William Christou
The Guardian / November 28, 2024
A year of fighting with Israel killed thousands – and shattered Hezbollah’s air of invincibility – before a ceasefire was reached.
Bint Jbeil – The Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah chose an iconic spot for his victory speech: the sports stadium in Bint Jbeil, a kilometre from the Israel-Lebanon border where, in 2000, crowds roared as the group’s then leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared it had ended Israel’s 18-year occupation of south Lebanon.
“Today we come to announce from Bint Jbeil and with confidence that we have won over the Israeli killing machine,” the MP told journalists on Wednesday, a few hours after a ceasefire with Israel took effect. Another war with Israel had ended, but this time there were no crowds in the stands, the stadium was covered in shrapnel and Nasrallah was dead.
Outside the stadium, a steady line of cars carrying thousands of displaced people were arriving to find their city and homes in ruins. Bint Jbeil, whose road signs proudly tout it as the “capital of resistance” after fighters held off Israeli forces for 33 days in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, had been battered. Relentless Israeli strikes on the city left it without water, electricity and a functioning hospital – scenes repeated in villages all across south Lebanon.
“It is true that there is destruction, martyrs and sacrifices, but in front of the goal set by the enemy [Israel], the price paid was worth the great results that were achieved,” Fadlallah said, rattling off a list of targets that he said Hezbollah had deprived Israel, including occupation of south Lebanon and the destruction of the organisation itself.
Hezbollah had set one task for itself when it launched rockets at Israel on 8 October 2023: force a ceasefire in Gaza. On Wednesday, after more than 13 months of fighting, Hezbollah stopped firing rockets and signed its own ceasefire with Israel – and Israel’s campaign in Gaza raged on.
When Hezbollah entered the fray last year, alarm bells began to ring across the region. The largest militia in the world boasted of 100,000 battle-hardened fighters, and western thinktanks estimated it had an arsenal of 150,000 rockets pointed at Tel Aviv.
In his first televised appearance after starting a war with Israel, Nasrallah explained that he had opened a “support front” to put pressure on Israel and draw its resources away from Gaza. He spoke of an equation which was to govern the tit-for-tat fighting that Israel and Hezbollah were engaged in for the better part of a year. A missile for a missile, a fighter for a fighter.
From the start, the proportions of Nasrallah’s equations seemed tipped against him. Tallies showed that for every rocket Hezbollah lobbed over the border, Israel responded with four strikes. The number of dead Hezbollah fighters climbed into the hundreds, while the number of Israeli soldiers killed remained at a dozen.
Still, he seemed to be in control. The world watched as Hezbollah slowly unveiled a new arsenal of weaponry it had been building since 2006, including drones that evaded Israel’s famous Iron Dome missile defence system, and an anti-aircraft missile that forced an Israeli jet to retreat. This was only “10%” of Hezbollah’s capabilities, Nasrallah promised.
The prevailing wisdom said that Hezbollah, even if it could not hope to defeat Israel, could exact enough of a toll that Israel would think twice before starting a full-scale war. Israel could level Beirut, but in the process Hezbollah promised that Tel Aviv would burn.
It is perhaps a testament to the charisma of Nasrallah that Lebanon, and much of the world, believed him. After Hezbollah’s military chief of staff, Fuad Shukr, was killed in an Israeli strike on Beirut in July, Nasrallah appeared on TV and chided his detractors with a wag of a finger and a colloquialism – Ya wash ya wash – “slowly, slowly”, which promised retribution.
Retribution never came. The remaining 90% of Hezbollah’s arsenal was either never deployed or never existed. The day after Israel announced it was turning its focus to the Lebanon front, thousands were injured by exploding pagers planted by Israeli intelligence services. A week later, Israel displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese with an aerial campaign and by the end of September, it had killed Nasrallah.
There was no more talk of stopping the war in Gaza. Hezbollah told western mediators that it wanted its own ceasefire. After blowing up more than 30 villages in southern Lebanon and procuring a promise that Hezbollah fighters would retreat north of the Litani River 18 miles from the border, Israel gave it to them.
A year of fighting with Israel had killed almost 4,000 people in Lebanon, displaced more than a million from their homes and caused more than $8.5bn (£6.7bn) in damages, according to the World Bank.
It also shattered Hezbollah’s air of invincibility. If Hezbollah could not claim that it would protect Lebanon from Israel, why did it exist? Its domestic opponents called for the militia to disarm and to allow the state to reassert itself in south Lebanon.
Hezbollah has warned its rivals not to overestimate its losses. In his latest speech the secretary general of the party, Naim Qassem, invoked the 1989 Taif agreement, which ended Lebanon’s 15-year long sectarian civil war, which all parties are keen to avoid.
“Hezbollah needs to frame this as a victory: just by surviving and not openly surrendering it considers it has somewhat overcome the invincible Israeli military,” said Karim el-Mufti, a senior lecturer in global affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. “It’s also looking after its political future inside Lebanon as difficult and burdening questions will be sure to be raised as to its role.”
In Bint Jbeil, Hezbollah was keen to reassert its presence. Members of its relief wings were clearing rubble-strewn roads and handed out flags to returning residents. The group’s anthems boomed over cars’ speaker systems.
“It might be hard for Europeans and westerners to understand, but this is victory,” said Mohammed, a resident of Bint Jbeil. “As long as the resistance is here – the Israelis will not be able to enter, then we have won.”
William Christou is a Beirut-based journalist
