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How Iran’s IRGC Rebooted Lebanon’s Hezbollah to Be Ready for War

A picture shows damaged buildings and destroyed vehicles following an Israeli airstrike that targeted the Haret Hreik neighborhood in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital Beirut on March 21, 2026. (AFP)
A picture shows damaged buildings and destroyed vehicles following an Israeli airstrike that targeted the Haret Hreik neighborhood in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital Beirut on March 21, 2026. (AFP)
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How Iran’s IRGC Rebooted Lebanon’s Hezbollah to Be Ready for War

A picture shows damaged buildings and destroyed vehicles following an Israeli airstrike that targeted the Haret Hreik neighborhood in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital Beirut on March 21, 2026. (AFP)
A picture shows damaged buildings and destroyed vehicles following an Israeli airstrike that targeted the Haret Hreik neighborhood in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital Beirut on March 21, 2026. (AFP)

Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) rebuilt Hezbollah's military command after it was mauled by Israel in 2024, plugging gaps with Iranian officers before restructuring the Lebanese group and laying plans for the war it is now waging in support of Tehran, two people familiar with these IRGC activities told Reuters.

The overhaul was the first of its kind for Hezbollah, a Shiite group founded by the IRGC in 1982, pointing to a hands-on approach after the blows of the 2024 war, including the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah and other top commanders.

Iran's investment paid off, getting Hezbollah back on its feet in time to enter the war in the Middle East on Tehran's side after it was attacked by the United States and Israel.

Reuters reported earlier in March that Hezbollah had seen another war as inevitable and spent months readying itself. This article sheds light on the IRGC's role in these preparations, based on accounts from six sources who spoke on condition of anonymity, as well as an expert on Hezbollah.

The IRGC, deeply involved in Hezbollah since it was established, sent officers to retrain its fighters and oversee rearmament, the two sources familiar with ‌IRGC activities said.

They ‌said IRGC officers also reshaped Hezbollah command structures that had been breached by Israeli intelligence - a factor that had ‌helped Israel ⁠kill many Hezbollah ⁠leaders.

An Israeli military spokesperson said on March 12 that Hezbollah remains a relevant and dangerous force despite the damage Israel has inflicted on it over the last three years.

Hezbollah has fired hundreds of missiles at Israel since it entered the regional war on March 2, prompting an Israeli offensive that has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon. Hezbollah fighters are battling Israeli soldiers who have seized ground in the south.

It has yet to be seen how Hezbollah, its power still below the peak levels seen a few years ago, would fare in the event of a full-scale Israeli invasion.

Hezbollah's media office, Iran's Foreign Ministry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Netanyahu said in January that Hezbollah was making efforts to rearm and rebuild its infrastructure with Iranian support.

SCRAPPING HIERARCHY

The two sources said IRGC officers tasked ⁠with helping Hezbollah recover arrived shortly after a ceasefire in November 2024, and set to work even as Israel ‌continued to strike.

One of them said the deployment involved about 100 officers.

Changes implemented at their behest ‌included replacing a hierarchical command structure with a decentralized one, comprising small units with limited knowledge of each other's operations, helping to preserve operational secrecy.

They said IRGC officers also drew ‌up plans for missile attacks against Israel that would be launched simultaneously from Iran and Lebanon - a scenario executed for the first time on March 11.

A ‌senior Lebanese security source said Iranian commanders had helped Hezbollah rehabilitate and reorganize their military cadres. The source said he believed the Iranians were helping Hezbollah pace the current conflict rather than being involved in the detail of picking targets.

Another source briefed on the matter said the IRGC sent officers to Lebanon in 2024 to conduct a post-war audit of Hezbollah, and took direct supervision of its military wing.

An additional two sources said the IRGC had embedded special advisers with Hezbollah last year to help it direct military affairs.

Andreas Krieg, a lecturer ‌at the security studies department of King's College London, said the IRGC "has basically reorganized Hezbollah as a far more flat system", contrasting this with the political hierarchy that had emerged around Nasrallah before his death.

