual, and social role that makes replacement extraordinarily difficult.
Israel feared Nasrallah while he was alive, but strikingly, it also appeared to fear him after his death. As soon as the date of his funeral was announced, both the United States and Israel began pressuring the Lebanese state to contain what was expected to be a massive procession. The Lebanese government moved to tighten restrictions, preventing Iranian aircraft from landing in Beirut for fear that Israel would strike the airport. Hundreds of Lebanese were then left stranded in Tehran airport after their flights were cancelled. Even those who managed to return through Iraq were met with strict conditions, including instructions not to raise any pictures of Hassan Nasrallah.
Iraqi Shiites who wanted to pay their final respects also faced Lebanese restrictions on entry visas. Even so, on the eve of the funeral, Beirut airport received around 50 planes arriving from different parts of the world.
During Nasrallah’s funeral, mourners arrived early in the southern suburb and secured their places in the stadium and its surroundings to prove that blood triumphs over the sword.
Inside Lebanon, the movement towards Beirut began two days early from the south and the Bekaa. Mourners arrived in advance so that no sudden obstacle would stop them from attending, and everyone secured a place in or around the stadium to show that blood triumphs over the sword. Israel did not remain quiet that day. It launched 14 airstrikes across Lebanon, while occupation aircraft flew low over the funeral site as Naim Qassem delivered his speech on screen.
Today, the resistance public finds it extremely difficult to secure shelter because of the deep hostility of other sectarian communities towards Hezbollah. Families hosting the displaced fear that party figures may be among them, drawing Israeli strikes that could kill civilians as happened repeatedly during the previous war.
Israel understands that stirring sectarian tensions in Lebanon has long been a strategic option. It has therefore not hesitated to do whatever it can to inflame division among Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians. Strikes on areas belonging to those communities could provoke anger not only at distant Israel, but also at displaced Hezbollah supporters.
A Party Fighting to Survive
Militarily, the decision to enter the war appears suicidal for Hezbollah, but it also frees the party from the passive position it had occupied for months. During that period, Israel had been draining it steadily without facing meaningful retaliation. For Hezbollah’s leadership, it had become pointless to continue losing figures without any response at all, at the very least to restore some moral and political standing.
Hezbollah expects to take severe blows, but it believes that cost would be imposed on it whether it chose confrontation or not.
The party is expected to suffer heavy blows that may eliminate new leaders, yet it also knows that this is a price it would likely pay whether it fought or not. Still, the inevitability of confrontation does not mean that it will pass without internal damage. Hezbollah’s supporters still see the resistance as the final line of defence for southern Lebanon, a region whose occupation Israel does not hide its desire to pursue. Yet the most dangerous internal challenge facing Hezbollah today may be the Lebanese government itself.
Weapons as a Means of Survival
On 5 August 2025, the Lebanese cabinet held a session chaired by President Joseph Aoun. On the agenda was the issue of confining all arms to the state, an unmistakable reference to disarming Hezbollah. The session lasted five hours and ended with the withdrawal of the two Shiite ministers affiliated with Hezbollah and the Amal Movement. Even so, the cabinet insisted on issuing a formal decision that all weapons must be placed under the authority of the Lebanese state and its security institutions, together with a clear timetable for implementation.
The government set the end of 2025 as the final deadline for completing this process. The Lebanese army was tasked with preparing a plan to be submitted to the cabinet by the end of August for study and approval, although the Shiite duo considered the decision non-binding. Two days later, the cabinet in a second session approved the goals of a proposed American paper intended to guarantee the continuity of the ceasefire, though it did not discuss mechanisms of implementation. The paper, put forward by the US envoy Tom Barrack, was designed to preserve the continuation of the cessation of hostilities agreement between Lebanon and Israel that took effect on 27 November 2024, an agreement that Israel did not in practice respect.
This decision came alongside the cabinet’s desire to ensure that all weapons remain in state hands. Reuters reported on 29 July that Washington had made a formal Lebanese cabinet decision committing to the disarmament of Hezbollah a condition of support. The Lebanese government quickly moved to meet that request in order to avoid political and diplomatic isolation.
The government’s decision was met with open rejection from Hezbollah at both the popular and political levels. During the same period in which Beirut saw the first cabinet session, Naim Qassem was delivering a speech at an event commemorating Mohammad سعيد Izadi, known as حاج رمضان, the Revolutionary Guard Quds Force official responsible for the Palestine file. In that speech, Qassem said that resistance was part of the Taif constitution and argued that the issue of weapons could not be decided by voting. After the decision was issued, Hezbollah treated it as though it did not exist, while at the same time stressing openness to dialogue in order to preserve room for negotiation and avoid direct confrontation with the state.
The party rejects discussion of the American paper, viewing it as an assault on the ceasefire arrangement signed in 2006. It understands that the cycle of war keeps turning and renewing itself, and that surrendering its weapons in practical terms would mean the end of Lebanon’s ability to deter Israel. It therefore moves on the ground according to a simple principle: there is no guarantee against an Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon except resistance.
But after two years since 7 October 2023, Israel has managed to turn Hezbollah’s weapons, in the eyes of many Lebanese political forces, from a source of pride into a burden. Even former allies such as the Free Patriotic Movement now support disarmament.
Before the outbreak of war, Hezbollah had believed that if it were ever forced to hand over its weapons, this would be limited to heavy and offensive systems such as precision missiles and advanced drones, while retaining a restricted deterrent capacity so that it would remain a force that could be reactivated if conditions changed. Now, however, the party appears to need its weapons more than ever in light of what it sees as Israeli recklessness and a conviction in Tel Aviv that the current opportunity to eliminate all opponents at once may not return.
Today, Hezbollah is fighting not for victory but for survival, just as Iran is fighting for the same reason. At the same time, Washington has started considering other options, such as removing Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon in a scenario resembling what Trump wanted in Gaza, or what was envisaged through the disarmament of Hamas, the removal of fighters, and their dispersal while Israel continued to expand.
A Second Founding Under Fire
Just as the Iranian system is adapting to war and changing under the pressure of endurance, Hezbollah too appears to be undergoing what can be described as a second founding.
The regional war, the resilience shown by the Iranian system, and the continuation of resistance in southern Lebanon all suggest that the goals pursued by Washington and Tel Aviv are not easily attainable. They may even rebound against their sponsors and shake long-standing alliances across the region.
Just as the Iranian system has adapted to war, transformed under the pressure of endurance, and embraced a mosaic doctrine that has prolonged its life and made it more flexible and harder to topple through air strikes, Hezbollah too appears to be undergoing a second founding. It is doing so under the pressure of a battle in which it has shown clear resilience, as reflected in the reports emerging from southern Lebanon over recent weeks and in the burned Israeli tanks that reminded many of the July 2006 war, whose twentieth anniversary is approaching. That memory continues to hang over the region, reminding everyone how profoundly the face of this area changed then, and how much has changed again since.
