With the beginning of the first threads on Monday, March 2, and through missile salvos and marches towards northern Israel, the Lebanese Hezbollah actually entered the battle line against the Hebrew state, in response to the assassination of the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, Ali Khamenei, and the launch of a comprehensive attack on Iran. But the question that now arises in Lebanese and regional circles: Why did the party initiate a confrontation with Tel Aviv at this time, despite the fragility of its military and political position, after the resounding defeat it suffered in the 2024 war and its loss of the first and second ranks of its leaders and soldiers?

Published on: 02/03/2026 - 19:17 Last updated: 02/03/2026 - 20:27

On Monday, March 2, Hezbollah took a dangerous decision to support Iran and enter into a military confrontation with Israel at a moment when it appeared weaker organizationally and internally than it had been since its inception in the 1980s, but it chose to act as an “axis organization” and not just as a local Lebanese force.

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This decision can only be understood at the intersection of three levels: the party’s situation after the 2024 war, the nature of its structural relationship with Iran, and Israel’s calculations, which turned southern Lebanon into an “open threat area” by mobilizing 100,000 reserves and evacuating dozens of villages even before the party fired its first bullet.

Hezbollah after 2024: “An exhausted but still dangerous organization”

A wide segment of analysts in Lebanon and the world agree that the 2024 war has profoundly changed Hezbollah. The Israeli National Institute for Security Studies (INSS) describes the organization as having emerged from the “Iron Swords” war completely different: “Exhausted and defeated, it stands at a crossroads as it struggles to recover, after most of its political and military leaders were eliminated, including its most prominent leader, Hassan Nasrallah.”

This judgment is supported by estimates of the liquidation of 10-15 percent of the command and operational positions within just fifteen months, which means that the command and control network has been subjected to a violent shock.

Analysts such as Michael Young go further, when he stated in an interview with Al Jazeera that “no military or political force can successfully reassemble itself after suffering a major defeat, as happened with Hezbollah... The question is whether it can launch missiles or projectiles towards northern Israel, and the answer currently is: “It cannot” in a description of its situation immediately after the war.

Imad Salama, a professor at the Lebanese American University, explains in an analysis published by Orion TV that “Hezbollah has undergone a “significant deterioration, including losses in leadership and a disruption in communications,” with it likely to turn into a “smaller, more agile entity” trying to rebuild under intense Israeli surveillance.

Israel not only struck the leaders, but also carried out a series of “pager” operations and targeted communications devices in September 2024, which paralyzed a large part of the communications network and demonstrated a deep intelligence penetration, while a study in the American Small Wars Journal estimated the party’s resilience index between 0.2 and 0.3 by the end of 2024, that is, more likely to be paralyzed by precise strikes compared to the past.

However, the picture is not that of a defunct organization. Tal Beeri, an expert at the Israeli Alma Center for Strategic Research, confirms in an interview with the newspaper “Israel Hayom” that the “Radwan” force has maintained an operational capability that allows a limited force incursion into northern Israel, estimating the strength of this force at no less than 2,500 fighters, with an increasing stock of precision munitions.

In other words: Hezbollah entered the year 2026 as an “exhausted” organization, but it still possesses a significant missile arsenal, elite capabilities, and long combat experience, with a leadership structure in the process of being reshaped and an internal structure that is living under unprecedented social and economic pressure inside Lebanon.

Iran above everything: ideological priority over the Lebanese account

In this relatively weak context, Hezbollah could have - logically - chosen “cautious neutrality” in the US-Israeli clash with Iran. But its ideological and strategic structure makes “protecting Iran” an existential issue for the organization itself.

Ali Larijani, a prominent Iranian official, said in a lengthy interview with Iranian News TV that the conflict “has greatly weakened Hezbollah,” but the party is “strong enough even without weapons from other places,” indicating that its value lies in its role within the axis of resistance more than just its arsenal.

The American Center for Middle East Policy (FDD, Foundations for Defense of Democracies) clearly describes it as “the crown jewel of the Iranian proxy network” and “the heaviest non-state armed organization in the world,” which means that striking Iran in its heart, by assassinating the Supreme Leader and bombing its military buildings, is not an event that the party can deal with as if it were an “external file.”

For its part, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW, Institute for the Study of War), indicates in a detailed report on Hezbollah’s options that Iran’s efforts in naval and missile armament in Lebanon are the fundamental dimension in evaluating any decision on the ground, which explains the party’s keenness to keep its link with the center in Tehran alive even in times of weakness.

