Amid the tangled streets of Beirut’s southern reaches, mournful Hezbollah followers have turned the mausoleum of Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader for more than 30 years, into a pilgrimage site.
His grave, a white marble slab engraved with Quranic verses, is sheltered by a canopy adorned with white and yellow artificial flowers. Around it, men and women pray separately on a patchwork of carpets.
Mr. Nasrallah was assassinated in the fallout from the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which set off the war in Gaza. The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah opened a second front in solidarity with Hamas by firing across the Lebanon-Israel border. The conflict eventually escalated into a full blown war, during which Israel eliminated Hezbollah’s leadership.
The Iran-backed group’s power has ebbed ever since, and after decades of building a formidable state within a state, Hezbollah faces an uncertain future.
“Hezbollah was two things: It was Hassan Nasrallah and the weapons,” said Mustafa Fahs, a Lebanese political commentator.
Now, at one of its weakest moments, Hezbollah finds itself struggling to hold on to the weapons that are at the very core of the group’s identity.
Over the past 40 years, Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim movement whose name means “Party of God,” became the most powerful military force in Lebanon — stronger even than the state army. Its yellow-and-green flag depicts a clenched fist raising a Kalashnikov rifle.
The group’s arsenal has long buttressed Hezbollah’s self-proclaimed role as Lebanon’s main defender against Israel and underpinned its rise as one of the most powerful political factions within Lebanon. But Hezbollah is coming under growing pressure from the Lebanese government and its Western and Arab financial backers to surrender whatever is left of that arsenal after the 13-month war with Israel left the organization in tatters.
Though it has so far resisted giving up weapons, it is not clear how long Hezbollah can sustain that position, especially with Washington pushing for a short disarmament timeline.
The extent of Hezbollah’s remaining arms stockpile is not known. But Israeli forces say they are still destroying caches, and the Lebanese Army has removed some weaponry.
A cease-fire agreed to in November of last year required Hezbollah to leave an 18-mile zone between the Litani River and the border with Israel, but its arsenal extends far beyond that. Under the terms, the Lebanese government should prevent “nonstate” groups from rearming.
Israel still occupies five points along the Lebanese border and has carved out a buffer zone a few miles deep along much of the frontier, blocking villagers from returning. It was supposed to withdraw from those areas under the cease-fire.
Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s new leader, has vowed the group will retain its weapons as long as Israel continues to attack Lebanon and occupy Lebanese territory.
“They ask us: ’Why do you need missiles?’ Brother, how else are we to confront Israel when it attacks us?” Mr. Qassem said in a recent speech. “Should we accept abandoning our means of defense?”
President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon, a former army general, expressed some sympathy for that view in a recent interview with The New York Times. But his government’s position is that Hezbollah must surrender its weapons as the first step.
“These are legitimate fears,” he said of Hezbollah’s narrative, while the ongoing Israeli presence on Lebanese territory buttresses the group’s argument. “I told them many times, the army, the state is responsible to protect not only you but all Lebanese.”
Thomas J. Barrack Jr., President Trump’s roving envoy for the Levant, has come to Lebanon repeatedly in the past months to press for Hezbollah’s disarmament.
Mr. Qassem, the Hezbollah leader, has said that the Americans are ignoring Israel’s repeated attacks on Lebanon after the cease-fire, while demanding that Hezbollah lay down arms in return for only a partial Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory.
Hezbollah and its Shiite base long dominated southern Lebanon, stretching from Beirut’s southern outskirts to the Israeli border.
The movement was once the strongest elements in Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, a chain of proxy forces across the Middle East meant to confront Israel and the West. In the latest wars with Israel, however, the alliance proved to be a paper tiger.
When Israel invaded Lebanon last fall to try to halt Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks, Iran did not intervene.
Israel then killed Hezbollah’s top political and military commanders, who built the movement in the 1980s and 1990s. It assassinated leaders in their bunkers and killed or maimed thousands of fighters with booby-trapped pagers.
