Summary

Nasrallah was one of Israel’s most capable and dangerous enemies. He led Hezbollah from 1992 and transformed it into a force that shaped Lebanon and served Iran far beyond its borders. Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 allowed Hezbollah to claim that armed resistance had forced the Israeli military out. The 2006 Lebanon War, which Nasrallah cast as a divine victory despite the devastation in Lebanon, made him a star across much of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Afterward, Hezbollah amassed an arsenal and precision-strike capabilities that gave it firepower rivaling that of many states, deterring Israel for years from taking decisive action against it. To generations of Israeli intelligence officers, Nasrallah combined the qualities of a statesman, military commander and leader attentive to his constituency. He remained fanatical, antisemitic and fully committed to Iran, yet could be calculating and sensitive to the price Lebanon’s Shiites would pay for his decisions. After 2006, he acknowledged that had he anticipated even a small chance of such devastation, he would not have ordered Hezbollah’s cross-border kidnapping. Israel’s intelligence community believed he had internalized one central lesson from that miscalculation – to avoid another full-scale war with Israel – and had become deeply risk-averse, almost traumatized by the prospect. Then something changed. Decades in power dulled his instincts and bred an arrogance that distorted his judgment. Hezbollah’s arsenal and Israel’s internal crisis convinced him he could defeat Israel and bring America to its knees. In March 2023, he said of Israel: “God willing, it will not reach its 80th birthday.” His confidence grew as potential challengers disappeared. Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s military chief, had been killed in a joint US-Israeli operation; his successor, Mustafa Badreddine, was later killed in Syria. As those who might test his assumptions disappeared, Nasrallah came to believe that no one understood Israel and the Jews better than he did. This fit his messianic, deterministic worldview: Iran’s Shiite revolutionary project was destined to triumph and every development seemed to confirm that history – and divine providence – favoured the Islamic Revolution. The warning signs were unmistakable in 2023. In its first ground infiltration into Israel since 2002, Hezbollah sent an operative 37 miles south of the Lebanese border to plant a roadside bomb near Megiddo. That summer it erected an armed tent on the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border and refused to remove it despite warnings. Neither move followed an Israeli action; both were unprovoked tests of Israel’s resolve. Israeli security officials urged a response, but senior decision-makers feared an escalation that could devastate cities. Israel held back to avoid such a war, and Nasrallah read that restraint as weakness. Hamas’s October 7 attack surprised Nasrallah and forced a choice. He opened fire the next day to support Hamas while sparing Lebanon’s Shiites a full-scale war. He bound Hezbollah to a pledge: no cease-fire in Lebanon before one in Gaza. That commitment trapped him: He could neither escalate to all-out war nor stop firing altogether, while Lebanon – and especially its Shiite communities – bore the cost. He also fell into the same analytical trap that had shaped Israel’s thinking before October 7: he could not accept that the other side had changed. Nasrallah continued to assume that Israel would not risk an all-out war in Lebanon. Even after Israel killed Hezbollah’s chief of staff, eliminated much of its elite Radwan force’s senior leadership, struck Beirut and destroyed a substantial share of the group’s firepower, he refused to believe the confrontation was no longer limited. The pager explosions exposed how deeply Hezbollah had been penetrated, but even that shock did not change his course. Nasrallah’s killing marked a decisive turning point in Hezbollah’s decline. The organisation still exists and remains dangerous, but it is a pale shadow of the force that once possessed the capabilities of a state military and threatened Israel, American lives and the stability of the Middle East. The strike shattered the leadership model built around Nasrallah and compounded the losses Hezbollah had already suffered. Hezbollah ultimately accepted a cease-fire in Lebanon without securing one in Gaza, while its leader, Naim Qassem, has neither Nasrallah’s authority nor his charisma. Nasrallah was a formidable enemy, but his abilities fed the hubris that caused his fall and brought Hezbollah to the lowest point in its history. He failed to grasp that Israel would no longer live with an existential threat on its borders and would take risks to remove it. His fate should warn leaders everywhere: The moment you become certain you understand your adversary may be the moment you cease to understand them at all. Or Horvitz is a fellow at The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and former head of the Israel Defense Intelligence Hezbollah branch