The Iran war is winding down, but one front never closed. In southern Lebanon, Israel and Hezbollah are still trading fire, and it’s become one of the biggest sticking points left in the deal between Iran and the United States. The old question is back: what do you actually do about Hezbollah? What CAN you do?
Here’s what’s hard about Hezbollah: it is two things at once. On the one hand, it’s a Lebanese political party that holds seats in parliament and runs the clinics and schools the failing Lebanese state can’t. On the other, it’s an Iranian-built army sitting on tens of thousands of missiles, many now cheaply upgraded with GPS guidance, pointed at northern Israel. You can’t bomb away the second without reckoning with the first.
In the last few years, Israel has hit Hezbollah harder than ever: the 2024 pager attack, the assassination of longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, supply lines severed when the Assad regime fell in Syria. And yet the organization persists. The only durable fix is political, and Lebanon’s sectarian deadlock makes that nearly impossible. So Israel is left “mowing the grass,” racking up tactical wins that never add up to a strategic one.
We trace Hezbollah from the rubble of Lebanon’s civil war to the Party of God of today, why Iran built it and won’t let go, and why beating Hezbollah on the battlefield may not be the same thing as winning.
