Israel is still bent on debilitating the Hizbullah rank and file through the intensive bombardments it has sustained since the terrorist pager attacks on 17 September. As carpet bombing of southern Lebanon prepared the way for its ground invasion, it escalated strikes against Beirut and other population centres to turn Lebanese public opinion against Hizbullah. It calculated that the massive displacement of the civilian population from the south, Hizbullah’s main area of influence, would trigger civil strife between supporters and opponents of the Lebanese resistance movement.

Tel Aviv thought it had scored a stunning victory through its serial assassination of senior Hizbullah leaders, culminating with the death of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. The resistance movement and its various media, political offices and military branches certainly staggered under the weight of the unprecedented assault for several days. However, the moment Israel launched its ground offensive on 1 October, Hizbullah’s forces in the field seemed amazingly unscathed by Israel’s strikes against the command, administration, and communications centres in Dahiya. The Israeli/US goal of precipitating civil and sectarian strife in Lebanon so far also remains out of reach.

Hizbullah’s surprising military comeback reached a peak on the evening of 13 October, when it unleashed a swarm of drones that penetrated 70 km into Israel to strike a Golani Brigade training camp south of Haifa, killing four and wounding 60. On that day alone, the resistance organisation carried out 38 operations, from missile and drone strikes to combat manoeuvres against Israeli ground forces. A barrage of missiles into northern Israel from Galilee to Acre and Haifa in the west had overwhelmed Israel’s air defences, enabling the drones to evade detection.

Hizbullah also reminded Israel of its modernised intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities by posting video footage taken by its surveillance drones showing military and civilian installations in Haifa Bay, including military bases, factories, a university, and air defence radar towers. However, Sunday was the first time Hizbullah sent in drones armed with an explosive payload, succeeding in hitting an assembly of Israeli soldiers at a secret military headquarters in Haifa. It appears that Hizbullah’s ISR capacities are still busy gathering potential targets while Israel has exhausted its military target bank in its month-long bombing spree. With its drone strikes against sensitive targets in Haifa, Hizbullah has signalled that it intends to restore the balance of deterrence and that bombs hurled against Beirut will be met by bombs hurled against Haifa/Tel Aviv.

In continuing with regular cross-border missile fire, Hizbullah is demonstrating, in fulfilment of Nasrallah’s vow some days before his assassination, that the Israeli aggression against Lebanon would not bring settlers back to their homes in northern Israel. Hizbullah has gradually been throwing new missiles into its mix of weapons deployed. They include the four classes of Fadi short to medium range missiles, the latest of which has a range of 200 km, and the long-range Falaq and Burqan missiles which can deliver quite a heavy explosive load. The purpose of expanding the distance of missile strikes into Israel is to match, at least to some extent, Israel’s displacement of the inhabitants of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa. It is worth noting in this context that Hizbullah has not yet tapped into its arsenal of long-range precision-guided missiles, of which Israel claims to have destroyed two-thirds. Regardless of numbers, Hizbullah would not want to exhaust its arsenal in the early days of a war that could drag on for a long time.

The new amassing of Israeli forces on the border with Lebanon has given Hizbullah many more targets — easily sighted assemblies of soldiers and armoured vehicles within reach of its short-range missiles. Since the beginning of this month, the Israeli occupation army (IOA) has made forays into the south along several axes, from the easternmost points of the Galilee Panhandle (Kafr Kila, Adaisseh, Mais Al-Jabal, and Blida, through the central sector (Maroun Al-Ras and Yaroun) to the western sector (Leabouneh and Naqoura) on the Mediterranean coast. The IOA’s strategy is to probe weaknesses in Hizbullah’s defences along the 130 km border. At all points the Israeli forces encountered stiff resistance and were unable to secure a foothold.

When entering from Naqoura, the IOA’s tactic was to infiltrate behind the positions of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) so that Hizbullah’s defensive fire would hit the UN forces instead of Israeli forces. Hizbullah released a statement saying that it would not direct its fire towards UNIFIL positions so as not to endanger the international peacekeepers. The IAO had no such qualms. When UNIFIL forces refused to abandon their positions, the Israeli forces opened fire on them, injuring five in three days (9, 10 and 13 October).