"That decentralized model that ⁠they've now implemented is also a bit ⁠more like what Hezbollah looked like in the 1980s - very small cells," said Krieg, who has researched the group for 15 years. He described this as a "mosaic defense" that is also being used by the IRGC in Iran.

LEBANON ASKED IRGC TO LEAVE COUNTRY

The IRGC's efforts were going on at the same time as Lebanon's government and its US-backed military were seeking to advance a process to disarm the group, underscoring a huge complication facing that objective.

Lebanon estimates that around 100 to 150 Iranian nationals in the country have ties to the Iranian government that go beyond normal diplomatic functions, including links to the IRGC, a Lebanese official told Reuters.

The official said the government asked those people to leave Lebanon in early March.

The two sources familiar with IRGC activities said Guards officers were among more than 150 Iranians who left Beirut on a flight to Russia on March 7.

IRGC members were among the roughly 500 people killed by Israeli attacks in Lebanon in the 15 months between the 2024 ceasefire and the eruption of the new war.

Around a dozen more have been killed in Israeli attacks since the war erupted, including in a strike on a Beirut hotel on March 8, they said.

The IRGC has been closely involved in Hezbollah since its men established the group in the eastern Bekaa Valley to export Iran's 1979 revolution and fight Israeli forces that had invaded Lebanon in 1982.

Qassem Soleimani, the top IRGC general who was killed in 2020 by a US drone strike, had worked alongside Nasrallah during Hezbollah's 2006 war with Israel. When Israeli airstrikes killed Nasrallah in a bunker in Beirut's southern suburbs, an Iranian general was among those who died alongside him.

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Features

Rats, Fleas Plague Gaza’s Displaced as Temperatures Rise

Garbage litters the ground next to makeshift shelters housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza City on April 20, 2026. (AFP)
Garbage litters the ground next to makeshift shelters housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza City on April 20, 2026. (AFP)
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Rats, Fleas Plague Gaza’s Displaced as Temperatures Rise

Garbage litters the ground next to makeshift shelters housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza City on April 20, 2026. (AFP)
Garbage litters the ground next to makeshift shelters housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza City on April 20, 2026. (AFP)

As springtime temperatures rise in Gaza, a surge in rats, fleas and other pests has compounded the misery of hundreds of thousands of displaced people still living in tents after more than two years of war.

With meager shelter and almost no sanitation, Palestinians told AFP the vermin are invading their makeshift homes, biting children and contaminating food, in what aid agencies warned was a growing public health threat.

"My children have been bitten. One of my sons was even bitten on the nose," said Muhammad al-Raqab, a displaced Palestinian man living in a tent near the southern city of Khan Younis.

"I am unable to sleep through the night because I must constantly watch over the children," the 32-year-old construction worker, originally from Bani Shueila, told AFP.

With shelters erected directly on soft sand by the Mediterranean Sea, rodents can easily burrow under tent walls and wreck havoc inside, where people have established makeshift pantries and kitchens.

"The rodents have eaten through my tent," Raqab said.

Nearly all of Gaza's population was displaced by Israeli evacuation orders and airstrikes during the war with Hamas that began after the group's attack on Israel in October 2023.

According to the UN, 1.7 million of Gaza's 2.2 million inhabitants still live in displacement camps, unable to return home or to areas that remain under Israeli military control despite a ceasefire that began in October 2025.

In these camps, "living conditions are characterized by vermin and parasite infestations", the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Action (OCHA) said after field visits in March.

Hani al-Flait, head of pediatrics at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza, told AFP his team encounters skin infections such as scabies daily.

- 'Flooded with sewage' -

"The severity of these skin infections has been exacerbated by the fact that these children and their families are living in harsh conditions that lack basic public sanitation, as well as a complete absence of safe water," he told AFP.

Sabreen Abu Taybeh, whose son has been suffering from a rash, blamed the conditions in the camp.

"We are living in tents and schools flooded with sewage," she told AFP, showing the rash covering her son's upper body.

"I have taken him to doctors and hospitals, but they are not helping with anything. As you see, the rash remains."

"The summer season has brought us rodents and fleas," Ghalia Abu Selmi told AFP after discovering mice had gnawed through clothes she had prepared for her daughter's upcoming wedding.

