Shield or Sword? Hezbollah as a Guarantor of Lebanon's Sovereignty Against Israeli Military Expansion. A Historical and Geopolitical Analysis.

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Introduction

In March 2026, the Lebanese army withdrew from the southern town of Ain Ebel, a Christian town in the Bint Jbeil region, located near a UNIFIL base where, among others, Polish soldiers are stationed. The area almost immediately came within range of Israeli military operations. Seeking to create a buffer zone in southern Lebanon and push Hezbollah beyond the Litani River, the Israelis displaced approximately 600,000 residents. Israeli politicians are openly talking about moving the state border to the Litani River, which would effectively mean annexing a significant portion of the territory of a sovereign state.

In this context, a question that Lebanese politics has been asking for decades recurs: who defends Lebanon when the Lebanese state is unable to do so itself? The answer, consistently repeated by history, is Hezbollah. It's not a simple answer, nor is it free from controversy. But it's an answer that an analysis of the facts dictates.

I. The Origins of Hezbollah - the Child of the Israeli Invasion

To understand Hezbollah's role in Lebanese security policy, one must start at the beginning, and that beginning is the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Operation "Peace for Galilee," launched on June 6, 1982, under the command of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, was officially aimed at destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) infrastructure operating from Lebanese territory. In practice, Israeli forces reached as far as Beirut, laying siege to the capital and evacuating PLO fighters from Lebanon. With the tacit approval of the Israeli leadership, Christian Phalangest militias committed a massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, one of the most heinous war crimes in the Middle East. Between 800 and 3,500 civilians were killed.

Israel did not withdraw after achieving its declared objectives. It established an occupation zone in southern Lebanon, established the collaborative South Lebanon Army (SLA), and established a long-term military presence on the territory of the sovereign state. This occupation lasted eighteen years.

It was in response to this invasion, with the support of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who arrived in the Bekaa Valley in 1982, that Hezbollah was born. Its founding manifesto in 1985 explicitly defined the organization as a resistance movement against the Israeli occupation. There was no ideological abstraction here—there was a specific enemy, a specific territory, and a specific response.

Hezbollah was not created in a vacuum, nor was it an imported product of the Iranian revolution transplanted to Lebanon. It grew from the lived experience of Lebanese Shiites from the south of the country—the most forgotten and impoverished community in the Lebanese religious mosaic—who were the first to experience Israeli bombing, displacement, and repression. The Lebanese state was too weak, too divided, and too mired in its own civil war to help them. Hezbollah filled this vacuum.

II. Eighteen Years of Resistance from 1982 to 2000

The period of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon was eighteen years of asymmetric warfare in which Hezbollah gradually built up its position as the only force capable of effective resistance.

The tactics employed by Hezbollah during this period—ambushes on convoys, suicide attacks on Israeli positions, and rocket fire—were often categorized solely as terrorism by Western observers. This categorization, while not without merit in some operations, ignores a crucial context: Hezbollah operated on its own territory, occupied by a foreign army. International humanitarian law recognizes the right to armed resistance to foreign occupation, and this right was exercised here.

A key moment came when Hezbollah gradually took control of the areas from which the SLA was withdrawing. General Antuan Lahad's collaborationist army, for years perceived by Israel as a guarantor of the buffer zone's stability, began to disintegrate under the pressure of Hezbollah operations. Desertions increased, and morale plummeted.

On May 24, 2000, Israel announced its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. There was no peace treaty. There was no agreement. There was a rout, with Israeli troops and thousands of Lebanese collaborators hastily evacuating within days, and Hezbollah fighters moving into abandoned positions. The UN Secretary-General confirmed Israel's full withdrawal to recognized international borders.

Throughout the Arab and Muslim world, this withdrawal was interpreted unequivocally: for the first time in modern history, the Israeli army had been forced to retreat not by the conventional military of another state, but by a guerrilla movement. For Hezbollah, this was the founding moment of its political legend. For Lebanon, it represented the regaining of sovereignty over its own territory, a feat no other entity had been able to achieve.

III. The 2006 War - Israel's Pyrrhic Victory

In the summer of 2006, Israel once again invaded Lebanon. The immediate pretext was Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in a border incident on July 12, 2006. The Israeli response was disproportionate to the provocation (as was also evident in 2023) and, as was later revealed, was the implementation of previously prepared operational plans.

For 34 days, Israeli air and ground forces conducted intensive military operations in Lebanon. They bombed the country's infrastructure, including the Beirut airport, bridges, power plants, and residential areas. More than 1,200 Lebanese died, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Over a million people were displaced. Material damage was estimated at tens of billions of dollars.

Hezbollah responded with rocket fire into Israeli territory. Over 4,000 rockets were fired over a 34-day period, reaching Haifa and further south. For the first time in history, northern Israel experienced mass evacuations of civilians and a paralysis of daily life. Forty-four Israeli civilians and 119 soldiers were killed.

