The Iran War Spreads to Lebanon
This weekend, after Israel and the United States assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian government promised vengeance, swearing to “strike you with such painful blows that you will beg for mercy.” Across the Middle East, a network of Iranian allies known as the Axis of Resistance went on notice. The paramilitary group Hezbollah was the first to act—despite pleas from the Lebanese government to stay out of the war. Hezbollah had been quiescent since November, 2024, when it agreed to a ceasefire with Israel that ended a vicious fourteen-month conflict; during the ceasefire, Hezbollah had carried out one attack, while Israel had sent thousands of drones over the border and launched near-daily strikes that killed more than three hundred and fifty Lebanese, including children. On Sunday, at around midnight Beirut time, Hezbollah sent what it described as a “barrage of precision missiles and a swarm of drones” toward an Israeli missile-defense site south of Haifa. The projectiles failed to reach their target, but the Israeli military struck back fiercely. After issuing evacuation notices for fifty-three towns in southern Lebanon, it pummelled targets from the border to the southern suburbs of Beirut. By daybreak, the death toll was at least thirty-one.
In Beirut, a familiar, traumatic routine set in. Schools closed, and an exodus of people fleeing the attacks jammed the streets with traffic, trapping drivers for hours. Apartment buildings were felled by air strikes, and smoke billowed from the blasts; the buzz of Israeli drones filled the air. But there were crucial differences. The previous war had been initiated by Hezbollah in solidarity with the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. This time, many Lebanese were less willing to accept Hezbollah’s decision to engage Israel. And, this time, the Lebanese government openly turned on Hezbollah.
On Monday, after an emergency cabinet session, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, visibly irate, told reporters that Hezbollah had mounted its attack in defiance of “the majority of the Lebanese.” The cabinet adopted a stricture “prohibiting any military or security activity by Hezbollah, deeming them illegal and obligating the party to surrender its weapons to the Lebanese state.” Security forces were ordered to apprehend anyone who attempted military activities from southern Lebanon. The country’s President, General Joseph Aoun, added that Hezbollah had given Israel “an excuse” to attack Lebanon, saying, “Those who launched the rockets bear sole responsibility.” Even Hezbollah’s closest ally, the speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, supported the cabinet’s decisions.
Mohammad Raad, the head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, responded that evening. The Lebanese, he claimed, “were expecting a resolution to prohibit aggression, but instead are faced with a resolution prohibiting resistance to aggression.” He argued that, given the state’s “impotence” against Israeli incursions, there was “no justification” for censuring Hezbollah, and he warned the government against “creating additional problems that would fuel the state of boiling tension.”
In Beirut, questions swirled: Could the state enforce a ban on Hezbollah’s armed wing without bloodshed? Had Hezbollah squandered the last of its political capital? Observers suggest a few plausible scenarios. There could be an explosive domestic confrontation between Hezbollah and the state’s security forces. Or Hezbollah could wait for parliamentary elections, scheduled for May, in the hope that more sympathetic leaders will be voted in (although the President described the ban on Hezbollah’s military activities as irreversible, and elections may be delayed). Or the government might set aside its differences with Hezbollah as Israel intensifies its campaign in Lebanon.
On Tuesday, Israeli ground troops stormed across the border. (Israeli forces already occupy five positions captured during the previous war, in addition to other southern territory that they have held for decades.) The Lebanese Army, which is supplied by the U.S., is not authorized to engage Israel except in self-defense; it withdrew some troops from the area. The next day, Israel issued evacuation orders for dozens of villages south of the Litani River, an area extending some thirty kilometres from the border. On Thursday, it followed up with an unprecedented evacuation notice for Beirut’s southern suburbs, a densely populated area home to hundreds of thousands of people. (Prior notices have indicated specific structures, not entire areas.) As drones circled overhead, messages spread on WhatsApp, warning people to open their windows so that they wouldn’t be shattered by blasts. The city fell into mayhem as panicked residents fled. Hours later, another forced-evacuation order was issued, for several towns in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. More than ninety thousand Lebanese have already been displaced. At least a hundred have been killed.
The Lebanese front is bleeding into a larger war across the Middle East. After the U.S. and Israel hammered Iranian nuclear sites last June, Iran offered a performative response: it struck U.S. bases only after providing enough warning for them to be evacuated first. This time, Iran has said that there are “no red lines.” Although many Iranian leaders have been killed, the regime remains intact, with no visible defections. The assassination of Khamenei, an octogenarian whose ideology considers martyrdom a religious reward, has galvanized his supporters. Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said that his country will not negotiate. Tehran began retaliating against Israel and the U.S., striking bases and installations in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Qatar, Jordan, and elsewhere. The U.S. Embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were struck by drones. So was the consulate in Dubai. Air-raid sirens are blaring across the region.
