Hezbollah’s decision to get involved in the war launched by Hamas was not made out of a desire to support the movement. Rather, Hamas provided Hezbollah with the climate it had been seeking for two decades, setting the stage for the “winner-take-all” adventure it has always wanted to go on.
The party launched its so-called “Support War” with an outdated combat doctrine, weak tools, and little experience confronting Israel’s technological superiority. The best advice Hezbollah could give its followers was not to use their mobile phones.
“Put them in your closet.” That was the strategy Nasrallah believed would outsmart Israel. A mundane, conventional piece of advice that allowed the Israelis to stage the largest intelligence operation in the region’s history, and indeed one of the most devastating attacks in history.
A former officer of France’s General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), Olivier Mas, spoke about the operation in an Al-Arabiya documentary, {Hezbollah} Leaders and the Story of Their Assassination. “The operation was carried out entirely with gloves. There were no traces, no DNA, nothing! It was almost a scientific procedure: open a box, and close it as though nothing had happened. It was connivingly brilliant and extremely effective. Hezbollah was unsettled and shaken to the core by a single blow.”
Keeping phones locked away was not enough to defeat Israel. This points to the overwhelming ignorance of the so-called Axis of Resistance, which, despite all its research and intelligence centers, has failed to overcome these kinds of fundamental shortcomings.
The “Pager Massacre” was a severe blow to the Axis, from top to bottom. Several factors explain this failure:
First: Contempt for the enemy. This notion is rooted in poetic polemics and a romanticized self-image. However, when enemies choose you or you choose them, you must be ready and prepared to defeat them. That was not the case for Hamas, Hezbollah, or even the Houthis. They fired scraps at Israel daily without examining its strengths nor the mindset that would shape its response. Underestimating the enemy is a leading cause of defeat.
Second: failing to see past previous battles. Hezbollah had assumed that its latest clash would simply be a continuation of the war in July 2006. Its war with non-state actors in Syria, however, had waned its capacities: logistically, militarily, and strategically. Israel no longer wages conventional strikes; it has moved beyond them. It wages scientific and technological warfare.
Because of its limited knowledge about global advances in military technology, Hezbollah believed that supporting Hamas would broaden its influence, especially since Assad’s survival and the fleeting stability in Syria, which it thought durable at the time, had emboldened it further. Accordingly, its crushing failure reflects a total strategic setback stemming from its ignorance of the scale of Israel’s technological progress over the past two decades.
Third: Hezbollah expected that the “Support War” would allow for reaping gains inside Lebanon, shifting the balance of power and allowing the party to exercise total control over the country’s future, system, and constitution. Amid the rise of a new civic discourse and the formation of a liberal political trajectory, it saw this war as a path to retaking the initiative. Its wager on the “Support War” was, therefore, also a domestic political gamble. It bet on Hamas keeping Israel busy, assuming the Israeli response would not be vicious. It misjudged the new realities in Israel, exposing itself to political decline and the collapse of security and intelligence capacities, as well undermining the broader Axis.
In conclusion: the saying “know your enemy” remains extremely pertinent for understanding the course of war. The war Hezbollah chose to fight was its undoing. It sealed its own fate.
Testing a capable enemy brings nothing but defeats and calamities. Ordinary people pay the price. When you are reckless with your territory, you can squander for arbitrary ideological considerations. Hezbollah gained nothing from the “Support War.” On the contrary, it was undermined and brought to its knees. After once promising the destruction of this or that state, the party’s ambitions have been reduced to projecting an image on a rock and broadcasting a speech or a song. All these losses are the result of pursuing a strategy that overestimated its capacities, strength, or endurance.