In turning its crosshairs on UNIFIL forces, Israel sparked international outrage, not least from countries, such as Italy, France and Spain, who contribute to these forces. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also rejected a request from Netanyahu to withdraw these forces from their positions, stating that they would remain where they are and continue to carry out their mission. He further stressed that deliberate targeting of UNIFIL peacekeepers is a war crime. UNIFIL consists of about 10,000 soldiers from 50 different countries from Europe, Asia, and South America.

Israeli propaganda claims its incursion into the south is succeeding, enabling it to achieve the main aim, which is to dismantle Hizbullah and isolate it politically in Lebanon, using carpet-bombing to displace Hizbullah’s support base northward to precipitate civil/sectarian warfare. Israel’s bombardment of Dahiya has since expanded to other residential quarters in Beirut, as though to tell the Lebanese not to harbour its targets because it would pursue them everywhere regardless of civilian casualties.  On 9 October, the IOA bombed the Basta neighbourhood in central Beirut in an attempt to kill Hizbullah’s political communications coordinator, Wafiq Safa. The strike caused a high-rise to collapse, killing 22 civilians and wounding at least a hundred others. According to subsequent reports, Safa survived. Israel has so far murdered over 2,300 civilians and injured 10,700 in Lebanon in the past few weeks.

Since Nasrallah’s assassination, Hizbullah has stopped holding funerals for its martyrs. While this is a break with recent practice, it aligns with its policy during the 2006 war in which it refused to divulge its losses until the ceasefire. Consequently, it is no longer possible to verify Israeli claims of success at taking out Hizbullah leaders. Meanwhile, the movement’s performance on the ground suggests that leadership positions have been quickly filled, as Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem said they would be.

Despite Hizbullah’s unexpected military achievements during the past two weeks, the Lebanese internal front is fragile and Hizbullah needs to actively forestall attempts to drive a wedge between it and the Lebanese public. In an attempt to solidify opposition to Hizbullah, Samir Geagea, head of the Lebanese Forces Party, convened a meeting of anti-Hizbullah Christian political forces pressing for the election of a president committed to disarming Hizbullah on the grounds that the state must hold a monopoly on arms. Although Hizbullah’s opponents have been pressing that demand since the formation of the 14 March Forces in 2005, to use an exclusively Christian platform to press them again could jeopardise Lebanon’s fragile cohesion. Some of Hizbullah’s opponents from other Muslim sects, such as the Sunnis and the Druze, have dropped the demand for Hizbullah’s disarmament since the beginning of the war because they are unwilling to take positions aligning with the Israeli aggression against Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, who heads the Amal movement, is working with allies to promote a consensus candidate for the presidency. However, this drive faces staunch resistance from prominent Christian parties such as the Lebanese Forces and the Kataeb Party. Most Lebanese political leaders call for the implementation of Resolution 1701 for an immediate ceasefire on the Lebanese front and the redeployment of the Lebanese army with UNIFIL forces in the south. Hizbullah’s adversaries go even further, insisting on the implementation of Resolution 1559 of 2004 calling for Hizbullah’s disarmament.

Still, the Lebanese political landscape today is not the same as it was during the Cedar Revolution of 2005. Another revolution took place in Lebanon in 2019, targeting the symbols of the ruling elites, all of whom the protestors considered corrupt and with vested interests in perpetuating Lebanon’s sectarian political system. A significant portion of the new political forces that rose to prominence in 2019 are currently working to support the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and reduce tensions in areas with diverse sectarian compositions.

As the situation currently stands, it seems unlikely that the propaganda of Hizbullah’s adversaries, who are eager to seize the moment of Israel’s aggression to settle scores with Hizbullah, will gain traction. However, Hizbullah must still rise to the challenge of recementing ties and building new bridges, especially with the sociopolitical groups who share its goal of repelling the Israeli aggression. However, the task of expanding its support base is not an easy one, as Hizbullah itself was instrumental to undermining the aims of the 2019 revolution. It then obstructed the election of a new president for two years, vetoing any candidate that did not align with its approach to confronting Israel. Today, however, Hizbullah appears ready to compromise over a consensus candidate if that candidate is someone who might open avenues for Hizbullah to expand its support base beyond its traditional demographic. Hizbullah understands that surprise achievements on the military front are not enough to overcome its current political predicament. It must mend fences, attract new political allies and supporters, and fight against designs to defeat it by polarising and destabilising Lebanese society amid the mounting human and material toll of the Israeli aggression.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 17 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly