Exclusive: How Hezbollah rebuilt while its enemies declared it dead
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.
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A senior US official described it as “extremely weak”. Centcom commander Michael Kurilla went further, calling Hezbollah “decimated” while praising the deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces into what he described as the former party's “strongholds”.
In Beirut, the political language also shifted. President Joseph Aoun said the state must hold the “exclusive right to carry arms”, and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said Hezbollah’s military presence south of the Litani River was almost over.
It has been common to hear commentators say that Israeli attacks had destroyed 80 percent of the party's military force. Hezbollah, the prevailing narrative went, had been broken and its disarmament was only a matter of time.
But it now appears that narrative mistook major losses for strategic collapse.
According to four sources familiar with Hezbollah’s postwar recovery process, reconstruction began on 28 November, one day after the ceasefire.
Inside the organisation, the assumption was not that the war had ended, but that another round of fighting with Israel was only a matter of time.
From that perspective, the sources said, the ceasefire was not a political settlement. It was an operational interval, and every day of it carried value.
'Mission accomplished'
Hezbollah, the sources say, believes Israel stopped its attacks for two reasons.
First, Israel believed that the organisation had been hit hard enough that international and domestic pressure would complete the task of collapsing Hezbollah politically, permanently.
Second, Israel assessed that pursuing the war further might produce heavier Israeli losses at a stage when it believed the strategic gains it pursued had already been secured.
Yet the sources say that the pause in open hostilities was an opportunity for Hezbollah.
It meant that although the war had exacted a heavy toll, it had also left open a critical space in which the organisation could reconstitute itself.
And the effort that followed, according to the sources, was not limited to restoring its basic military capacities.
The ambition was broader: to recover as much as possible of Hezbollah’s pre-October 2023 capabilities, structure and infrastructure.
By mid-December 2025, the sources say, military commanders had informed the leadership that everything that could be rebuilt had been rebuilt.
“We told the leaders: mission accomplished,” the military commanders were quoted as saying by a source.
Some capabilities, particularly those linked to air defence and other strategically significant systems, had sustained damage that could not simply be reversed.
But within those limitations, the sources said, the rebuilding effort was described as extensive, methodical and disciplined.
'Walking martyrs'
The task in front of Hezbollah was huge.
On 17 September 2024, Israel detonated hundreds of pagers used by party members, wounding dozens of people, mostly civilians, and revealing shocking intelligence penetration.
Later that month, ferocious air strikes on Beirut and other areas of the country killed the top of the party’s military leadership, as well as its longstanding secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah.
Israel had hit Hezbollah with a multi-layered shock campaign aimed at rupturing command, exposing networks and paralysing its ability to function.
One source described Hezbollah’s leadership as “blinded, scattered and broken”, as Israeli forces began a ground invasion in October 2024 after an intense bombing campaign.
“The steadfastness of fighters on the border fighting a fight to the death provided the party’s remaining top military leaders room to breathe and gather themselves to regroup,” he told Middle East Eye.
“These walking martyrs saved the party.”
Asked why some military commanders survived while others were seemingly picked off at will by Israeli air strikes, the source said: “They did not pick up the phone."
Structural rethinking
According to the sources, Hezbollah’s communications architecture had been penetrated far more deeply than previously understood.
The party had always assumed its members were being surveilled. But it became clear that Israel was able to track their location in real time and locate Hezbollah leaders and fighters with precision.
Sources describe how the party largely abandoned all three of its previous communications networks for sensitive matters, returning instead to what one source called “basic and primitive” methods: human couriers, handwritten notes and compartmentalised channels between command and field units.
A second source described the tactical shift as a “deliberate act of adaptation” rather than being a sign the organisation had regressed.
And the strategy also fed into a wider structural rethinking.
'The steadfastness of fighters on the border fighting a fight to the death provided the party’s remaining top military leaders room to breathe'
- Source familiar with Hezbollah's recovery
In the years after Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, and especially during Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad, the organisation increasingly resembled a conventional army: larger, heavier, more centralised and more dependent on extended command chains.
That transformation expanded its capabilities, but the experience of the 2024 war prompted surviving commanders to rethink that model.
Hezbollah, a third source said, had become “a large wagon that could only be moved by a group of stallions”, where once it had resembled “lighter stray horses”.
After the 2024 war, the sources said, senior military figures moved back toward what they called the “Mughniyeh spirit”, a reference to the late commander Imad Mughniyeh and an earlier doctrine built around dispersed, semi-autonomous units.
Under this model, units operate according to broad scenario-based guidance rather than constant direct instruction.
The link to central command becomes lighter, slower and less exposed. That shift may reduce speed in some areas, but it strengthens endurance. It is a model built not only to operate, but to survive.
A return to the south
The same strategy appears to have shaped Hezbollah’s return to the south.
Publicly, the ceasefire agreement demanded that Hezbollah have no military presence between the Israeli border and the Litani River, with the Lebanese army deploying in the area instead for over 60 days.
By 8 January 2026, the Lebanese army said it had taken operational control of the region, and Salam said almost all weapons there were now in state hands.
Yet according to the sources, the reality on the ground was far more complex.
Hezbollah, they say, did not need large, visible formations to rebuild its presence.
It relied instead on smaller cells and individual cadres to repair damaged facilities that had not been fully destroyed, reactivate sites that had not been exposed, and quietly reinforce positions that had not been formally disclosed.
The sources describe a situation in which Hezbollah was not departing from Lebanon’s deep south; it was gradually re-entrenching through patience, concealment, and careful movement.
“We connected daylight to nighttime relying on person to person to recover and restore,” the third source said.
This contributed to the ceasefire’s contradictory character.
On paper, Lebanon was moving toward a “state monopoly on arms”. In practice, Israel continued striking, accusing Hezbollah of trying to “rearm and rebuild its terror infrastructure”, while the party maintained that it had respected the truce in the south.
By the time open conflict began again earlier this month, around 400 people in Lebanon had been killed by Israeli strikes since the ceasefire began.
The period was never a stable peace. It was an active and contested phase in which each side was trying to shape the terms of the next confrontation.
Resupply issues
One reason that Hezbollah’s enemies were confident that it would struggle to recover from the 2024 war was that its supply lines seemed to have been severed.
After the fall of Assad, Nasrallah’s successor, Naim Qassem, publicly acknowledged that the organisation had lost its military supply route through Syria, even as he sought to minimise the strategic significance of that loss.
Yet according to the sources, the collapse of Assad’s government also produced a brief but important opportunity.
During the chaos that followed, Hezbollah was able to move quickly to empty depots before the new authorities consolidated control, and Israeli strikes destroyed what remained.
At the same time, it spent months replenishing rockets and drones through Iranian support and local manufacturing.
That does not mean every capability was restored in identical form. Some advanced systems, especially air defence, remained difficult or impossible to replace.
Developments on the battlefield over the past two weeks have proved that Hezbollah had not been pummelled into irrelevance.
On 2 March, the party launched around 60 drones and rockets, followed by a similar number the next day, before increasing the pace soon after.
This week, Hezbollah missiles even reached southern Israel, sending Israelis in Ashkelon and communities near the Gaza Strip running for cover.
An organisation that had been widely described as broken is once again producing sustained fire, redeploying fighters and placing pressure on Israel on both Lebanese and Israeli territory.
“Mohammed Afif, our former media chief, used to say ‘Hezbollah is not a party, it is a nation, and nations don’t die’,” the third source recalled.
“People thought that was no more than a slogan. But we’ve proved it was not.”
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