Hezbollah’s Difficult War: How Southern Lebanon Rewrote the Rules of Battle

Hezbollah is not merely resisting. In the strictly military sense, it is reshaping the grammar of war itself, fighting through flexible rules of engagement that shift with time, terrain, and circumstance.

There is no fixed defense in the familiar sense, nor even a clearly flexible one. There are no raids or fire-support patterns as defined in military manuals. Everything in the south today feels different from what came before, and that shift has taken place not over decades, but in barely more than a year.

On the Israeli side, the result has been unmistakable shock, accompanied by accusations, questions, and even ridicule traded between settlers, the army, the security establishment, and the political leadership. Only the “ceasefire” eased that shock, giving the occupation army the operational breathing room it needed.

But how does Hezbollah fight now, and why does it say so little? Militarily, the party confines itself to brief statements, stripped of the inflated claims that often accompany Arab war communiques. They serve their narrow purpose — reporting the operation — while the psychological war is left to other releases and platforms operating in parallel.

Whoever learns faster wins
Hezbollah military commanders acknowledge that the party has learned much from its enemy. In their telling, the well-known Islamic maxim that “wisdom is the believer’s lost property” helped justify studying Israeli methods, adapting them, and in some areas moving ahead of them.

The 2024 battle forced Lebanon’s resistance fighters to confront what more than sixteen years without a full-scale clash with the occupation had changed. The long absence of direct combat, compounded by the fallout from Israel’s security war, had produced a battlefield very different from the one Hezbollah last fought on.

There had been considerable optimism that Hezbollah’s experience in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, followed by its close study of the Russian-Ukrainian war, had equipped the party with a hybrid combat doctrine blending conventional military methods with guerrilla warfare.

That optimism did not survive the war that followed. Israel caught Hezbollah off guard, confronting it with a mix of military and intelligence strategies that left it paralyzed, though not defeated.

‘Five rings’
In Operation Arrows of the North, between 23 and 27 September 2024, Israel applied the “five rings” principle developed by US military theorist John A. Warden III, a security source explains to The Cradle. This became the clearest conceptual framework for planning and execution, because the operation was never limited to tactical strikes. Its aim was to create systemic effects on the enemy’s ability to fight and recover.

The practical lesson is that dispersed tactical victories can be turned into strategic effect when strikes are managed as part of a synchronized and integrated plan targeting the enemy’s power structure as one interconnected package: command, intelligence networks, logistical structures, civilian support bases, and field forces, rather than random or isolated targets.

This is where Warden’s theory becomes useful. Warden is regarded as one of the most prominent military thinkers of the twentieth century. A US Air Force officer who retired with the rank of colonel, he gained prominence after publishing The Air Campaign in 1988, turning his thesis at the National Defense University into an integrated operational theory.

For Warden, war is not merely a confrontation between opposing armies. It is a process aimed at dismantling the enemy system from the inside out.

He therefore divided the enemy’s overall structure into five rings: political and military leadership at the center, serving as the directing mind and decision-maker; vital systems, including command, control, communications, and the management of energy and information; infrastructure, such as transport networks, energy systems, and logistical facilities; the population, which provides the material and moral base for sustaining war; and field forces, the outermost ring, most visible in combat.

The essence of the theory is that synchronized, concentrated strikes against several rings simultaneously can cause systemic paralysis greater than that of conventional bombing against isolated targets. The idea is not limited to air power, as was initially assumed.

It is a framework for setting operational priorities and sequencing strikes to produce functional collapse within the enemy system, breaking its internal balance faster than a gradual drain on its resources.

Israel’s five-ring strike on Hezbollah
When the “five rings” are used against adversaries that lack maneuver flexibility or alternative command networks, their effect multiplies. A comprehensive strike can impose human and institutional costs that reshape the political and operational arena at the same time.

Israel proceeded from this premise through an integrated execution structure built on intelligence gathering, precise timing, and coordination between different instruments.

First, real-time intelligence — a mix of satellite imagery, aerial and field reconnaissance, signals intelligence, and human sources — gave strike planners a dynamic picture of target maps and supply chains.

Second, these inputs were used to build synchronized strike packages, including air, missile, and precision-guided attacks, designed to hit command and communications nodes, ammunition depots, and supply routes within a short window that limited the enemy’s ability to reorganize.

Third, Israel moved to consolidate the results through continued intelligence activity and persistent surveillance, hitting resupply networks, preventing the restoration of operational capacity during the recovery window, and maintaining a political and operational price for any redeployment.

At the same time, the field impact of the Israeli attack cannot be separated from its political and social dimensions. Disabling the enemy’s capabilities may produce internal political shifts: popular pressure, fractures inside alliances, or changes in local balances of power.

These may then generate regional dynamics that affect the attacker’s own ability to sustain operations. This was the additional outcome Israel was betting on. It got nothing from it.

