Israel’s attacks have devastated Hezbollah. How is it still fighting back?

In the third week of September, in the final weeks before the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the world that the aims of Israel’s war were changing. With Gaza in ruins, more than 42,000 Palestinians dead and hundreds of thousands more forced from their homes, Israel was turning its gaze to its northern border with Lebanon, where steady exchanges of rocket fire across the border with Iran-backed Shiite group Hezbollah had driven tens of thousands of Israeli civilians to take shelter far from the frontier. 

Netanyahu announced that Israel’s war goals now included these civilians’ safe return to their homes, secure from the constant threat of missile fire. But more than a month after Netanyahu’s promise heralded a devastating air and ground campaign against Hezbollah, nearly annihilating its political and military leadership and displacing 1.2 million Lebanese civilians – including almost half a million children – it was the prime minister’s own home that would become a target.

Over the weekend, a drone launched by Hezbollah crashed into the side of Netanyahu’s holiday house in Caesarea, far from the Lebanese border. Luckily for the prime minister, he wasn’t at home. 

Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said that Hezbollah was still exacting a heavy toll on Israel despite the devastating losses inflicted on the militant group.

“What we have seen now in the past two weeks is that Hezbollah seems to have regained the initiative, Hezbollah is back on its feet, Hezbollah is pushing back and inflicting casualties on Israel on a daily basis,” he said. “Hezbollah’s missiles now target any part of Israel, I mean literally any part, including the apartment of Binyamin Netanyahu. And including key military facilities in Israel.”

The scale of Israel’s campaign of escalation against Hezbollah is difficult to overstate. The triggering in late September of thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies believed to belong to Hezbollah militants killed dozens of people, including children, and wounded thousands more. In the days following these attacks, Israel launched repeated air strikes against what it said were Hezbollah positions in south Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley in the east and in the capital Beirut itself.

On September 27, a nighttime air raid using US-made bunker-buster missiles cut down half a dozen apartment buildings in the city’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh, throwing the city into chaos and killing long-time secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. His presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine, would be killed days later. Senior military figures including Nabil Qaouk, Ibrahim Aqil and Ali Karaki have also fallen under Israel’s unrelenting air assault. 

Those strikes have continued, reaching into the heart of central Beirut as well as targeting essential financial services linked to Hezbollah’s political wing. In the shadow of these daily strikes, Israeli troops have pushed across the border, carrying out what the IDF describes as “limited operations” that have led to bloody clashes with Hezbollah’s fighters. 

Gerges said that Israel’s killing of secretary-general Nasrallah and much of the military command structure had badly damaged the militant group.

“I think in the first weeks, Hezbollah was off-balance, Hezbollah was shocked and rattled – its command and control was basically malfunctioning,” he said. “And I think you cannot really understand the celebrations in Israel and the US except by understanding the basically difficult position that Hezbollah found itself in after it suffered these major, catastrophic setbacks.”

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Despite the almost total destruction of its senior political and military leadership and the obliteration of dozens of arms stockpiles and military positions, though, Hezbollah’s own guns have not been silent. The group is believed to have roughly 50,000 fighters at its disposal – half of them reservists – and as many as 200,000 missiles, some capable of striking targets deep into Israeli soil. 

The Shiite group has continued to launch barrage after barrage of missiles at military targets in Israel – first, its customary rocket fire, as well as explosive drones and, as of yesterday, precision missiles launched at a military factory on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. A number of these attacks have slipped beneath Israel’s lauded Iron Dome unchecked, killing Israeli soldiers and wounding dozens more. 

Gerges said that part of the secret of Hezbollah’s endurance in the face of the assassination of much of its leadership rested in part on the group’s long-standing practice of training and outfitting its fighters as almost entirely autonomous units. 

“Hezbollah as a paramilitary organisation has empowered its separate units and separate field commanders to act on their own,” he said.

“Every single Hezbollah unit in the field in southern Lebanon or the Beqaa Valley has basically been trained to take action into their own hands, to rely on their own judgement. Every single unit has been acting on its own for the past four weeks – this is all guerilla warfare in terms of separate units.” 

A briefing prepared in March by the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies said that the paramilitary group’s structure had been built for precisely these kinds of David-and-Goliath struggles with Israel’s more conventional modern military. 

“Hezbollah has employed a version of what the United States calls ‘mission command’, empowering subordinates to make independent battlefield decisions based on a commander’s intent. This force design has allowed Hezbollah to operate effectively under conditions of overwhelming Israeli firepower,” it read. “In 2006, for example, its rocket units were designed to set up a launch site, fire, and disperse in less than 28 seconds, relying on pre-positioned equipment, underground shelters, and mountain bicycles to achieve such a small window of exposure.”

In many ways, Hezbollah’s endurance against Israel’s overwhelming military superiority shows just how much the group has been preparing for this moment. Created in the chaos of Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982, the group is no stranger to insurgent campaigns against greater military might.

These same tactics would serve it well in 2006, when an overconfident Israel sent thousands of troops and columns of tanks rolling across the border, only to find its forces pinned down by armed militants with an intimate knowledge of southern Lebanon’s labyrinth of wadis, hills and valleys.

Gerges said that Hezbollah seemed prepared to fight a grinding war of attrition against Israeli ground forces – even at the cost of the continued devastation of its military structures. 

“More than a month after Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon, Israel does not fully control a single village in south Lebanon. Not even one," he said. “Of course, Israel comes in with overwhelming power, it takes over a hamlet, half of a village, but Hezbollah has been able to resist and to force Israeli military formations to retreat under fire. So I think overall from Hezbollah’s perspective, time is on its side, not Israel’s side.”

Hezbollah’s controversial decision to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during Syria's brutal civil war has also given the group’s fighters recent experience with more conventional military means, including armoured divisions and artillery – though the idea that these kind of manoeuvres would be called upon in southern Lebanon seems unlikely. In any case, Gerges said, Hezbollah seems to be playing a longer game. 

“What we need to take into account is that Hezbollah does not really have to defeat Israel, it cannot defeat Israel – that’s not the question,” he said. “The idea of Hezbollah is to prevent Israel from having security – period. Not only on its northern border, but in many parts of Israel.”