"Fleas have caused skin allergies not only for children but for adults as well," she said, sorting through garments riddled with holes inside the tent she now calls home in Khan Younis.

The 53-year-old said her family has been displaced 20 times since October 2023 and has yet to return to their home in the town of Abasan al-Kabira near the Israeli border.

Despite the ceasefire, Israel continues to control all access points into Gaza, with tight inspections and frequent rejections of aid deliveries, according to NGOs and the UN.

This has caused shortages in everything from medicine and fuel, to clothing and food.

Airstrikes and firefights between Israel's military and what it says are Hamas fighters still occur near-daily.

According to the territory's health ministry, which operates under Hamas authority, at least 777 people have been killed by Israel's military since the start of the ceasefire.

The military says five of its soldiers have also been killed in Gaza over the same period.

Features

Chornobyl First Responder Says Few Survive 40 Years on

Petro Hurin, 76, one of hundreds of thousands of "liquidators" brought to clean up the aftermath of the explosion that tore apart reactor Four of the Chornobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, reflected in a mirror as he stands in his house in the village of Khutory, Cherkasy region, Ukraine April 7, 2026. (Reuters)
Petro Hurin, 76, one of hundreds of thousands of "liquidators" brought to clean up the aftermath of the explosion that tore apart reactor Four of the Chornobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, reflected in a mirror as he stands in his house in the village of Khutory, Cherkasy region, Ukraine April 7, 2026. (Reuters)
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Chornobyl First Responder Says Few Survive 40 Years on

Petro Hurin, 76, one of hundreds of thousands of "liquidators" brought to clean up the aftermath of the explosion that tore apart reactor Four of the Chornobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, reflected in a mirror as he stands in his house in the village of Khutory, Cherkasy region, Ukraine April 7, 2026. (Reuters)
Petro Hurin, 76, one of hundreds of thousands of "liquidators" brought to clean up the aftermath of the explosion that tore apart reactor Four of the Chornobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, reflected in a mirror as he stands in his house in the village of Khutory, Cherkasy region, Ukraine April 7, 2026. (Reuters)

Petro Hurin says his health has never been the same since he was sent 40 years ago to clear the Chornobyl site in the wake of the world's worst nuclear accident.

He was among hundreds of thousands of "liquidators" brought in to clean up after the explosion at reactor four of the Chornobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986. The disaster sent clouds of radioactive material across much of Europe.

Thirty-one plant workers and firemen died in the immediate aftermath, mostly from acute radiation sickness. Thousands more have since succumbed to radiation-related illnesses, such as cancer, although the total death toll and long-term health effects remain a subject of intense debate.

At the time, Hurin worked for a business that supplied diggers and construction vehicles, which sent him to the Chornobyl exclusion zone in June 1986. Of the 40 people sent by his company, only five are alive today, he said.

"Not a single ‌Chornobyl person is ‌in good health," the 76-year-old said. "It's death by a thousand cuts."

Soviet authorities strove to ‌conceal ⁠the extent of ⁠the Chornobyl disaster, refusing to cancel the May 1 parade in Kyiv, around 100 km (60 miles) to the south. Ukraine's current government has highlighted the Soviet authorities' bungled handling of the accident and attempts to cover up the disaster.

Hurin said some colleagues produced medical certificates to excuse themselves from serving in Chornobyl, but he was willing to help.

"I realized that, however small my contribution might be, I was doing my bit to help tame this atomic beast," he said.

HEADACHES, CHEST PAIN, BLEEDING

Working 12-hour shifts, Hurin used an excavator to load dry concrete mixed with lead – shipped to the site by river barge – onto trucks ⁠for transport to the reactor, where it was mixed to build a massive sarcophagus ‌to contain the radiation.

"The dust was terrible," Hurin recalled. "You'd work for half ‌an hour in a respirator, and it would end up looking (brown) like an onion."

After four days, Hurin said he ‌began experiencing severe symptoms, such as headaches, chest pain, bleeding and a metallic taste in his throat. Doctors treated ‌him but after another shift, he could barely walk. He feared he had "a day or two" to live.

