With Hezbollah’s Iranian patron on the ropes, Jerusalem gets another shot at completing the job it was forced to pause two years ago.

It took barely 48 hours after the United States and Israel began their joint operation against the Iranian regime for Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israel. As it became clear that regime decapitation was part of the operation’s objectives, the group’s involvement was all but inevitable. Israel retaliated immediately with a wave of targeted strikes and has now begun limited ground operations in south Lebanon, even as its air force maintains an unprecedented tempo of sorties over Iran.

For Israel, Hezbollah is unfinished business. And while the Iranian proxy’s fate ultimately will be affected by that of its patrons in Tehran, the current moment offers Israel an opening to rectify the mistake of two years ago and secure a strategic win independent of the ultimate outcome of the campaign in Iran.

By the end of 2024, Hezbollah was at a low point it had not experienced since its establishment four decades earlier. The blows Israel inflicted on the organization during the war that began in October 2023—culminating in the elimination of nearly its entire top echelon and in the loss of an essential logistical and financial lifeline with the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria in December 2024—left Hezbollah weakened, exposed, and strategically vulnerable. It appeared that relatively little additional pressure would have sufficed to dismantle it as a powerful militia and prominent political actor in Lebanon.

Yet in November 2024, under American pressure and amid a desire to prioritize other arenas, Israel was forced to accept a cease-fire. In doing so, it granted Hezbollah a lifeline—one the organization has used to regroup and rebuild. It looked as though Israel had been denied a rare strategic opportunity. After all, for decades Israel viewed Hezbollah as its most dangerous enemy. The organization’s missile arsenal had cast a constant shadow over life in northern Israel and had contributed to Israeli strategic hesitation regarding action against Iran’s nuclear program.

For a while, it seemed as though an old-new concept, one that was supposed to have collapsed on Oct. 7, had once again begun to take hold in regard to Lebanon: namely, the conceit that Hezbollah had been severely weakened and was now deterred; that time and internal Lebanese pressure would gradually compel it to disarm. This logic, which was encouraged by American envoys and U.S. policy in Lebanon, echoed past strategic assumptions that had proved fatally wrong.

When Hassan Nasrallah decided to join Hamas’ war against Israel, he was convinced it was a win-win situation, based on his experience over three decades as Hezbollah’s secretary general. When Israel’s northern villages cleared out under Hezbollah fire, and when it appeared that Washington had placed limits on Israeli escalation in Lebanon, it looked as though his calculation was sound. However, Nasrallah had made a deadly mistake, as he failed to grasp and internalize the profound shift that had taken place within Israel following Oct. 7. He also underestimated the extent of the intelligence and operational superiority that Israel had gained over the years against his organization.

By the summer of 2024, Jerusalem had made the decision to launch a comprehensive attack against Hezbollah. Within a couple of months, the IDF had succeeded in eliminating the group’s top military command as well as its political leadership, including Nasrallah and his successor, Hashem Safieddine, and had neutralized most of its military capabilities. Facing mounting losses, Hezbollah was relieved by the American push for a cease-fire that took effect on Nov. 27, 2024. Within a month of the cease-fire, the Assad regime collapsed, further compounding Hezbollah’s difficulties.

Eyal Zisser, Tablet Magazine