Overnight, Israel’s military shifted part of its focus to a new front, one that isn’t Iran: it pummeled the Lebanese capital of Beirut with airstrikes, and issued more evacuation warnings across areas of the country controlled by the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.
“The objective is to disarm Hezbollah,” Nimrod Novik, a fellow at the Israel Policy Forum and former senior adviser to the late Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, told GZERO.
The pretext came when Hezbollah – which is reportedly overseen now by members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – launched rockets and drones on Monday, in what was a meager strike. The militant group was itself under pressure from Iran to get involved in the conflict with the US and Israel, after an Israeli airstrike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The response has been furious: Israel first launched airstrikes on Monday, and initiated another ground invasion of its northern neighbor, ending the tentative truce that countries reached in 2024. Then came evacuation orders on Wednesday and Thursday for hundreds of thousands of people in Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon, including the southern parts of the country and the southern suburbs of Beirut. Then came the barrage on Friday. Lebanon’s health ministry said more than 200 people have been killed since Monday.
“Israel is likely to continue pounding Hezbollah targets throughout the country,” said Eurasia Group’s Middle East Managing Director Firas Maksad. It may even continue beyond the Iran conflict.
Recap on Hezbollah. The Shiite militia emerged in the early 1980s amid Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, with the aim of beating back the Israeli forces that were occupying southern Lebanon following a terrorist attack along Israel’s coast. Its principal funder: the Islamic Republic of Iran, which wanted to expand its influence in the region. Hezbollah later formed a political wing, first fielding candidates for Parliament in 1992.
Under the leadership of Hassan Nasrallah, who took the reins in 1992, Hezbollah became a powerful force in Lebanon. It also became a weapon for Iran amid its hostility toward Israel.
“Hezbollah was the proxy of proxies,” Steven A. Cook, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told GZERO. “It was essentially Iran’s second strike capability.”
Then it unravels. On Oct. 8, 2023, just one day after the Hamas attacks on Israel, Hezbollah joined the fight, firing rockets and artillery at Lebanon’s southern neighbor. Israel responded with its own strikes. A year later, the conflict escalated: Israel killed several Hezbollah members via exploding pagers, and, on Sept. 27, 2024, it assassinated Nasrallah, before launching a ground invasion in southern Lebanon a few days later. The two sides signed a tentative ceasefire two months thereafter, but not before one million Lebanese residents had been displaced.
Since signing the ceasefire agreement, Israel has been pressing the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah’s militant wing once and for all. The government has “made some progress,” said Cook, but “it wasn’t necessarily as robust as [Israel] would like” – and the Israelis feared that Hezbollah was rebuilding its capabilities.
Can Israel achieve its goal now? With Nasrallah dead, Iran under attack, and public sentiment in Lebanon increasingly shifting against the militant group, Israel eyes an opportunity to finally end Hezbollah as a military force.
“Hezbollah’s decision to attack Israel in defense of Iran is deeply unpopular amongst its own support base,” said Maksad. He added that Hezbollah “has not yet recovered from the war” it had with Israel in late 2024.
However, fully disarming Hezbollah will be difficult, in part because of the sheer scale of its military – the militant group has weapons and soldiers spread all over the country. This has forced the Lebanese government to be judicious in its efforts to quell the militant group – it desperately wants to avoid sparking another civil war in a country that is rife with sectarian divisions, and Hezbollah is the main political and military force that speaks for the sizable Shiite population. Disarming Hezbollah also can’t be done remotely, according to Novik, the former Peres adviser.
As such, the short-term goal is to weaken Hezbollah to the point where the Lebanese government can finish the job itself. If Israel can achieve this, Novik said, then it will turn towards another longer-term target: a lasting peace with Lebanon.
“There is another objective, more ambitious, and that is the hope that we can enter into serious negotiations with Lebanon, at the minimum over a non-aggression pact, at the maximum, a peace process,” said Novik. “But I would say that that's a bit over the horizon.”
