Israel’s assassination of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, its elimination of most of the group's top commanders and the destruction of its communications system – spectacularly illustrated by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies – has crippled the Shiite group, leaving it with little choice but to return to the guerrilla tactics it deployed when it began in the 1980s.
Hezbollah declared a “divine victory” in the month-long 2006 war after successfully ousting Israeli forces from Lebanon. And the Iran-backed group is once again facing off with its arch-enemy – but under very different circumstances.
"We want [Israeli soldiers] to enter Lebanese territory (...) if they come to us they are welcome, because what they see as a threat we see as a historic opportunity," Nasrallah said ironically in a September 19 speech, just eight days before he was killed in a massive Israeli air strike targeting Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in the southern outskirts of Beirut.
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) announced Wednesday that eight of its soldiers had been killed in combat in southern Lebanon, a day after launching a ground incursion that it described as “limited, localised and targeted ground raids based on precise intelligence against Hezbollah terrorist targets and infrastructure”.
Hezbollah resumed cross-border fighting with Israel in support of its ally Hamas following the latter’s deadly October 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel. And while it might have once relished a head-on confrontation with its arch enemy, it could never have expected to do so with a diminished force and leadership structure in such disarray.
Nasrallah’s death comes on the back of Israel’s elimination of nearly all of the group’s top commanders. The mass explosions of Hezbollah communications devices also suggest that Israel has managed a deep infiltration of the group’s communications systems.
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Back to basics
The continued pressure from Israel and the significant losses of recent weeks are likely to leave Hezbollah with no choice but to return to the guerilla tactics it deployed when it was first founded, with Iran’s backing, in 1982. Hezbollah began as a local Islamist militia group whose battlefield tactics mainly consisted of staging ambushes and planting roadside bombs – a far cry from the movement it has now become as one of the main political parties in Lebanon.
“The reorganisation of the movement, which is still trying to contend with its losses, will take months, if not years. Especially since Israel now controls its supply of arms after destroying a large part of its arsenal; it won’t allow Hezbollah to rebuild [another one] like it did over the past 20 years,” said Christophe Ayad, reporter at French daily Le Monde and author of "Géopolitique du Hezbollah". “I think Hezbollah will return to a more modest form of guerilla warfare.”
“Hezbollah, which has also lost a lot of its commanders in the targeted strikes – especially in the drone unit – will finally do what it does best: wage guerilla warfare on the ground, like it did in the 1980s and the 1990s during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, and in 2006 during the 33-day war against Israel,” Ayad said.
This type of warfare would not require Hezbollah to have a command structure in place nor access to sophisticated communications systems, Ayad explained.
“Hezbollah units are made up of autonomous cells that consist of all the different types of specialities within a single group,” he said. “They are often made up of men from southern Lebanon who are perfectly familiar with the terrain, the arms caches and the tunnels, and are therefore more than capable of fighting where they are.”
Since the deadly 2006 conflict, both Israel and Hezbollah have spent the past two decades preparing for a new confrontation. But this time the “Party of God” – many of whose fighters were hardened fighting alongside Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria – will not be able to count on the element of surprise that helped it oust Israeli forces and which ultimately propelled Hezbollah to victory under Nasrallah.
“Even if Hezbollah is seeing what it has long been waiting for – a repeat of the 2006 ground invasion – it seems intoxicated by its own “divine victory” rhetoric, assuming that events will play out exactly the same way,” said Ayad, who won France’s Albert Londres Prize for journalism in 2004.
This is a mistake often made by a winning side, he said, noting that France made the same error in 1939 when it prepared for World War II using the same tactics it successfully used in World War I. To keep the Germans out, France built a Maginot Line – a long line of defence made up of fortifications, obstacles and weapons. But instead of attacking the Maginot Line the Germans simply avoided it, invading France instead through the Netherlands and Belgium.
“The Israeli army failed in 2006 because it thought it was fighting a small guerilla force,” he said. “Instead, it found itself up against much better-equipped and better-trained fighters. Hezbollah has suffered such significant setbacks in 2024 because it thought it would see a repeat of the 2006 war.”
‘The defeat is complete’
“In the meantime, Israel, which has clear military superiority, has learned the lessons from their 2006 failure,” Ayad said. “The army has largely prepared the ground via air strikes and communications campaigns. Today, it seems focused on targeted strikes rather than waging a war of occupation, which it did until 2000 [when it withdrew from southern Lebanon], despite the Israeli far right’s messianic dreams of annexation.”
Israel would likely continue with its lightning strikes, aiming to destroy arms caches, tunnel networks and possibly villages, he said. Once those objectives have been achieved, the army will likely withdraw behind the border to avoid setting itself up for the ambushes it saw in 2006.
The IDF broadcast images on Monday of soldiers allegedly searching through Hezbollah arms caches that had been found in a border village in southern Lebanon.
Although both sides claim to be waging an existential war and dream of crushing the enemy once and for all, Ayad said that Hezbollah, whose survival is now truly at stake, “can hardly hope for anything better than to save face by inflicting heavy losses on the Israeli army and pushing it back beyond Lebanon’s borders”.
Nasrallah’s death and the elimination of almost all of Hezbollah’s top commanders have already largely spelled a defeat for the group.
“When the supreme leader is killed before the battle has even begun, you can go so far as to say that the defeat is complete. Remember that before October 7, Hezbollah planned incursions into Israel to foment terror. A year on, it’s far from that.”
This article has been translated from the original in French.