In this context, Oded Eilam wrote in Israel Hayom on 17 April 2026 that Israel must abandon what he called the defensive posture of “degradation” and move instead to a strategy of “dismantling and reassembly.” The steps required after Israel’s failures in Lebanon, he argued, involve combining military, economic, and political action into “a decisive fist,” with all efforts focused on achieving a decisive outcome.

Eilam then maps the arenas he believes Israel should target. Beirut’s southern suburb, he writes, is not merely a “Shia stronghold,” but a “multi-layered center” of leadership, propaganda, community institutions, and, at times, financing infrastructure — the place where Hezbollah functions most clearly as an “organization within society,” not just an armed force.

The Bekaa, in his reading, is less a political symbol than a depth zone of social presence, logistics, financing, and smuggling routes, while Baalbek-Hermel forms Hezbollah’s “strategic rear,” with training centers, weapons storage, the Damascus–Baalbek supply axis, missile-production workshops, and rocket depots.

He pairs this with calls to strike Hezbollah’s welfare networks, intensify US-led political warfare, outlaw the party, dismiss its ministers, close the Iranian embassy, apply Gulf economic pressure on Beirut, and encourage internal Lebanese alternatives to Hezbollah’s monopoly.

Lebanon’s new shock
Any serious assessment of the offensive campaign must include social and political indicators, not only firepower or logistics. These indicators determine whether the window created by a strike can be turned into lasting change in the enemy’s position, or whether it will remain a temporary opening that is quickly exhausted.

This is where Israel fell into the trap of numbers and exaggeration, becoming a victim of its own psychological war against the resistance.

All of this was supposed to make the next battle easy, or at least short and contained. Instead, for nearly a month and a half, Israel found itself replaying the same scenario its army had faced in 2024, losing soldiers, equipment, and vehicles to enforce a reality the occupation believed it had already settled.

All of the above was supposed to lead to an easy victory in the next battle, or at least to an easy and rapid battle, not to a repeat, over nearly a month and a half, of the same scenario the Israeli army faced in 2024, which drained soldiers, equipment, and vehicles in order to consolidate a reality that the occupation thought was already behind it.

What stands out is that Israel tried to repeat the same method of action in 2026, “but it made several mistakes,” a military source in the resistance tells The Cradle. The first was its firm conclusion that Arrows of the North, followed by thousands of strikes over 15 months, had produced a weakened Hezbollah that could barely stand in any later confrontation.

The second mistake, according to the source, was treating Hezbollah’s visible body as the main and only body. “Israel proceeded on the basis that it now knew everything — how could it not, when it had killed the party’s historic secretary-general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and continued its intelligence encirclement?” he says.

“Qualitative superiority took over Israeli minds at every level, from decision-makers to the lowest military rank on the ground.”

On this specific point, the party worked intelligently to “let the Israeli live his theory to the end,” the source says, while building small parallel bodies operating in separate rings:

“The person who transports the missile or drone from the Bekaa or Beirut to the south is no longer the same person who delivers it to the relevant facility. All chains were separated from one another — manufacturing, assembly, delivery, fortification, and so on.”

The same source explains:

“The party’s military commanders, including some who were martyred in assassinations during the months of ceasefire before the current confrontation, worked in absolute secrecy, to the point that the political level itself no longer had clear answers to many detailed questions as it once did. We can say that we returned to the 1980s and 1990s, when the secret of our success was that we worked amid a hostile environment on every side: a large part of the Lebanese state, the Syrian authorities, international forces, the Israeli occupation, and endless western and American intelligence agencies.”

Israeli admissions pile up
In an article titled “To be two steps ahead of the enemy,” published by Yedioth Ahronoth on 7 April 2026, Shahar Segal writes that the difference between September 2024’s Operation Arrows of the North and the current reality is “not always understood.”

In September, he argues, the Israeli army initiated the operation, Hezbollah was surprised, and the party had not prepared for the possibility of a deep strike against its chain of command.

“Therefore,” he writes, “it failed to fulfill its purpose.” This time, Segal says, “the picture is reversed”: Hezbollah had prepared precisely for that scenario, chose the initiative at the decisive moment, and has therefore managed to function effectively even against the Israeli army’s war machine.

Segal then returns to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” doctrine. The idea, he writes, was “simple, almost cruel in its simplicity”: not to convince the enemy, but to break his hope by building an unshakeable reality of force, an “iron wall” against which resistance would repeatedly break. Only when the other side internalizes that there is no path to victory, he argues, will it stop dreaming of decision and move toward negotiations. “This does not happen in one day,” Segal adds. “Last time, it took about 25 years.”

He adds, “The difference between victory in battle and historical victory.” Threats do not disappear, they change — and the most important change must be Israel’s own initiative, depth, and forward thinking. This is so that Tel Aviv is not merely reacting, but shaping events “two steps ahead of the enemy.”

The results appeared in Israeli security officials’ admission, reported on 4 April 2026, that the current Lebanon campaign could end without Hezbollah being disarmed.

