Hezbollah's last battle

The Shiite militia had been preparing since November 2024. Everything else was smoke and mirrors.

It was eight days before his assassination. Hezbollah's powerful Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah delivered his final speech in the aftermath of the pager operation. 

Visibly shaken but not broken, the sayyed struggled to hold the line, reaffirming two messages he considered essential: "The Lebanese front will not stop as long as the aggression against Gaza continues"; "The essential thing is not to let yourself be brought down by the blow, however hard it may be." Translation: the "resistance" may bend but will not break.

Two months later, his successor Naim Kassem gave his blessing to a deal negotiated by "big brother" Nabih Berry with US special envoy Amos Hochstein, an agreement that in many ways resembled a capitulation for Hezbollah. Not only did the party agree to decouple the Lebanese front from Gaza, but the deal implicitly required its disarmament across all Lebanese territory. 

The text makes multiple references to Resolution 1701, which itself refers to Resolution 1559 — calling for the disarmament of all militias, and stipulates that Lebanon must, "beginning with the area south of the Litani, dismantle all existing unauthorized installations involved in the production of weapons and related material, all military infrastructure and positions, and confiscate all unauthorized weapons."

Was Hezbollah truly prepared to disarm? Or had it signed an agreement under pressure from its ally and its popular base after a devastating war? For several months, the party-militia maintained deliberate ambiguity. One of its senior figures, whom we met on several occasions, assured us that the party could consider "integrating its weapons into the state within a defense strategy." 

He went so far as to claim that his movement "no longer had any intention of waging war against Israel" and that maintaining its arsenal was justified by the fact that "the new Syrian power was threatening to cross the border and massacre the Shia and rape their women",  rhetoric that proved increasingly effective among the party's popular base following the horrors perpetrated by Syrian government forces and their allies against Alawites in March and Druze in July.

A Party in Flux

For months, Hezbollah sent contradictory signals, giving the impression that the party itself was in deep transformation, fragmented into competing factions interpreting the consequences of the November 27 agreement differently. 

As proof of this confusion, two Hezbollah members found themselves debating before a minister the reason why the party had signed the deal. "We didn't know what was in it — Berry signed it without telling us," claimed the first. "Not at all, he did it because we told him to," replied the second.

Within the organization, the heirs of the al-Dawa party,  less tied to the Islamic Republic than Nasrallah and his designated successor Safieddine had been , now occupy the most senior positions. Naim Kassem is the figurehead, followed by the head of Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc, Mohammad Raad. 

Experts, diplomats and journalists close to the party all agree: Hezbollah is changing. That change takes time, because the base must not be unsettled — but the party knows it must reinvent itself. "It is simply seeking institutional compensation in exchange for its weapons," one of those diplomats told us.

For months, Hezbollah played along, more or less. It began by accepting, grudgingly after years of obstruction, that Joseph Aoun would accede to the presidency and resigned itself to Nawaf Salam being appointed Prime Minister. It entered the government, settling for a relatively minor role. It cooperated, with varying degrees of goodwill, with the army to demonstrate readiness to respect the agreement south of the Litani. 

And it refrained from responding to any Israeli attack, even as Israel violated the ceasefire daily and refused to withdraw from at least five positions captured during the last confrontation.

Was Hezbollah genuinely changing? Certain information already circulating at the time gave reason to doubt it. 

The party was reportedly still receiving 60 million dollars per month from its Iranian patron, according to the US Treasury. And the Pasdaran, who created and trained Hezbollah in the early 1980s,  had become its true commanders since Nasrallah's assassination. 

Reports suggested the Shiite militia was reconstituting its forces, producing its own drones and purging its own ranks. There were even claims it continued receiving weapons transiting through Syria via smuggling networks, despite the presence of a deeply hostile regime in Damascus.

But what would it need those weapons for, if it had itself admitted it no longer wanted to fight Israel?

"We Are No Longer Hiding"

On August 15, a week after a historic decision by the Lebanese government to reassert the state's monopoly on legitimate violence,  Hezbollah's Secretary-General offered a first hint of an answer. "Lebanon will have no life if you choose to stand on the other side," warned Naim Kassem, in reference to the executive's intention to disarm the party. 

The era of keeping a low profile was over. Hezbollah had no intention of absorbing further blows without striking back. The base was restless and the militia issued its threat: touch our weapons and it will be civil war. 

"Death rather than disarmament," Mohammad Raad declared on television, eyes glistening with emotion, words that were enough to terrify a country still traumatized by fifteen years of civil war, and an army so accustomed to playing a symbolic role that it had no desire to confront fighters more trained, more motivated and sometimes better equipped than itself.