Since the cease-fire, signs of Hezbollah’s weakening have mounted. The group’s fighters, which once numbered in the thousands, have mostly withdrawn from the south — a major concession that both Israel and the Lebanese government had long sought.
The Lebanese army, backed by a U.N. observer force, says it has removed 90 percent of Hezbollah’s weapons from southern Lebanon.
The Lebanese army is gradually raising the number of troops in the south. Once the military there is up to full strength, President Aoun said, an armed Hezbollah will be unnecessary.
Hezbollah’s main patron, Iran, is in retreat across the Middle East. During a brief Israel-Iran war in June, Hezbollah refrained from new attacks on Israel, only making verbal statements of solidarity.
Syria, once led by a staunch Hezbollah ally, is now governed by former rebels hostile to the Lebanese militants. Syria’s government has tried to dismantle Iranian smuggling networks transiting Syria that delivered cash and weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, crimping its resources.
Despite the cease-fire, Israel has struck Lebanon almost daily, hitting what it says are Hezbollah weapons, infrastructure and leaders and killing scores of civilians. The whine of Israeli drones has become background noise in the capital, Beirut.
Hezbollah has barely retaliated, another sign of its weakness.
The timing of Hezbollah’s disarmament is one of the trickiest elements of Lebanon’s postwar future.
The Lebanese government must defang the group to secure Western funds without provoking an internal conflict. Hezbollah has long been under Western sanctions due its designation as a terrorist organization.
After 50 years of intermittent wars, the country’s economy is severely contracted, its banking sector is in crisis, its electricity grid in shambles. The World Bank has estimated that Lebanon needs $11 billion to reconstruct the damage from the last war.
Frustrated supporters of Hezbollah are demanding to know when they will receive reconstruction money to rebuild homes and businesses destroyed in the war. The government hopes the resentment brewing among southern residents over the lack of recovery aid will pressure Hezbollah to compromise on giving up its weapons.
Still, assessing the mood within Hezbollah’s base is difficult.
Shiite Muslims constitute about a third of Lebanon’s population, though not all support the group. Hard-line supporters want Hezbollah to retain its weapons.
“We are being called upon to give up the only card that hinders this enemy, the only tool that prohibits them from cutting our throats,” said Sheikh Ali al-Mawla, a white-turbaned cleric who was visiting Mr. Nasrallah’s mausoleum. He described Hezbollah arsenal as a protective umbrella for all Lebanese.
Among some Shiites, a combination of shock, despair and anger is evident even if they are afraid to criticize Hezbollah openly.
It was Hezbollah, after all, that forced Lebanon to give the Shiites a real seat at Lebanon’s political table. Without Mr. Nasrallah, many feel adrift.
“We looked up to him for everything — politically, militarily, how we should act, how to live,” Mustafa Hammoud, a 24-year-old dentist in a white polo shirt, said during a visit to Mr. Nasrallah’s mausoleum, where he said he prayed often.
Still, Hezbollah has sought to portray the war as a triumph. “Victory” posters pervade Shiite neighborhoods, while the dead commanders are cast as saints in paradise.
Hassan, a Shiite from the south who said his daughter is married to a Hezbollah fighter, scoffs at those proclamations of victory. The house he spent 20 years of savings to build is now a hole in the ground, he said, asking to be identified by his first name only for fear of retribution.
“They promised us a victory, but instead they destroyed our villages, destroyed our houses,” he said angrily.
In its southern Beirut stronghold of Dahiya in early July, Hezbollah organized a parade for Ashoura, the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, Prophet Muhammad’s grandson.
Craters punctuated many blocks. Women sat silently, holding aloft photographs of sons and husbands killed in the war. A blind man, one of thousands maimed in the pager attacks, hobbled down the street, a wife and a child clutching each arm.
Isra Ghasawi, serving customers across from a family shop that was pancaked by an Israeli air raid, said the community felt increasingly cornered.
“Everyone is against us,” she said.
Euan Ward contributed reporting.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
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