Israel's strike leaves Hezbollah reeling, Iran's strategy in question

Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah's combat capabilities and dismantled its command structure, raising questions about Iran's strategy of arming anti-Israel groups in the region, assessed Matthew Levitt, an expert from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on Tuesday.

"The Shia organization Hezbollah, operating in Lebanon and for years the most significant direct strategic threat to Israel, has become a 'shadow of its former self'," the analyst wrote in a commentary published on the institute's website.

In a matter of days, a spectacular series of Israeli intelligence and military operations have seriously weakened Hezbollah's combat capabilities and disarmed its command staff, assessed Levitt.

He believes that after bombing the command center of this organization and killing its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, "it is no exaggeration to say that the Hezbollah from two weeks ago no longer exists."

Since Hezbollah was the backbone of Iran's network of proxy militants, known as the Axis of Resistance, that country's strategy of arming and positioning proxy groups in the region has also suddenly become threatened, emphasized the analyst.

According to Levitt, the Israeli operation has caught Hezbollah's command by surprise, as they had miscalculated that their rocket arsenal would deter Israel from attacking their forces in Lebanon. Nasrallah himself threatened Israel last year, stating that in the event of an attack, it "would be sent back to the Stone Age."

However, as pointed out by Levitt, the decision to take action against Hezbollah should not be surprising, since after the Palestinian Hamas invasion on October 7, 2023, Israeli society increasingly leaned toward the opinion that the situation in the north of the country and the continuous shelling from Lebanese territory were unacceptable.

Israelis "lost patience" with Hezbollah's rocket attacks, and Nasrallah made a mistake by deeply believing in the long-standing assertion that Israel is "weaker than a spider's web."

Earlier this month, after the explosion of Hezbollah's pagers and walkie-talkies, Nasrallah appeared on the group's satellite television channel and calmly assured that 'accountability would come.' It did, but in the case of Nasrallah and the organization he led, concluded Levitt.

Israel announced that, as a result of airstrikes, it eliminated a large part of Hezbollah's combat potential and killed almost all high-ranking commanders of this group. On Monday, the Israeli armed forces announced the start of a ground operation against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

The Israeli military entered the country for the first time since the slightly over a month-long war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. Israel occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000.