"I was brought to the hospital, and the doctors did a blood test first," Hurin said. "They pricked all my fingers and a pale liquid came out, but no blood."

Soviet doctors refused to diagnose radiation sickness, a finding he said was not permitted at the time. Instead, he was told he ‌had vegetative-vascular dystonia, a nervous disorder often linked to stress.

Before the disaster, Hurin had never taken sick leave, but afterwards he spent around seven months going from ⁠one hospital to another to ⁠receive treatment, including a blood transfusion.

He says he has been diagnosed with anemia - often linked to radiation sickness - angina, pancreatitis and a series of other conditions.

By the standards of his countrymen, Hurin has lived a long life. According to the World Health Organization, average life expectancy for men in Ukraine stood at 66 in 2021, having declined during COVID.

Now retired, Hurin lives with his wife Olha in central Ukraine's Cherkasy region. Although he suffers from health problems, he still plays the bayan – a type of accordion - and writes songs and poems.

He says he is fighting to access a special disability pension for "liquidators" of the nuclear disaster.

Another catastrophe - Russia's 2022 invasion of his homeland - has come to dominate his life. He and his wife Olha regularly visit a memorial in nearby Kholodnyi Yar dedicated to their grandson, Andrii Vorobkalo, a Ukrainian soldier, who was killed three years ago in the war, aged 26.

After his daughter had left to work in Europe, Hurin and his wife raised Andrii from the age of four. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Andrii quit his job in Greece.

"He left everything behind and came to defend Ukraine," Hurin told Reuters, standing near the memorial stone dedicated to his grandson. "We think of Andrii all the time."

Features

Driven by the Pressures of War, Iran Gives Its Field Commanders More Power Over Factions in Iraq

Members of the Popular Mobilization Forces attend a funeral for colleagues who were killed in a US airstrike in Anbar, in Najaf, Iraq, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP)
Members of the Popular Mobilization Forces attend a funeral for colleagues who were killed in a US airstrike in Anbar, in Najaf, Iraq, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP)
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Driven by the Pressures of War, Iran Gives Its Field Commanders More Power Over Factions in Iraq

Members of the Popular Mobilization Forces attend a funeral for colleagues who were killed in a US airstrike in Anbar, in Najaf, Iraq, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP)
Members of the Popular Mobilization Forces attend a funeral for colleagues who were killed in a US airstrike in Anbar, in Najaf, Iraq, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP)

Iran has granted its commanders greater autonomy over armed factions in Iraq, allowing some groups to carry out operations without Tehran’s approval, a shift driven by the pressures of the war, three faction members and two other officials told The Associated Press.

Many Iran-backed factions are funded through the Iraqi state budget and embedded within the security apparatus, drawing criticism from the United States and other countries that have borne the brunt of their attacks and say Baghdad has failed to take a tougher stance.

Despite mounting pressure from the US, Baghdad has struggled to contain or deter the groups. The most hard-line factions now operate under Iranian advisers using a decentralized command structure, the five officials told AP, each on condition of anonymity to speak freely about sensitive matters.

“The various forces have been granted the authority to operate according to their own field assessments without referring back to a central command,” said one faction official, who didn't have permission to speak publicly.

The war in the Middle East has exposed the fragility of Iraq’s state institutions and their limited ability to restrain these groups. A parallel confrontation between Washington and the factions has deepened the crisis, with factions acting as an extension of Iran’s regional campaign and escalating attacks on US assets in Iraq before a tenuous ceasefire deal was reached in April.

Even if the ceasefire agreement holds, Washington is expected to intensify efforts against the groups militarily and politically, particularly as they gain latitude to operate more independently, officials and experts said. On Friday, the US imposed sanctions on seven commanders and senior members of four hard-line Iran-backed Iraqi armed groups.

“The US is still going to feel it has the freedom of action to hit Iraqi factions,” said Michael Knights, head of research for Horizon Engage, a geopolitical risk consulting firm, and an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “That may well play out into an effort to try and guide a less faction-dominated government formation.”

