Why Israel Is Finding It So Hard To Eliminate the Hezbollah Threat

Smoke was still rising over Beirut’s southern suburbs after Israeli warplanes struck what officials described as a Hezbollah command center in the densely packed Dahieh district on June 7, killing at least two people and wounding at least 11 others.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the strike came in retaliation for Hezbollah drone attacks on Israeli troops earlier that day. Senior Iranian lawmakers were quick to respond, vowing a “decisive and painful response” and telling Israelis to “watch the skies.”The November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon came with a guarantee: Hezbollah would disarm. It was a promise the group never intended to keep. By January, Israel’s Foreign Ministry had the evidence in writing: “Hezbollah is rearming faster than it is being disarmed.”Five months later, with Lebanon dragged into the wider American and Israeli war against Iran and a fresh ceasefire framework rejected outright by Hezbollah, that assessment reads less like a caution than a prophecy. The reason, analysts say, is simple: Hezbollah was built to be rebuilt.So how does a group that lost its leader, most of its arsenal, and its overland supply line keep clawing its way back?“Hezbollah is a guerrilla organization that uses relatively simple, low-cost capabilities to threaten and attack Israel, and because such capabilities are easy to build and rebuild, resilience is imprinted into the group’s genes,” the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, Rose Kelanic, tells The New York Sun.A disarmament effort losing the raceOn paper, the disarmament effort began promisingly. Lebanon’s army announced in January it had completed the first phase of its plan to bring all non-state weapons under government control, clearing the zone between the Litani River and the Israeli border. The Lebanese armed forces commander, General Rodolphe Haykal, escorted journalists and diplomats through abandoned tunnels to showcase the progress, even as he conceded the military’s “limited capabilities.”Mr. Netanyahu’s office called the effort “an encouraging beginning” though “far from sufficient.”“Israel has significantly degraded Hezbollah’s infrastructure,” a senior fellow and director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at The Washington Institute, Matthew Levitt, tells the Sun. The question now, he continues, “is whether the Lebanese armed forces can be convinced to follow through on the government of Lebanon’s instruction to actually disarm” the group.Tallies of patrols and seized weapons, Mr. Levitt cautions, tell only part of the story.“To gauge the true effectiveness of the LAF’s disarmament effort, one must go beyond the number of patrols, raids, and seized weapons and take a hard look at what it has done and not done to search private property, target underground facilities, stop cross-border smuggling from Syria, and transparently dispose of armaments,” he says.After a recent visit to the Israel-Lebanon border, Mr. Levitt observes that “the LAF is working hard, but still falling far short of disarming Hezbollah.”Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Naim Qassem, branded the entire disarmament effort a “grave” mistake in a televised speech on February 16, delivered as General Haykal presented the second phase of the plan to Lebanon’s Cabinet. He insisted the ceasefire applies exclusively south of the Litani, a reading that contradicts the agreement’s plain text, and accused the government of playing into Israel’s hands.“We do not want war, but we will not surrender, and we are ready to defend ourselves,” he said.Then the region exploded. After American and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in late February, Hezbollah attacked Israel on March 2. Israel responded with an aerial campaign and a ground operation involving five divisions. Lebanese authorities say nearly 3,700 people have been killed since, with more than 1 million displaced.A renewed ceasefire announced in Washington on June 3 created pilot zones in southern Lebanon where the Lebanese army “will take exclusive control of the territory to the exclusion of all non-state actors.”Hezbollah rejected within a day, with Mr. Qassem calling the deal “absurd, humiliating, and insulting” and demanding a full Israeli withdrawal. Another round of talks is scheduled for the week of June 22. Israel’s military chief, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, signaled little patience in the interim, saying this week he had approved plans to “further deepen the blow to Hezbollah.”The regeneration machineWhat has stunned Israeli military planners is not that Hezbollah survived 2024 — the killing of its chief Hassan Nasrallah, the detonated pagers, the decimated long-range arsenal. It is how fast the group came back.The Israel Defense Forces estimates it has wiped out 85 to 90 percent of Hezbollah’s pre-2023 stockpile — more than 150,000 rockets — leaving the group with somewhere between 10,000 and 23,000 projectiles and around 1,000 long-range precision-guided missiles. Yet since March the group has averaged around 100 rockets and drones fired at Israel per day, including a barrage of nearly 200 on March 11 that caused more physical damage than Israeli commanders had anticipated. Israel’s own military analysis later revealed Hezbollah had originally planned to launch 600 that day. “It has mostly rebuilt capabilities that don’t require major logistical operations and can be smuggled into Lebanon in small kits or otherwise produced locally,” a faculty affiliate with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, Daniel Sobelman, tells the Sun. Mr. Sobelman also serves as a professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Hezbollah’s ranks have taken a beating, too. Israel puts the fighter death toll at 7,000 to 8,000 since October 2023 — roughly 2,500 of them since March, with another 10,000 wounded in the current conflict alone. By that count, the group has lost a third of its pre-war force. Yet Israeli assessments still put Hezbollah’s overall strength anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 fighters, even as recruitment falls short of replacing the dead.The bigger change, Mr. Sobelman argues, is in the nature of the fight itself.