Israel’s inevitable failure to disarm Hezbollah

Since the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to expel the PLO, Hezbollah has been a thorn in Israel’s side. Born of that very invasion, the Party — as it is called — waged a relentless guerrilla war against Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon, backed, financed, and trained by Iran. Its ideological allegiance to Tehran was never a secret. In a remarkably candid 2016 speech, the late Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah declared openly what enemies had long alleged: “Hezbollah’s budget, its income, its expenses, everything it eats and drinks, its weapons and rockets, come from the Islamic Republic of Iran.” In a separate address to Iranian nationals in Beirut, Nasrallah went further, proclaiming that “We were born with Iran’s Islamic revolution and acquired our existence and life with the Islamic revolution,” adding that his organization’s devotion to the Iranian Supreme Leader surpassed even that of many Iranians. He warned that “we will consider every hand that tries to take our weapons as an Israeli hand.”

That loyalty came at a profound cost to Hezbollah’s Arab credibility. The Party fought alongside Iranian forces against Iraq in the 1980–1988 war, earning the enduring hatred of Iraqis who viewed it as a Shiite militia in foreign service. Far more damaging was its intervention in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad. Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, one of Hezbollah’s fiercest critics, put the damage bluntly in 2025: “Hezbollah’s actions have effectively set Lebanon back a hundred years, if not more.”

Following the 2006 war with Israel, Hezbollah emerged as a formidable fighting force, its arsenal swollen with Iranian precision missiles capable of striking deep inside Israel. The catastrophic miscalculation came when it joined Hamas’s campaign after October 7, 2023, absorbing devastating Israeli strikes that decimated its missile stocks, ammunition depots, and entire command structure, including Nasrallah himself. Yet the organization’s successor made the group’s intentions unmistakable.

The new Secretary General, Naim Qassem, vowed that the Party would not “relinquish its weapons or its defenses,” dismissing the Lebanese government’s high-level engagement with Israel as “a gratuitous and humiliating concession.”

Qassem framed any handover of arms in existential terms, insisting: “Those who call for submitting arms practically demand submitting them to Israel… We will not submit to Israel.”

In a rare interview on American television, senior Hezbollah political official Wafiq Safa echoed the same defiance. “We don’t believe that there are any guarantees with the Israelis, but for the weapons that we possess,” he said, framing the arsenal not as a threat but as the only reliable deterrent.

A senior Hezbollah commander in the Beqaa Valley, Hussein al-Nimr, reinforced the message, declaring that the movement would never lay down its weapons. At the same time, Israeli attacks persisted in violation of the ceasefire.

Washington and Beirut read the situation differently. US analyst David Daoud of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies offered a sober assessment: “Hezbollah explicitly and repeatedly rejected disarmament after the November 2024 ceasefire took effect. Naim Qassem’s stance is neither new nor surprising. The question isn’t whether Hezbollah will suddenly change, but rather what Lebanon intends to do about it.” Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, elected after Hezbollah’s military reverses, has tried to navigate the contradiction. When Qassem accused his government of treason for engaging with Israel, Aoun fired back: “What we are doing is not treason. Rather, treason is committed by those who take their country to war to achieve foreign interests.”

The impasse is structural, not merely political. The Taif Agreement, which ended the Lebanese Civil War, called for the disbanding of all Lebanese militias. Hezbollah, however, was informally exempted because it was a resistance force fighting Israeli occupation.

That exemption has never been rescinded in any meaningful way. Hezbollah’s condition for transferring weapons to the Lebanese Army remains unchanged: complete Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory to the internationally recognized 1949 armistice lines. Israel, for its part, has continued airstrikes on Lebanese territory, giving Hezbollah precisely the justification it needs to hold its arsenal. An anonymous Israeli official acknowledged the bind, stating simply that disarming Hezbollah “will be very hard and that they do not know if it will succeed.”

Security analyst Jonathan Lord of the Center for a New American Security cut through the strategic pretense in a pointed observation about the Iran-Hezbollah relationship that reveals why the guns will never go silent: “Hezbollah exists to protect Iran, not the other way around.” As long as Tehran requires a loaded weapon on Israel’s northern border, Hezbollah will remain exactly that — armed, embedded, and indispensable to a patron that has never once prioritized Lebanese sovereignty over Iranian strategic interest. Hezbollah views its mission as nothing less than the expulsion of the Israeli occupying force from every inch of Lebanon, no matter the treasure, time, and lives spent to achieve that goal.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.