From the beginning, Iran understood that an investment in Hezbollah would give it a strategic opportunity to attack Israel without risking a direct confrontation on its own soil. Thus, Hezbollah gradually became Iran’s most successful export item.
The turning point was the year 2000, when the Israeli army withdrew from southern Lebanon after eighteen years. Hezbollah presented the move as its first major victory over the “Zionist entity,” which brought it enormous political capital in the eyes of both the Shia population and the wider Arab world.
The group immediately invested this capital in building a parallel state. While the official authorities in Beirut were falling into economic agony due to corruption, Hezbollah was building schools, hospitals and, above all, a massive military infrastructure with Iranian money, which the Lebanese state army could not match.
When another major war broke out between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006, the world believed that UN Security Council Resolution No. 1701 will restore order. The resolution clearly stated that southern Lebanon was to be free of any armed presence except the official Lebanese army and UN troops. However, the reality was the opposite.
Hezbollah ignored the resolution and built an underground world of tunnels, warehouses and launchers under the noses of peacekeepers. Over the past twenty years, southern Lebanon has essentially become one large military base masked by civilian infrastructure.
Everything was made worse by the attack by Hamas from Gaza
For Israel, this situation became unsustainable after October 7, 2023. The Hamas attack from Gaza showed that the threat of invasion across the border is not theoretical, but real. Hezbollah opted for a war of attrition and began shelling northern Israel, leading to something Israel had never experienced before: the forced displacement of its own population within its own state.
Tens of thousands of Israelis had to leave their homes in the Galilee because the threat of rockets and ambushes was a daily occurrence. For every government in Jerusalem, regardless of political color, the return of these people has become the number one priority.
What’s next?
The years 2024 and 2025 were marked by a gradual escalation, when Israel moved from the defensive to the targeted elimination of the Hezbollah command. High-tech operations, including the 2024 pager operation that killed dozens of Hezbollah members, have shown that Israel has detailed information about the militant movement’s internal structure. While the elimination of longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah that same year dealt a severe blow to the group, it did not remove the thousands of rockets and trained fighters buried in the south.
This brings us to the current situation in 2026. Israel’s strategy has changed from surgical strikes to full-scale war with a clear objective: to force the creation of a buffer zone that diplomacy has failed to secure for two decades. The Israeli army is systematically advancing towards the Lítání river today.
For Israel, it is not just an occupation in the traditional sense of the word, but an attempt to physically eliminate Hezbollah’s military presence within reach of Israel’s borders. The army destroys not only weapons, but also logistics – tunnels that lead directly under Israeli villages and command centers hidden in the basements of residential buildings in southern Beirut.
The biggest victim of this development remains Lebanon as a state. The country, which is mired in the worst economic crisis in history, has no control over its territory. The Beirut government is just a helpless witness as its country becomes a battlefield for the goals defined in Tehran.
Iran uses Lebanon as a “proxy” piece on the chessboard that it is willing to sacrifice in order to maintain pressure on Israel and strengthen its negotiating position in the wider region. The Lebanese have thus become hostages of an organization that decides on war and peace without their consent.
Netanyahu: We are staying in Lebanon
Israeli operations in 2026 are conducted with the belief that no ceasefire will work if Hezbollah remains on the southern border. The experience of 2006 showed that paper agreements without a strong enforcement mechanism are pointless.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces “remain in Lebanon in a reinforced security buffer zone.”
“This is a security belt ten kilometers deep that is much stronger, more intense, more continuous and more solid than the one we had before. That is where we are and we will not leave,” .
Today, therefore, we are following the effort to create a new reality on the ground, where the security of northern Israel will be guaranteed by military superiority, not by international treaties that have failed in the past.
As long as Lebanon’s sovereignty remains an empty concept and Hezbollah functions as an extended arm of Iranian geopolitics, the region will remain in a vicious circle, according to Middle East experts. Israel will attack to eliminate threats, and Hezbollah will try to survive in order to renew the threat.
The question remains whether the physical displacement of the militias beyond the Litání River will bring permanent peace, or just another temporary silence before the next phase of the war, which began in 1948 and continues to this day.