If Kassem's speech marked a first turning point, the illusion persisted for a few more months. Even as the pro-Iranian formation continued to refuse cooperation with the army north of the Litani, Lebanese authorities insisted that disarmament was nearly complete south of the river, in the zone bordering the unmarked frontier with Israel.

So when Israel and the United States launched their attack against Iran on Saturday, February 28, political leaders, diplomats and analysts were fairly confident that Hezbollah would not enter the battle. The party had stayed out of the Israeli-Iranian war of June 2025. 

It no longer had the means to do much. And the government had conveyed to it, through Nabih Berry, Israeli threats in the event of intervention,  and the party had "committed" to standing down. Even when it was confirmed that Ayatollah Khamenei had been assassinated,  what Hezbollah had designated as a red line, the probability of its intervention remained low in the eyes of most observers.

In reality, none of them - ourselves included - had realized that Hezbollah had been preparing for this war since November 27, 2024. And that the agreement in question was probably signed precisely to allow the militia to survive and participate in the final battle.

The Preparation Nobody Saw

For months, Hezbollah's fighters had received a single directive: give the impression they had renounced combat and were preparing for a reconversion under state authority, according to multiple sources inside the party contacted in recent days. 

Some had even stopped listening to Naim Kassem's speeches, so much did his conciliatory tone unsettle them. However often he reminded audiences that Hezbollah's patience had its limits, it sounded like little more than a slogan designed to maintain morale among supporters.

In closed circles, Hezbollah's fighters made no secret of their criticism of the agreement, which they considered to their disadvantage — and questioned how long their patience could last. Meanwhile, military training continued.

In the night of Sunday to Monday, March 2, the fighters returned to their previous combat positions. If the first salvo was relatively modest, the tempo escalated steadily. The first missiles were launched from north of the Litani, but within hours, fighters had reappeared in the zone south of the river, engaging in close combat along the front line at the Israeli border. 

It took Hezbollah no more than a few hours to remobilize its forces in the South and the Bekaa Valley and to place its commando units on standby along the southern border. "We are no longer hiding," a party member told L'Orient-Le Jour.

Hezbollah - widely written off as a dying force - appears instead to have used the preceding eighteen months to draw lessons from the previous war. 

The party has changed its communications methods, which had cost it so dearly. It is conducting coordinated attacks with Iran designed to saturate Israel's air defence systems. It moves in small units and favours ground combat, while the Radwan Force, its elite uni, appears to be fully operational once again. Even Israeli intelligence seems caught off guard by its condition, having spent months justifying its strikes on Lebanon by claiming its enemy was trying to rebuild its forces.

"There was never any question of surrendering our weapons," a party member insists, justifying the choice by citing Israel's predatory nature. 

If Hezbollah waited for Khamenei's assassination before launching its attacks,  probably on Iranian orders,  its rhetoric frames its struggle as a response to Israeli aggression. 

"There was a real debate about the weapons, but it was impossible to lay them down when Israel wasn't respecting the agreement," another source within the party acknowledge, while nonetheless repeating the same arguments aimed at disconnecting Hezbollah's decision from the war against Iran. Its popular base can accept suffering in order to "resist" Israeli aggression,  but it is far harder to ask the same base to suffer in order to try to save the Iranian regime.

To the End

For Hezbollah's fighters, the objective now is to "go all the way." "This is the great battle that Nasrallah announced," says one of them. A fight to the death, one whose outcome for the party is difficult to foresee. 

Despite its preparation, the balance of forces on the ground remains heavily against it: northern Israeli towns have not been evacuated, while Lebanon already counts 800,000 displaced persons and Israel threatens to launch a major operation in South Lebanon. 

More isolated than ever domestically, Hezbollah could find itself caught between the Lebanese army and the Israeli army,  though this scenario is so politically sensitive that it currently appears off the table.

So what does Hezbollah expect from this war, a war that allows Tehran to extend the conflict further and mobilize Israeli resources on another front? What is its endgame? Hezbollah can hope that the Iranian regime survives,  perhaps even emerges strategically strengthened, which would inevitably alter the balance of power in Lebanon. 

It can also hope to "resist" the very probable Israeli invasion on the ground, or at least use it to remobilize a portion of the Lebanese population around the indispensability of "resistance" against such an enemy. In that sense, it can survive — or at least avoid disappearing entirely. "We are prepared for a long confrontation," warns one of the members interviewed. A decision Kassem confirmed in his last speech on Friday.

If the Iranian regime falls, Hezbollah appears condemned. If it survives, the party can hope to survive as well.

But at what cost to Lebanon?

"The Lebanese will thank us one day, when Lebanon has given the world a lesson," replies one of the senior figures interviewed, without flinching.