Israel’s Unfinished Business in Lebanon
Eyal Zisser
With Hezbollah’s Iranian patron on the ropes, Jerusalem gets another shot at completing the job it was forced to pause two years ago
Hezbollah and Iranian flags are seen at an event honoring Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on March 1, 2026 at Ashoura Square in southern Beirut, Lebanon
Daniel Carde/Getty Images
It took barely 48 hours after the United States and Israel began their joint operation against the Iranian regime for Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israel. As it became clear that regime decapitation was part of the operation’s objectives, the group’s involvement was all but inevitable. Israel retaliated immediately with a wave of targeted strikes and has now begun limited ground operations in south Lebanon, even as its air force maintains an unprecedented tempo of sorties over Iran.
For Israel, Hezbollah is unfinished business. And while the Iranian proxy’s fate ultimately will be affected by that of its patrons in Tehran, the current moment offers Israel an opening to rectify the mistake of two years ago and secure a strategic win independent of the ultimate outcome of the campaign in Iran.
By the end of 2024, Hezbollah was at a low point it had not experienced since its establishment four decades earlier. The blows Israel inflicted on the organization during the war that began in October 2023—culminating in the elimination of nearly its entire top echelon and in the loss of an essential logistical and financial lifeline with the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria in December 2024—left Hezbollah weakened, exposed, and strategically vulnerable. It appeared that relatively little additional pressure would have sufficed to dismantle it as a powerful militia and prominent political actor in Lebanon.
Yet in November 2024, under American pressure and amid a desire to prioritize other arenas, Israel was forced to accept a cease-fire. In doing so, it granted Hezbollah a lifeline—one the organization has used to regroup and rebuild. It looked as though Israel had been denied a rare strategic opportunity. After all, for decades Israel viewed Hezbollah as its most dangerous enemy. The organization’s missile arsenal had cast a constant shadow over life in northern Israel and had contributed to Israeli strategic hesitation regarding action against Iran’s nuclear program.
While the Iranian proxy’s fate will be affected by that of its patrons in Tehran, the current moment offers Israel an opening to rectify the mistake of 2024.
For a while, it seemed as though an old-new concept, one that was supposed to have collapsed on Oct. 7, had once again begun to take hold in regard to Lebanon: namely, the conceit that Hezbollah had been severely weakened and was now deterred; that time and internal Lebanese pressure would gradually compel it to disarm. This logic, which was encouraged by American envoys and U.S. policy in Lebanon, echoed past strategic assumptions that had proved fatally wrong.
When Hassan Nasrallah decided to join Hamas’ war against Israel, he was convinced it was a win-win situation, based on his experience over three decades as Hezbollah’s secretary general. When Israel’s northern villages cleared out under Hezbollah fire, and when it appeared that Washington had placed limits on Israeli escalation in Lebanon, it looked as though his calculation was sound. However, Nasrallah had made a deadly mistake, as he failed to grasp and internalize the profound shift that had taken place within Israel following Oct. 7. He also underestimated the extent of the intelligence and operational superiority that Israel had gained over the years against his organization.
By the summer of 2024, Jerusalem had made the decision to launch a comprehensive attack against Hezbollah. Within a couple of months, the IDF had succeeded in eliminating the group’s top military command as well as its political leadership, including Nasrallah and his successor, Hashem Safieddine, and had neutralized most of its military capabilities. Facing mounting losses, Hezbollah was relieved by the American push for a cease-fire that took effect on Nov. 27, 2024. Within a month of the cease-fire, the Assad regime collapsed, further compounding Hezbollah’s difficulties.
The incoming American administration convinced itself that these developments had created favorable conditions inside Lebanon for Hezbollah’s opponents, thereby creating a supposedly historic moment for American engagement in support of the Lebanese government and armed forces. In January 2025, the new Lebanese government pledged to restore state sovereignty and disarm non-state militias, including monopolizing arms south of the Litani River. The Lebanese army presented a plan to take over Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in the area, and by the end of 2025, Lebanese official declarations claimed that the mission, south of the Litani, had been accomplished.
In practice, however, declarations did not reflect reality. Hezbollah adopted a low profile, not as an act of surrender, but as a strategic pause intended to preserve its remaining assets and rebuild, and also to facilitate the government’s efforts to secure reconstruction funds for southern Lebanon. But its attitude remained one of public intransigence. A few days before the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, the group’s new secretary general, Naim Qassem, openly rejected the government’s stated plan for the area north of the Litani. That meant the plan was effectively dead, as the Lebanese government lacks both political and military cohesion to confront Hezbollah directly. Fear of renewed civil war and the potential fragmentation of the military constrains decisive action. Instead, Lebanese leaders routinely blame their inaction on Israel, claiming that ongoing Israeli military activity prevents stabilization.