Though Hezbollah is battered after the previous war with Israel, it remains the vanguard of an Axis of Resistance that includes Yemen’s Houthis, Palestinian groups, and numerous Iraqi militias. An Iraqi militia commander who recently attended meetings in Tehran told me that the Iranians were ready for a “very long war,” which they had “calmly and extensively prepared” for. In recent days, some of Iraq’s armed factions have launched attacks on U.S. interests—in Iraq and, the groups claim, in Kuwait and Jordan. The militias have sustained casualties in counterattacks. Like other Axis forces, many of the Iraqi militias have been weakened since the war in Gaza began, but the commander told me that the “circle of resistance” was expanding with each new escalation.
The Iraqi state is proceeding carefully. It has condemned the attacks on Iran and on Iraqi militias; at the same time, it has asked armed factions in Iraq to refrain from strikes without orders from the state. Baghdad fears that instability in Iran, one of its largest trading partners, will have devastating economic effects. Iran has already effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz—a major conduit for shipments of oil, which funds most of Iraq’s national budget. Yemen’s Houthis also retain the ability to resume their siege on shipping in the Red Sea. Oil prices and shipping costs are rising.
Iran faces what is widely considered the strongest military in the world, alongside Israel’s technologically advanced forces; France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have indicated that they may join the campaign, too. But small, agile forces can still inflict harm, particularly in battles that they consider existential. Tehran’s strikes are already draining Washington’s supply of air-defense interceptors. On Monday, the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, lamented that, in a month, Iran can produce more than a hundred ballistic missiles and field thousands of drones; in the same time, the U.S. can deliver only six or seven interceptor units.
On Tuesday, Hezbollah amplified its campaign, launching drones and rockets at military sites in Israel and at Israeli Merkava tanks that had entered Lebanon. It also said that it had downed a drone. Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, announced that he’d ordered his military to seize additional positions in southern Lebanon. On Wednesday night, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, made his first televised remarks since the front reopened. He said that Hezbollah’s weapons weren’t up for debate. He urged the Lebanese people “not to stab the resistance in the back during a period of confrontation and war” but to instead unite and “prioritize confronting this enemy. After that, we can debate our other issues.”
As Hezbollah engages in a new war, the question of its motivations is crucial. Why react to Khamenei’s death and not to the many Israeli attacks during the ceasefire—especially now that there is a huge U.S. military force deployed to the region? Qassem, in his speech, claimed that Hezbollah had preëmpted an Israeli escalation. “Read the Israeli media and the statements of some officials,” he said. “They prepared for this aggression. They identified the targets and called up a hundred thousand reservists.” (The Israel Defense Forces has said that its preparations were defensive.)
Amal Saad, a Hezbollah expert and a lecturer in politics and international relations at Cardiff University, argued on social media that Hezbollah’s decision was not a gamble, because “a gamble presupposes something of value left to lose.” Given Israel’s violations of the ceasefire and a Lebanese government that the party sees as “collaborationist,” Hezbollah was faced with the choice to either fight back or face “slow annihilation.”
Saad, reached by phone in London, acknowledged that Hezbollah’s supporters would bear the brunt of its reëngagement, but she said that they had also suffered during the ceasefire, as residents of border villages were unable to return and rebuild. The question wasn’t whether there would be “war or no war,” Saad told me, but whether the war would be fought on Hezbollah’s terms or on Israel’s. “What the community appears to be demanding is a commitment that this intervention will be consequential enough to justify the costs that it will inevitably extract,” she said.
Saad proposed that Hezbollah had two reasons to reëngage now. Having restrained itself while Israel attacked during the ceasefire, Hezbollah could say that it had given Beirut’s diplomacy a chance. More significantly, she said, “acting during the ceasefire violations would have meant fighting alone, on unfavorable terms, without the regional cover the Iran war now provides and the possibility of a more durable and favorable ceasefire agreement.”
The Axis of Resistance, she explained, had adopted a “decentralized mosaic defense,” which suggested that “Hezbollah’s military operations are not part of a joint-operations room” with other Axis factions “but are being conducted autonomously on the operational level—though aligned strategically with Iran in terms of timing and, likely, pre-agreed escalation ladders.” The key question, Saad said, “was how far the U.S. and Israel are willing to push in response, and whether they have correctly read the threshold beyond which the Axis, and particularly Hezbollah, was always going to conclude it had nothing left to lose.” ♦