Decentralized control

Days into the war sparked by US and Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, an Iranian delegation arrived in Iraq’s Kurdish region and delivered a blunt message: If faction attacks escalated near US military bases, commercial interests and diplomatic missions, Iraqi Kurdish authorities should not come to Tehran with complaints, as there was little they could do about it.

“They said they’ve devolved authority to regional Iranian commanders,” a senior Iraqi Kurdish government official said on condition of anonymity, citing the subject's sensitivity.

In the past, Kurdish leaders in Iraq would call Iranian officials after attacks to ask why they had been targeted. “This time, they wanted to preempt that by saying, ‘We can’t help you with the groups in the south right now,’” the official said.

This shift reflects lessons drawn from the 12-day war in June, the official said. Faction officials corroborated the claim. During that war, operations were tightly centralized. In its aftermath, greater autonomy was granted in the field.

A spokesperson for Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, among the Iran-backed armed groups that have attacked the US in Iraq, said there was “coordination” with Iran in launching attacks but didn't give details.

“Since we are allies of Iran, we have coordination with our brothers in Iran,” Mahdi al-Kaabi said.

In the recent war, key Iraqi faction leaders appeared to step back from the latest phase and didn't appear to be directly involved in operations, Knights said. US strikes largely killed mid-level commanders, according to faction officials.

“None of the first-line leaders have been killed,” said a second faction official, who wasn't authorized to brief reporters.

Rather than targeting top figures, the US also focused on Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisory cells, said Knights, who tracked the attacks. In one strike in Baghdad’s upscale Jadriya neighborhood, three Guard advisers were killed at a house used as their headquarters during a meeting, according to the second faction official.

Pressure on Iraq is intensifying

At the heart of government efforts to rein in armed groups lies a paradox: The factions the government says it cannot control are tied to political parties that brought it to power.

The Coordination Framework, an alliance of influential pro-Iran Shiite factions, helped install Mohammed Shia al-Sudani as prime minister in 2022. He now serves as caretaker premier amid a prolonged political deadlock.

Faction forces carrying out attacks on US targets aren't rogue actors; they're part of the state’s Popular Mobilization Forces, created after the fall of Mosul in 2014 to formalize volunteer units that were critical in defeating the ISIS group.

The PMF has evolved into a powerful force, with fighters receiving state salaries and access to government resources, including weapons and intelligence. The result, critics say, is a deep contradiction: Certain state-funded groups operate in line with Iranian priorities, even when doing so undermines Iraq’s national interests.

Al-Sudani’s office didn't respond to the AP’s requests for comment on the decentralized control of armed groups.

The US is focused on curbing the power of these groups in Iraq, the senior Iraqi Kurdish official and a Western diplomat said, which will put increasing pressure on the government, still functioning in caretaker status. The diplomat also spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't permitted to brief reporters.

Last week, Iraq’s ambassador to the US was summoned to Washington to hear US condemnation of attacks by Iran-backed factions on American personnel and diplomatic missions, according to State Department deputy spokesperson Tommy Bigot.

“The Deputy Secretary affirmed that the United States will not tolerate any attacks targeting its interests and expects the Iraqi Government to take all necessary measures immediately to dismantle Iran-aligned armed groups,” Bigot said in a statement.

Factions resist steps from Iraq's government

Al-Sudani has taken limited steps to curb faction influence, including further institutionalizing the PMF and occasionally removing commanders who act outside state authority. The efforts have met significant resistance from armed groups.

Further institutionalizing them has deepened their entrenchment within the state. The US may seek to isolate the most hard-line factions — including Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada — from others more embedded in Iraq’s political system. “The bad factions from the worse factions,” the senior Iraqi Kurdish official said.

Harakat al-Nujaba spokesperson al-Kaabi offered a dual framing of the group’s position, stressing both its alignment with Iran and its claim to Iraqi state legitimacy.

“To put it bluntly, we are allies of Iran,” he said. He described the group as part of Iran’s regional “axis” alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen.

At the same time, he insisted the group operates within Iraq’s political order, supporting the state and government when they serve national interests.

“It’s true we’re not affiliated with the government or the prime minister, but we respect the law and the constitution,” he said.