Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam accused Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem of “serving Israel” rather than “Lebanon’s sovereignty” on Tuesday, turning around accusations that Hezbollah supporters have repeatedly directed at state officials engaged in talks to end the war with Jerusalem.
The accusation came hours before the seventh round of US-backed talks between Beirut and Jerusalem and after Qassem accused Beirut of making “free concessions” to Israel, demanding it instead “open the door to dialogue with the resistance.”
“The truth, however, is that the greatest service rendered to Israel has been provided by those who unilaterally dragged Lebanon into the absurd wartime adventures of the ‘support front,’ giving Israel pretexts to attack our country, violate its sovereignty, destroy its cities and villages, kill its residents and displace hundreds of thousands,” Salam wrote on X/Twitter.
The Iran-backed terror group first attacked Israel on October 8, 2023, a day after its Hamas allies invaded southern Israel and murdered over 1,200 people. The fragile ceasefire that took effect in November 2024 was ended by Hezbollah in March 2026, when it launched an attack in response to the killing of the Islamic regime’s Ali Khamenei.
Salam said that “dialogue and unity can only be built through the courage to acknowledge the facts, however bitter they may be, and to take responsibility for the reckless choices whose heavy price the Lebanese continue to pay.”
“Those who monopolized the decision to go to war and still seek to seize the state’s decision, tying Lebanon to external calculations and axes while disregarding the interests of their own community, as well as those of Lebanese as a whole, are in no position to hand out certificates of patriotism, let alone sovereignty,” Salam wrote.
Researcher says war weakened Hezbollah
Asked whether Hezbollah’s actions had “served” Israel, Harel Chorev, a senior researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center and a historian of the Middle East, told The Jerusalem Post that Hezbollah’s attacks had indeed led to “historic milestones” for the IDF.
“The war was actually terrible for Hezbollah,” he said, noting that it had led to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general of 32 years, in September 2024, along with most of the group’s senior leadership.
The war was the result of “the hubris of Nasrallah,” who dragged Hezbollah into the war to pay its “dues” to Iran’s axis, he explained. Hezbollah became bolder as the months of war went on, though Israel’s quick gains made it clear to the group that the decision “was a total miscalculation.”
Those high-level assassinations “broke the spirit of Hezbollah supporters,” he said, adding that many were still searching for the “new Nasrallah” to save the group and push them forward.
Chorev said he doubted much of Hezbollah’s Shiite support base would deradicalize, as most had spent decades subjected to the group’s indoctrination. Though not ideologically separated, many have had to accept that the cost of supporting such a group is losing their infrastructure.
“They lost 24 villages, which were probably totally demolished because of their infrastructure, because they had so much subterranean infrastructure,” he continued, assuring that there was no “punitive” cause of their loss, but a natural consequence of allowing Hezbollah to expand as they had that could potentially see communities less willing to see such structures rebuilt.
Hezbollah faces growing political isolation
On the political stage, Hezbollah has also lost tremendously as polls indicate a significant portion of Lebanon’s population supports making an agreement with Israel, he continued, leaving Hezbollah “isolated.”
A poll conducted by the International Information Company in Lebanon in May found that 84% of Druze, 77% of Maronites, and 72% of Orthodox Christians wanted a peace deal with Israel.
Frustrations with Hezbollah and Iranian interference in Lebanon were further brought to light in June when 400 Lebanese public figures joined the “A Call to Save Lebanon” initiative, calling for only state actors to hold arms and for negotiations to be carried out by the state.
Chorev said it was important to steer away from “childish expectations” that Hezbollah could ever be eliminated militarily, but said that it would take years to recover its leadership, commanders, and infrastructure, and Israel is unlikely to allow such a reconstruction to move ahead smoothly.