Hezbollah is weaker today, but the possibility of another war has not disappeared.
In the spirit of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, Israel’s borders must be secured by unmistakable and enduring military strength. Israel should remain prepared for war as though conflict could erupt tomorrow, with substantial offensive combat forces permanently deployed along its borders capable not only of stopping a surprise attack, but of immediately seizing the initiative and carrying the fight into enemy territory.
Weakened but not out
Hezbollah in 2026 is not the Hezbollah that Israel faced in 2023. The organization has suffered a profound military setback, one that should neither be minimized nor mistaken for a permanent outcome.
Before October 7, Hezbollah was estimated to possess 150,000-200,000 rockets and missiles, including advanced and precision-guided weapons. Its Radwan Force comprised 5,000 elite operatives trained for a large-scale invasion, seizing military posts and Israeli communities, killing civilians and soldiers, and taking hostages.
The picture in 2026 is dramatically different: Hezbollah’s rocket and missile stockpile is estimated at roughly 20,000, while approximately 70% of its firepower has been damaged. Its attack-drone arsenal, once estimated at 2,000-2,500, is assessed at roughly 1,000 after partial replenishment. Extensive tunnels, weapons depots, launchers, and command posts have been exposed or destroyed.
The human toll has been equally consequential. Leader Hassan Nasrallah was eliminated, and thousands of operatives were killed or wounded, and the Radwan Force suffered severe losses. Its capacity to execute the invasion it had prepared has been significantly degraded.
These are strategic achievements, not tactical footnotes. Israel has fundamentally altered the military balance it faced in 2023.
Israel’s August 25, 2024, preemptive strike against Hezbollah also illustrated an emerging security doctrine: prevention rather than containment, offense alongside defense, initiative rather than reaction, and neutralizing threats before they fully develop. Deterrence should be measured not merely by the casualties an enemy inflicts, but by imposing costs that make renewed aggression strategically unattractive.
But this is precisely where caution must begin.
No guerrilla force
Some Israeli assessments now characterize Hezbollah as a guerrilla organization. That conclusion may be premature. Its current operational pattern may resemble guerrilla warfare, but this does not necessarily constitute a lasting structural transformation, nor determine what the organization may restore over time.
Hezbollah is operating after severe losses, under sustained IDF pressure and an Israeli military presence inside southern Lebanon that creates an offensive and defensive buffer between Hezbollah and Israeli civilians. Its freedom of action is being actively constrained.
The real test comes the day after: What happens when the IDF eventually withdraws and Hezbollah regains greater room to operate?
Israel risks mistaking the effectiveness of its own military pressure for evidence of Hezbollah’s enduring weakness. That raises critical intelligence questions: What remains deeper inside Lebanon? Which weapons, infrastructure, and forces survived beyond what Israel has identified? What is Hezbollah adapting or developing outside Israel’s current field of view?
Intelligence requires humility – about what is known and what may remain unknown.
October 7 provides the most painful case study. An enemy’s observable behavior at a particular moment cannot safely become a long-term assumption about its intentions or future capacity. Adversaries learn. They decentralize, recruit, conceal, preserve knowledge, change communications, find alternative supply routes, and wait.
History reinforces the warning. On the eve of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Hezbollah possessed an estimated 15,000 rockets and missiles. Resolution 1701 followed. UNIFIL remained in Lebanon. The Lebanese Armed Forces were present. Yet Hezbollah subsequently expanded its arsenal roughly tenfold and developed near-state military capabilities, evolving into a force of an entirely different magnitude.
If Israel has now pushed Hezbollah back by many years, that is an extraordinary achievement. It is also a warning: Hezbollah has already demonstrated that it can recover from a far weaker starting point.
The First Lebanon War offers another cautionary case, this time from the radical Sunni camp. Israel drove Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat and the leadership from Beirut. Arafat later returned to Gaza through the Oslo process and publicly invoked the Treaty of al-Hudaybiyyah when discussing the agreement. The years that followed brought devastating Palestinian terrorism, including suicide bombings on Israeli buses that killed innocent civilians and helped derail efforts toward peace.
The lesson is not that diplomacy is futile. It is that agreements, ceasefires, and even severe enemy degradation cannot by themselves predict future behavior or capability. Temporary quiet must not become an illusion of permanent security.
Intertwined with Iran
The same analytical discipline is required today.
The objective cannot be another cycle in which a diminished threat is managed until it again becomes powerful enough to require war. Emerging dangers are most manageable before they acquire the infrastructure, resources and military power that make confronting them vastly more costly.
This is particularly important because Hezbollah cannot be separated from Iran. For years, its arsenal functioned as an Iranian strategic insurance policy, designed in part to constrain Israeli action against Tehran by threatening an overwhelming second front from Lebanon.
Degrading Hezbollah’s missile, drone, command and invasion systems therefore had consequences far beyond Israel’s north. The campaign became a force multiplier for Israeli freedom of action against Iran.
The Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon supply corridor has also suffered a major blow. Yet Tehran has not abandoned Hezbollah, and preserving the organization remains an Iranian interest. Supply networks adapt. Local production remains possible. New channels can emerge. The enemy studies interdiction precisely to circumvent it.
Nor is Hezbollah merely what Israel sees in southern Lebanon. Behind its armed presence lies a broader international architecture that has sustained financing, procurement and force generation. Military operations can destroy assets; durable strategic change requires disabling the machinery capable of recreating them.
Enforcing UN resolutions
Alongside continued military pressure on Hezbollah, a strong and sustained international diplomatic effort is essential to prevent the organization from rebuilding its power.
The framework for such an effort already exists. The 1989 Taif Agreement paved the way for the end of Lebanon’s civil war and the disarmament of its militias. Hezbollah was the exception: it remained armed, continued to expand its power and ultimately became stronger than the Lebanese Armed Forces.
UN Security Council resolutions 1559, 1680, and 1701 subsequently called for the disarmament of militias and the restoration of Lebanese state authority over its territory and weapons.
Yet these requirements were never implemented with regard to Hezbollah. Their implementation now requires sustained international pressure on Lebanon through a US-led diplomatic initiative. The objective extends beyond Hezbollah’s military disarmament to dismantling its political power and restoring full Lebanese sovereignty, ultimately creating the conditions for a peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel.
Israel has demonstrated exceptional intelligence and military superiority, but tactical success is not a strategic end state. Hezbollah has been severely degraded, not dismantled. The mission is not complete. What remains, and the mechanisms capable of restoring what was lost, are no less important than what Israel has destroyed.
Quantitative and qualitative assessments of enemy capabilities remain essential, but Israel cannot base its defense solely on what it believes Hezbollah can do today. Israel must maintain constant readiness for war as though conflict could erupt tomorrow, with substantial offensive forces permanently deployed along its borders as an active shield against surprise attack. No political arrangement can substitute for such preparedness.
The danger now is not underestimating Israel’s achievement. It is overestimating what that achievement guarantees.
Present weakness is measurable. Future weakness is not guaranteed.
The objective is therefore not merely to preserve a diminished Hezbollah, but to dismantle the system that enabled it to accumulate near-state military power in the first place.
Victory is not the moment when the enemy stops firing. Victory is the point at which the system that enabled it to build the threat can no longer recreate it.■
Danny Ayalon is a former Israeli deputy foreign minister, Knesset member, and ambassador to the US.
Moran Alaluf is an analyst on Middle East affairs and counterterrorism, and a specialist on Iran and Hezbollah.