Israel Exploiting Hezbollah’s Weakened Position in Lebanon to Assassinate its Members

A firefighter douses the flames of a car hit by an Israeli strike in the southern Lebanese village of Burj al-Muluk on March 15, 2025, in which one person was reportedly killed. (AFP)
A firefighter douses the flames of a car hit by an Israeli strike in the southern Lebanese village of Burj al-Muluk on March 15, 2025, in which one person was reportedly killed. (AFP)
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Israel Exploiting Hezbollah’s Weakened Position in Lebanon to Assassinate its Members

A firefighter douses the flames of a car hit by an Israeli strike in the southern Lebanese village of Burj al-Muluk on March 15, 2025, in which one person was reportedly killed. (AFP)
A firefighter douses the flames of a car hit by an Israeli strike in the southern Lebanese village of Burj al-Muluk on March 15, 2025, in which one person was reportedly killed. (AFP)

Israel is waging a law intensity war against Hezbollah in Lebanon by assassinating its suspected members and fighters taking advantage of the Iran-backed party’s inability to retaliate to the attacks to avoid the eruption of an all-out war again.

Israel has carried out assassinations against Hezbollah south and north of Litani since the ceasefire in the war took effect in November.

The party appears to be restricted by the conditions imposed by the ceasefire and its new weakened position in Lebanon, leaving the Lebanese state with the responsibility to handle Israeli violations.

In its latest attack on Hezbollah, Israel said on Saturday that it assassinated a member who “had taken part in terrorist activity” in the southern Lebanese town of Kfar Kila.

Sources told Asharq Al-Awsat that Israel is imposing through its attacks a buffer zone along the border with Lebanon that is largely empty of civilians given the extent of the damage incurred in the war.

Israel is expanding the area of its attacks slightly north of the border by targeting people suspected of being Hezbollah members or even supporters, they added.

Figures close to Hezbollah said Israel is taking advantage of the “green light” given to it by the international community to go ahead with its attacks in Syria, Gaza and southern Lebanon, where it is violating the ceasefire and United Nations Security Council resolution 1701.

It is also exploiting the political restrictions that are “tying Hezbollah’s hands” in Lebanon that do not allow the party to respond to the Israeli attacks.

The new conditions imposed by the war have forced Hezbollah to join political work and suspend military activities, while continuing to refuse to lay down its weapons.

The party is coming under Lebanese and international pressure to refrain from retaliating to the Israeli attacks that could prompt Tel Aviv to launch a wide-scale war against Lebanon again.

Hezbollah chief Sheikh Naim Qassem had days earlier said the party is committed to the ceasefire and will not give Israel excuses to violate it.

Hezbollah’s opponents told Asharq Al-Awsat that the party is being restricted from acting given the new president and government in Lebanon.

Hezbollah does not want to become embroiled in a confrontation with them, they stressed, so it is “placing its cards with the state.”

Should the state fail in stopping the Israeli violations, and should diplomacy also fail, then it may resort to discussing a defense strategy that would include Hezbollah.

Another area that is restricting Hezbollah is the reconstruction of areas destroyed by Israel during the war.

Should Hezbollah violate the ceasefire, then the international community may consider holding back any financing of reconstruction, said the sources.

Moreover, the party is being restricted by its own Shiite popular base. A new war would risk their displacement yet again and jeopardize their support to Hezbollah, they added.



Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.