Despite being restrained by the 2024 cease-fire, Israel continued to strike in Lebanon almost daily, tailing Hezbollah operatives, complicating its reconstruction efforts in southern Lebanon, and exerting indirect pressure on it by preventing its Shiʽite supporters from returning to their villages along the border with Israel. For all its advantages in continuously degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities and command structure, the Israeli-sustained campaign nevertheless lacked strategic decisiveness, stopping short of overwhelming Hezbollah or even halting the organization’s rehabilitation process.
Although it was the less friendly Democratic administration that pressured Israel to halt its war on Hezbollah in 2024, the Trump administration has also placed some restrictions on Israeli activity in Lebanon, even as it has accepted continued IDF targeted strikes against the group. That’s because the Trump administration shares the bipartisan Washington consensus over propping up the Lebanese government. This conventional wisdom contained an inherent contradiction: Even as the U.S. proclaimed the government and armed forces to be the instruments for containing Hezbollah, it simultaneously excused them for avoiding precisely this course of action.
But the Trump administration came in with an even more ambitious plan: namely, the expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Syria and Lebanon. It was convinced that in the face of the regional momentum, and supposedly under internal pressure from within Lebanon, Hezbollah will have no choice but to relent. The administration’s envoys Tom Barrack and Morgan Ortagus urged Israel to engage in talks with the Lebanese government to build momentum toward some agreement—albeit without disrupting the near-daily targeted strikes against Hezbollah. This fantastical thinking not only assumed political dynamics in Lebanon that do not correspond to reality but also had the effect of continuing a key feature of the Biden administration’s policy: preventing a full-scale Israeli operation in Lebanon.
In the first 24 hours after the strike against Iran, Israel reportedly relayed to Beirut via the Americans that it would not strike in Lebanon if Hezbollah didn’t engage. Unsurprisingly, that proved short-lived, as Hezbollah inevitably heeded Tehran’s priorities rather than the growing voices within Lebanon urging it not to drag the country into yet another destructive war.
The question now is how far Israel will go in this second round. Three obvious scenarios come to mind: one, an intensified version of the campaign of precise targeting, aimed at degrading capabilities and preventing any serious threat to the home front, while the Israeli Air Force continues its operation in Iran; two, a limited ground operation to create a de facto buffer zone near the border in order to protect northern communities in Israel and prevent their mass evacuation, while clearing the area in south Lebanon of any remaining, or newly rebuilt, Hezbollah infrastructure; three, a full-scale operation to inflict a decisive defeat on the group.
As things currently stand, Israel appears to be implementing a combination of the first two scenarios—with high-profile targeted assassinations, which in recent days have included the head of Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters, Hussein Makled, and, more significantly, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force’s commander in Lebanon, Daoud Ali Zadeh. Reportedly, the United States has sent reassurances to the Lebanese that Israel would not attack Beirut’s airport or seaport—a long-standing American request to the Israelis.
Both these scenarios, however—provided they don’t change—are more of a variation on the existing theme and appear to be pegged to other developments, be they the fate of the regime in Iran, or any U.S.-backed plan with the Lebanese government and army. The IDF’s Chief of the General Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir’s statement on Tuesday—“We are determined to eliminate the threat Hezbollah poses and will not stop until this organization is disarmed”—could also be understood in line with a more limited scenario. That is, the IDF would apply increased pressure and then bet on the option of the Lebanese government, under a U.S. umbrella, disarming the group. Given that this option is without historical precedent, the likelihood of it going nowhere is high. Which would then mean that Israel would have to settle, once again, for a holding pattern.
The underlying problem remains: Hezbollah’s disarmament will not result from persuasion or internal Lebanese pressure. As in the case of Iran, the issue is not the terms of negotiation, but the continued existence of a heavily armed militia operating outside state control. Hezbollah will not voluntarily relinquish its weapons. What is needed is a decisive military campaign that will lead to its defeat.
The opportunity missed in November 2024 should not be missed again.
Eyal Zisser is the Vice Rector of Tel Aviv University and the holder of The Yona and Dina Ettinger Chair in Contemporary History of the Middle East. He is the author of, among other books, Assad’s Syria at a Crossroads; Lebanon: the Challenge of Independence; Faces of Syria; The Bleeding Cedar; and Syria: Protest, Revolution, Civil War.
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