Israeli ground forces entering southern Lebanon encountered resistance they hadn't anticipated. Hezbollah, well-entrenched in the local terrain, successfully defended areas like Bint Jbeil—a city that's once again making headlines today. The Israeli ground operation suffered significant losses and failed to achieve its objectives.

The ceasefire declared on August 14, 2006, under UN Resolution 1701, was widely viewed as a diplomatic and military defeat for Israel. Hezbollah was not disarmed. Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah declared a "divine victory," and while this assessment was exaggerated, it contained a grain of truth: the organization had survived and remained combat-capable despite the might of the Israeli war machine.

Crucially, for an analysis of the Lebanese perspective, the Lebanese army remained out of combat for the entire 34 days of the conflict. Not because it didn't want to defend the country, but because it was too weak, ill-equipped, and internally divided to do so. Hezbollah was the only force standing against the Israeli army. The only one.

IV. The Structure of Lebanese Powerlessness: Why Is the State Unable to Defend Itself?

To understand the durability of Hezbollah's role as the de facto guarantor of security in southern Lebanon, it is necessary to understand the structural weakness of the Lebanese state.

Lebanon operates under a confessional system established by the National Pact of 1943 and modified by the Taif Agreement of 1989. The division of power between Maronites, Sunnis, and Shiites, entrenched in state institutions, means that every political decision requires a multi-ethnic consensus, which is extremely difficult to achieve in times of crisis. The Lebanese Army, deliberately kept weak and internally confessionally balanced, was never designed as a tool for territorial defense against external aggression.

Added to this are chronic underfunding, a multi-year economic crisis leading to the virtual collapse of the state after 2019, and, finally, political impossibility. Any decision to deploy the army would require the support of all parliamentary factions, which, given the divisions over Israel, is unrealistic.

In this vacuum—aptly dubbed the "Lebanese trapezium of weakness" by the Arabs—Hezbollah has built a parallel security system over the decades. With its own army, its own intelligence, its own logistical network, and, crucially, its own social legitimacy in the south of the country, where the Lebanese state has never had a significant presence.

V. 2024-2025 history repeats itself

The current situation in southern Lebanon is in many respects a repetition of earlier patterns, with the difference that the regional context is more complex and Israeli territorial ambitions are openly expressed.

Following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, Hezbollah opened a "support front" for Gaza, engaging in exchanges of fire with Israel along the Lebanese border from November 2023. In September 2024, Israel carried out a series of assassinations against Hezbollah leaders, including the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, and launched a ground operation in southern Lebanon. A ceasefire in November 2024 was intended to end the fighting and lead to Hezbollah's withdrawal beyond the Litani Pass.

However, in the spring of 2025, the Israeli army continues to operate in Lebanese territory, capturing more and more towns, and the Lebanese army is withdrawing from positions it was supposed to occupy under the agreement. Ain Ebel, a Christian town and symbol of Lebanon's multi-faith south, has become another symbol of Israeli advancement and Lebanese impotence.

Israeli politicians are openly talking about moving the border to the Litani River. This isn't rhetoric; it's a promise of permanent territorial change that would mean the annexation of several hundred square kilometers of Lebanese territory and the elimination of dozens of settlements.

In this context, Hezbollah, weakened, deprived of its historical leadership and with a depleted infrastructure, remains the only armed force that offers any resistance to the Israeli advance. The ambush near Bint Jbeil, in which four Israeli soldiers were killed, confirms this.

VI. Between Shield and Controversy: An Honest Analysis

A thorough analysis cannot overlook the complexity of Hezbollah's role. The organization is classified as terrorist by the United States, the European Union, and several other countries. Its activities outside Lebanon—attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets worldwide, involvement in the war in Syria on Assad's side—go far beyond the narrative of the resistance movement.

Within Lebanon, Hezbollah is simultaneously a political party, a social network, a service provider for the Shiite poor, and a military force operating outside state control. This multifaceted nature makes simple categories like "terrorists" or "liberators" inadequate.

Nevertheless, when we ask about Hezbollah's specific, historically recurring role in Israeli military operations in Lebanese territory, history's answer is unequivocal: it was and remains the only force to effectively resist them. Not because other forces were unwilling, but because other forces were not, are not, and likely will not be able to.

Summary

The Lebanese army's withdrawal from Ain Ebel in March 2026 is not an anomaly; it is a continuation of a decades-long pattern. Lebanon is too structurally weak to defend its borders against Israel. The international community, including UNIFIL, the UN, and Western powers, have repeatedly demonstrated that their presence provides surveillance, not protection.

In this reality, Hezbollah, with all its contradictions and controversies, fulfills a role that no one else can: armed resistance to Israeli territorial expansion. The history of 1982–2000, the history of 2006, and current events speak with one voice.

The question the world should ask itself is not only "what is Hezbollah," but above all: why, after more than forty years of Israeli invasions, occupations and military operations on the territory of a sovereign state, has the international community still not developed any mechanism for the actual protection of Lebanon?

Until this question is answered, southern Lebanon will have only one defender.

Article prepared by the analytical department of the Middle East Foundation.