For over a year, Israel, Washington and even Lebanon’s government have been speaking as if Hezbollah has been broken for good.
Yet the Lebanese armed movement is once again at war with Israel, striking its enemy in response to the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Its performance on the battlefield and ability to strike deep into Israeli territory shows that Hezbollah treated its 15 months of ceasefire with Israel not as an end to war, but as a narrow and urgent window to rebuild, reorganise and prepare for what it believed would inevitably come next.
When a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel took effect on 27 November 2024, after more than a year of conflict sparked by the Gaza war, the public narrative was blunt.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the campaign had “set back” Hezbollah “decades”, destroyed most of its rockets and eliminated its top leadership.