“The Israeli military has in recent weeks become a static occupying force in southern Lebanon in a way that has played into the hands of what is ultimately a guerrilla organization,” he says.“Israel has become militarily vulnerable to Hezbollah’s capabilities, which, although tactical, are nonetheless precision-guided and highly effective in the type of interaction that now exists between the two sides.” He adds that “Hezbollah possessed massive military stockpiles before the war, meaning that whatever residual capabilities it still has are significant.”The group has also learned to build at home.“Over the past two years, Hezbollah has adapted to the loss of weapons-smuggling corridors from Iran through Syria by learning to manufacture its own munitions, including sophisticated-yet-inexpensive fiber-optic drones that can be built using 3-D printers and other mundane materials widely available in civilian economies,” Ms. Kelanic explains.The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 was supposed to cut the supply line for good. It hasn’t. Syrian sources told Israeli media in April that the new government in Damascus, publicly hostile to Iran, is quietly cutting arms deals with Hezbollah on the side, with hundreds of warehouses in the capital reportedly holding seized Grad, Scud, and Katyusha rockets ripe for the taking.Hezbollah has been unapologetic about it. In a Resistance and Liberation Day speech in May, Mr. Qassem declared that “there is no such thing as exclusivity of weapons or disarming Hezbollah.” He equated disarmament with “extermination” and insisted that the group’s weapons are “an internal Lebanese matter and not part of negotiations with the enemy.”Hezbollah’s drones, he added, are “pursuing the occupying forces everywhere.”The Lebanese government has pushed back, loudly if not always effectively. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam banned all of Hezbollah’s military activities on March 2, calling them illegal and demanding that the group hand over its weapons — only for Hezbollah to launch a new attack on Israel the same day.President Joseph Aoun claimed 80 to 85 percent of the area south of the Litani is now free of Hezbollah weapons. At the same time, Mr. Salam has insisted the group must eventually become a political party without a military wing. General Haykal, however, has complicated that picture, saying national unity is Lebanon’s priority and suggesting the army is not answerable to the government on the matter.The Iranian lifelineNone of it would be possible without Tehran. Iran has funneled roughly $1.5 billion to Hezbollah since the 2024 ceasefire, according to Israeli military officials — bankrolling recruits, weapons workshops, and the patronage networks that keep Lebanon’s Shiite community tied to the group.The United States Treasury has reached a similar conclusion, with its top sanctions official saying in November that Tehran moved about $1 billion to the group in 2025 alone, much of it smuggled through Dubai and currency exchanges. The group has done it before: after the 2006 war, Hezbollah rebuilt an arsenal of 15,000 rockets into one approaching 150,000 within two decades.Even cutting the cord with Tehran may not be enough.“Stamping out such capabilities is nearly impossible, regardless of whether or not Hezbollah receives Iranian help,” Ms. Kelanic says.Disarming a guerrilla group, she explains, “requires the support of the civilian population” to provide intelligence on its activities and production facilities, and that cooperation hinges on confidence in the state itself.“The public must be convinced that the Lebanese government will ultimately prevail over Hezbollah; otherwise, Hezbollah could punish them later, a threat that can have a real chilling effect,” she says.Mr. Sobelman is similarly skeptical that the group will ever willingly hand over its guns.“Hezbollah would prefer to forcibly resist any attempt to disarm it, and even risk another civil war, than for Hezbollah and the Shiite community in Lebanon to become utterly defenseless and vulnerable to internal retribution,” he says. “The most realistic solution in the long run would be for Hezbollah to gradually integrate into the Lebanese army. The Lebanese government’s plan to fully disarm Hezbollah was never realistic.”That leaves the insolvent and outgunned Lebanese state — wedged between an Israeli campaign that has killed Lebanese soldiers and a militia that answers to Tehran — as the unlikely linchpin of any lasting fix.“The key to weakening Hezbollah lies in bolstering the status of the Lebanese state, its institutions and central government, which would inherently come at Hezbollah’s expense,” Mr. Sobelman says.

Why Israel Is Finding It So Hard To Eliminate the Hezbollah Threat

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