A Battered and Diminished Hezbollah Accepts a Cease-Fire

by · NY Times

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A Battered and Diminished Hezbollah Accepts a Cease-Fire

Thirteen months of war left Hezbollah weakened, isolated and desperate for a way to stop the fighting.

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Residents of the Dahiya, south of Beirut, celebrated the announcement of a U.S.-backed cease-fire on Wednesday.
Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

By Ben Hubbard

Reporting from Beirut

For years, Hezbollah told the Lebanese that it alone could defend them from Israel. It boasted of powerful weapons and hardened commandos who would unleash deadly “surprises” if war broke out. And it assured its followers that a regional alliance of militias supported by Iran would jump in to support it in battle.

Those myths have now been shattered.

After 13 months of war, Hezbollah entered a cease-fire with Israel on Wednesday that it will struggle to convince anyone, other than its most fervent loyalists, is not in fact a defeat.

The 60-day truce, which is supposed to lay the groundwork for a more lasting cease-fire, comes after three months of withering Israeli attacks that have thrown the organization into disarray.

Deep intelligence infiltration enabled Israel to assassinate many senior leaders, including Hezbollah’s secretary general of 32 years, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel bombarded the group’s most loyal communities, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee and blowing up dozens of villages, ensuring that many people have no homes to immediately return to.

And Hezbollah’s fateful decision to consult no one before firing rockets at Israel, setting off a conflict that grew into Lebanon’s most deadly war in decades, has left it isolated in the country and in the wider Middle East, with Lebanon facing an exorbitant bill for reconstruction.

Many of Hezbollah’s opponents in Lebanon and elsewhere hope that the war has weakened it enough that it will no longer be able to impose its will on the country’s political system. But it remains unclear whether Lebanon’s other parties will now feel empowered to stand against it.

Hezbollah still has many thousands of fighters in Lebanon and commands the loyalty of a large share of the country's Shiite Muslims.

After the cease-fire took hold on Wednesday, thousands of them poured back into Beirut’s southern suburbs to inspect the damage. Many honked their horns, waved yellow Hezbollah flags and said the fact that Hezbollah survived amounted to a win.

“Morale is high and there is victory,” said Osama Hamdan, who was cleaning out the shop where he sells water pumps. His family’s apartment had been damaged and would cost more than $5,000 to fix so they could move back in, he said.

“None of this is important,” he said. “What is important is the victory and the resistance. We are with them to the end.”

Yet Israel’s battering of Hezbollah will likely echo in Lebanon and across the region for years.

The group, which was founded in the 1980s with Iranian guidance to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, grew into the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. It also served as a senior proxy force in the Iranian-backed network of anti-Israel militias known as the “axis of resistance.”

At Iran’s behest, it sent fighters to Syria to help quash a rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, joined battles in Iraq against the Islamic State and sent experts to Yemen to enhance the capabilities of the Houthi militia there.

At the height of its power before the war, it was perceived to be such a military threat that Israel and the United States feared that a war with the group could set the region ablaze and devastate Israel.

But as the war escalated, Hezbollah’s allies failed to come to its aid in any effective way, undermining the credibility of Iran’s network. And Israel stepped up its attacks so fast — incapacitating thousands of Hezbollah members by detonating wireless devices and heavily bombing their communities — that Hezbollah found itself unable to mount a response close to what it had threatened for years.

Securing the cease-fire required the group to make serious concessions.

Hezbollah began firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas after that group’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. For months, as Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, Hezbollah’s leaders swore that the battle would end only when Israel stopped attacking Gaza.

That demand is nowhere to be found in the new cease-fire, leaving Israel free to continue its quest to destroy Hamas.

The new cease-fire also gives an oversight role to the United States, which Iran and Hezbollah have long railed against for its staunch support for Israel. Iran and Hezbollah would have only accepted such an arrangement if they were desperate to stop the war, analysts said.

“It indicates the degree to which Iran is concerned and worried about its new vulnerability and the incoming Trump administration,” said Paul Salem, a Lebanon expert at the Middle East Institute, a think tank.

Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s border also deterred Israel from attacking Iran, because of fears that Hezbollah would bombard northern Israel in response. That threat has been drastically reduced, depriving Iran of a key defense. Iran and Israel have exchanged direct fire in recent months but Iran has yet to respond to Israel’s most recent bombardment, apparently to avoid a broader war.

“The shoe that hasn’t fallen yet is the obvious fact that there is a huge imbalance between Israel and Iran,” Mr. Salem said. “Israel can attack Iran at will and Iran cannot do the same.”

In Lebanon, too, Hezbollah is likely to face an array of economic, social and political challenges if the cease-fire holds.

For years, it justified its arsenal to other Lebanese as essential to defend the country against Israeli attacks. Now, it has not only failed in that defense but must answer to fellow Lebanese who are angry that it single-handedly dragged the country into a costly war that no one else wanted.

“Hezbollah is worried about the internal dynamics in the country,” said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “There are many people who are not happy with what happened, and not just opponents but people in Hezbollah’s orbit.”

The war has displaced 1.2 million people, the government says, mostly Shiite Muslims from Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley.

Many of them are now sheltering in areas dominated by other sects — Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druse — many of whom do not want them to stay and fear that Hezbollah members could draw Israeli fire.

Caring for the displaced and repairing the war’s damage will pose a major challenge to Lebanon, whose economy was in crisis before the fighting began, and to Hezbollah, whose supporters have been the hardest hit.

A World Bank report this month estimated that nearly 100,000 housing units had been damaged or destroyed and about 166,000 people had lost their jobs in the war. It estimated the total physical damage and economic losses at $8.5 billion.

Given Iran’s own economic troubles and Hezbollah’s unpopularity with other Middle Eastern governments, it is unclear who may contribute funds for reconstruction, and with what conditions.

Nevertheless, Hezbollah’s remaining public figures have already begun marketing the cease-fire as a victory, saying their fighters kept firing missiles, rockets and drones into Israel and valiantly confronted the Israeli troops who invaded southern Lebanon.

“From now, we confirm that the resistance will remain, will continue, will carry on,” Hassan Fadlallah, a Lebanese parliamentarian from Hezbollah, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

In fact, Hezbollah’s social service arms were already prepared to help the displaced return home, he said.

“When Israel’s aggression against Lebanon ends, then the resistance that was fighting in the battlefield will itself be working to help its people to return and to rebuild,” he said.

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