Israel's decisive blows leave Hezbollah weakened and Iran scrambling

Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah's combat capabilities and destroyed its command, putting Iran's entire strategy of arming anti-Israel groups in the region into question, assessed Matthew Levitt, an expert from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on Tuesday.

"The Shia organisation Hezbollah operating in Lebanon, which for years has been 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 moves have significantly weakened Hezbollah's combat capabilities and disarmed its command staff, assessed Levitt.

In his opinion, after bombing the command centre of this organisation and killing its leader Hasan Nasrallah, "it is no exaggeration to say that the Hezbollah from a fortnight ago no longer exists."

And 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 – emphasised the analyst.

According to Levitt, the Israeli operation surprised Hezbollah's command, which had mistakenly calculated that its rocket arsenal would deter Israel from attacking its 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 7 October 2023, Israeli society increasingly leaned towards 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 organisation 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 1982-2000.