“We can end the current campaign without Hezbollah being disarmed,” Israeli military officials told Mako, adding that dismantling the organization is “a strategic objective that will be achieved over time, and not only through military means,” requiring economic pressure, Hezbollah’s severance from Iran, internal Lebanese pressure, and political arrangements.

One senior officer put it more bluntly: disarming Hezbollah would require Israel “to occupy all of Lebanon and go village by village,” adding that “disarming Hezbollah is not the objective of the war.”

For this reason, the army stressed “humility” in setting objectives. The new strategy focuses instead on creating something resembling a security belt through the wide-scale destruction of infrastructure in the first line of border villages, similar to the “yellow line” model applied in the Gaza Strip. The aim is to prevent residents from returning to these areas in any settlement, especially in locations used by Hezbollah to launch rockets and carry out attacks.

Against the backdrop of this retreat, Shira Barbivay-Shaham wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth that the cases of Iran in Operation Rising Lion, Hezbollah in the current round, and Hamas before 7 October point to “a continuing failure and difficulty” in the Israeli intelligence community’s ability to assess enemy readiness after a round of fighting.

This failure, she argued, applies both to intentions — the extent to which the enemy has been deterred from entering another round and how deterrence shapes its leadership’s decision-making — and to capabilities, including the speed with which it can restore missile production, weapons, and military force.

Before the 2026 war
Before examining the current battle and answering the urgent questions raised by this ongoing war, it is necessary to review the situation that preceded it.

This account draws on special field meetings with Hezbollah fighters and some of their commanders who survived the previous war.

On the resistance side, the first point is that fighters and capabilities remained under fire without direct responses to the occupation. “Part of the non-response was intended to avoid revealing the new method of action and to preserve ambiguity,” according to field officials.

“But this meant enduring sacrifices, especially in the exposed and already known apparatus, in order to preserve the new recruits and what was below the radar.”

The second point is the loss of important commanders and cadres who are difficult to replace quickly; interruptions in the specialized training chain, which had taken place in Syria, through Syria, in Iran, and inside Lebanon itself; and logistical difficulties in manufacturing, in addition to security, technical, and financial difficulties.

The third is the erosion of morale, while the leadership asked everyone to remain patient despite near-daily assassinations, the continued displacement of border villages, the absence of any horizon for reconstruction, and talk of major political solutions imposed at the expense of southerners.

The fourth is a strained social reality caused by the difficulty of displacement options if war resumed, heavy political and media pressure, and repeated talk of a “major defeat,” as the state accelerated steps to end the armed presence by declaring the phase south of the Litani complete and opening the phase north of the river.

On the Israeli side, a key factor was the breathing room the occupation army had between the Gaza truce in October 2025 and the outbreak of war on Iran in March 2026 — almost four uninterrupted months. This period allowed it initially to restore force readiness, rotate and rest reservists, resume scheduled training, reevaluate all fronts, and finalize a series of military and security appointments and adjustments.

The second is the implementation of scheduled and emergency maneuvers and exercises, local and external, across multiple scenarios. Among the most prominent were landing exercises in the West Bank, whose geography in some respects resembles the southern, Bekaa, and Syrian environments, suggesting that the army was preparing for any major offensive or defensive action.

The third was a renewed sense of confidence inside Israel’s military-security complex. Despite the length of the war and its mounting social and economic costs, the army, security establishment, and connected defense industries were still riding a wave of victory euphoria, convinced that any front could be brought to heel.

The fourth was the visible push by the Ministry of Defense and Israeli arms manufacturers to replenish depleted munitions and expand local production, alongside the rollout of the Iron Beam laser system, presented as the start of a new “laser age” for protecting Israel’s skies, and intense intelligence activity across all fronts.

Hezbollah under constraint
Hezbollah and its men were therefore forced to operate under a severe imbalance: lost deterrence, deep wounds, an open security war, and a diminished arsenal of strengths.

They also faced a harsh field and security reality. Surveillance was constant — from the air, space, sea, and agents on the ground. Israel had restored the border-monitoring systems Hezbollah had worked hard to destroy during the support front, while American, British, French, and Arab intelligence activity in Lebanon intensified from the air and on the ground.

There were also building demolitions, sudden incursions, kidnappings, and captures. The South’s lower population density deprived the resistance of a human cover that had long aided its work. Large quantities of weapons were confiscated or destroyed, either through direct Israeli action or by international forces and the Lebanese army at American request. On top of this came political, security, and logistical restrictions imposed by the army and the state.

All of this came amid a difficult reality of armament and funding. Traditional funding and armament lines — Iran to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon — had been almost completely severed. Reliance on self-manufacturing was difficult, and major efforts were required to restore what had been damaged in previous confrontations, including the support-front war and Hezbollah’s 2024 Battle of the ‘Possessors of Great Strength’ — the name it gave to the ground battle in southern Lebanon.

There was also a full reassessment of the supply chain for military, security, logistical, and communications acquisitions, with the work governed by the principle of doubting everything until proven otherwise.

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