When Iran is targeted on this scale, hesitation becomes as costly for the party as the intervention itself:

The Lebanese government: An armed ban amid a weak and divided scene

With Hezbollah's announcement of launching missiles and drones at northern Israel, the Lebanese state did not keep itself outside the event, but rather adopted a decision that was symbolic and decisive in its content, even if the question of its implementation remained open in practice.

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said in a press conference after an early morning session of the Council of Ministers in the presidential palace east of Beirut, that “the Lebanese state rejects any military or security action launched from its territory outside the framework of official institutions, and declares that the decision of war and peace lies exclusively in the hands of the state,” declaring “an immediate ban on Hezbollah’s military and security activities, and considering any launching of missiles or marches from its soil outside the law.”

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The Council of Ministers, according to a statement published in the media today, described the party’s actions as “contrary to the government’s decisions,” and instructed the army and security forces to “prevent any missile launches or marches from Lebanese territory, and bring every violator to justice.” It also demanded that the party be disarmed and that weapons be confined to the hands of the state.

The decision itself, supported by previous decisions in 2025 regarding the extra-state disarmament plan, was described in an analysis by the ITIC Center of the Israeli Institute for Security Studies, as “an attempt to preserve state sovereignty in light of a complete collapse of the political partnership” amid an Israeli threat to expand the war.

The pivotal question, posed by Lebanese and international analysts, is: How can a weak, politically divided, and fragilely progressing country with a disarmament plan, implement such a decision against a party that possesses firepower and field structure in the heart of the south and the Beirut suburbs?

Reports such as those published by the INSS Institute and the FDD Center, and analyzes published by (Middle East Eye), indicate that implementation of the decision is supposed to begin in the south according to the first phase of the army’s plan, which assumes the deployment of forces extending to the Litani River, and the dismantling of tunnels and missile launch sites, but it acknowledges that the army suffers from a lack of resources, an ongoing Israeli threat, and faces widespread popular and political rejection from the partisan environment.

On the other hand, the party realizes that any open confrontation with the army, before a comprehensive sacrifice at home, may lead to divisions within the Shiite community, and it also warns that an internal movement fears a repeat of the dangers of 2008 or another civil war.

This means that the government decision is not, in essence, a single military decision, but rather a political and legal tool used in two cases:

With this approach, Nawaf Salam’s decision was born, amid a complex reality that does not allow him to “impose it by force,” but he responds to it at the level of discourse: the party declares that its decision was based on “defending Lebanon and the people and supporting Iran,” in contrast to the state that insists that its decision alone is considered legal.

Israel opens the door to the south: mobilizing 100,000 reserve soldiers and evacuating 53 villages

The Israeli decision played a decisive role in the timing and specifications of Hezbollah's entry into the battlefield. Hours before the party launched its first salvoes on the night of March 1-2, field reports from the British newspaper The Guardian reported that the Israeli army estimated the mobilization of about 100,000 reserve soldiers, with a large portion of them being transferred to the border with Lebanon in anticipation of the expansion of the war in the north.

In parallel, the army issued evacuation orders to residents of between 53 and 55 villages and towns in the south and the Bekaa, amid talk that residents were required to move 1,000 meters away from their villages, and the army warned that staying near party sites would “endanger life.”

These steps are not purely defensive measures, but rather a complex strategic message:

From this angle, Hezbollah, according to analyzes by specialists at the Alma Research Center, is entering the confrontation as it tries to pressure it to force it to accept a watered-down version of its biased decision, or push it into a costly combat experience that will weaken it further, while Hezbollah insists that any decision will not be understood in its environment as “submission,” but rather as “defense.”

The balance of mutual vulnerability: Why do both sides choose limited escalation?

The irony is that both parties - Hezbollah and Israel - enter this round from a position of “restrained power” and not from a position of “absolute superiority.”

Hence, “calculated escalation” seems to be the logical intersection:

The party launches missile barrages and marches and announces “joining the battle” in revenge for Khamenei and support for Iran, without opening all its reserves or pushing the “Radwan” military unit into large-scale incursions.

In this sense, Hezbollah's decision is not the decision of an organization that is reassured of its strength, but rather the decision of an organization that is besieged between an axis demanding that it defend its position (Iran), an enemy that threatens to complete its destruction if it becomes involved, and a collapsed Lebanese environment that warns it of a new war, as many Lebanese analysts and politicians express.

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