What survived Hezbollah's two wars? A force that fought again is on the record. Its old structure is not

The finding

On 2 March 2026, fifteen months after a cessation of hostilities that it had not signed, Hezbollah fired rockets and drones into Israel. For the next three and a half months it fought a war: across the whole southern front, against an Israeli air campaign and a ground operation, under a campaign name it announced on 11 March. When a ceasefire took effect on 19 June, the fire the UN’s radar could see stopped within two days, and peacekeepers have not detected a Hezbollah projectile since.

That is the strongest single piece of evidence about what Hezbollah’s military organisation is after the war of 2023–24, in which it lost its Secretary-General and the senior commanders whose deaths it confirmed. It proves that the organisation survived, and that something in it could still plan, direct and stop a war. It is often read as more than that — as proof that the old Hezbollah came back. It is not. Fighting again is evidence of survival. It is not, by itself, evidence that the command structure, the units, the arsenal or the ability to replace losses returned to what they were.

This Note separates those things and grades each against the public record. The short answer is that the record establishes function more clearly than structure. What Hezbollah could do in 2026 is on the record. What it now is — how it is commanded, how it is organised and whether it can rebuild again — is largely not.

Two wars, as Vigil dates them

Vigil records two campaigns, and this Note uses them as written. The first is the Lebanon front of 2023–24: Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza from 8 October 2023, then Israel’s escalation from September 2024 — the air campaign it called Northern Arrows, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September and a ground operation from 1 October — ending in the cessation of 27 November 2024. The decisive losses came in the last ten weeks. The second is the 2026 Lebanon war, from 2 March 2026, fought inside the wider war with Iran. A Hezbollah–Israel ceasefire has held since 19 June, but Israeli forces remain in southern Lebanon, Israeli strikes continue, and the war has not formally ended. “Two wars” here means those two records; the period between them, when any rebuilding took place, is the ceasefire of December 2024 to March 2026.

Survival is not continuity

Six claims are commonly collapsed into one, and the evidence for each is different:

• The organisation survived — it exists, it is led, and it acts.
• The command structure survived — the same bodies and offices direct it.
• The unit structure survived — the same formations, with the same roles.
• The arsenal was restored — weapons on hand returned to their former scale.
• Force generation was restored — the organisation can replace the people and matériel it loses.
• Pre-war capability was restored — it can do what it could do before.

The 2026 war settles the first of these and bears on the last. It says much less about the four in between. An organisation can keep fighting under a new structure; it can fight from stocks it cannot replace; it can replace its leader without replacing its commanders. Each of those is a different finding, and none follows from the fact of renewed war.

What 2024 removed

The losses of 2024 matter here for the offices attached to them, not as a roll of names.

At the top, the line is documented. Hassan Nasrallah was killed on 27 September 2024. Hashem Safieddine, the head of the Executive Council and widely expected to succeed him, was killed weeks later; Hezbollah confirmed his death on 23 October. On 29 October Hezbollah announced that its Shura Council had elected Naim Qassem, the deputy Secretary-General, under its “approved mechanism”. The political office was replaced, by a named successor, within a month, through the body that elects him.

Below the top, the losses are on the record and the offices mostly are not. Hezbollah confirmed the deaths of the senior military figures killed between July and October 2024, but it named the office for only a few of them — among them the commander of its southern front since October 2023 and the head of its “air unit”. The roles widely attached to the others — head of operations, commander of the Radwan Force, head of the missile force, head of logistics — are Israeli attributions, or independent ones, and are recorded here as that. Before the killings came the pager and radio attacks of 17–18 September, which struck members of Hezbollah’s units and institutions across the organisation; Nasrallah called them an unprecedented blow. What they did to its communications and middle ranks is described in general terms and is not documented in detail.

The record also has a ceiling that matters for everything after it. From late September 2024 Hezbollah stopped naming its dead, and in the 2026 war it stopped issuing death notices once the toll passed about five hundred, according to Asharq Al-Awsat’s sources. When Israel said on 23 November 2025 that it had killed Haytham Ali Tabatabai, the organisation’s “chief of staff”, Hezbollah confirmed his death and called him a great commander; it did not state his office, and it has named no successor. When a commander was killed in Beirut on 1 April 2026, Hezbollah again gave no office: the IDF said he commanded the southern front, and a Lebanese security source told AFP he ran the organisation’s Iraq file.

What was rebuilt — and who says so

Hezbollah says it rebuilt. On 30 October 2024, in his first speech as Secretary-General, Qassem said the organisation had begun to recover “by filling the gaps, appointing alternative leaders”. In March 2025 he said it had regained its footing within ten days. These are Hezbollah’s own statements about its own acts, and they are documented as statements. They name no appointee to any military post. A claim that offices were refilled, with no office and no officeholder named, establishes that the leadership says the structure was restored. It does not show the structure.

Three investigations go further, each on anonymous sources. Le Figaro reported in October 2025 that Iranian officers helped reconstitute the command within days of the 2024 losses and that the chain of command was shortened. Reuters reported on 21 March 2026, citing two people familiar with the Revolutionary Guard’s activities, that Guard officers filled command gaps, retrained fighters, oversaw rearmament and moved Hezbollah from a hierarchy to small, compartmented units; a single further source said the Guard audited the military organisation and took direct supervision of it. Middle East Eye reported in August 2026, from figures close to Hezbollah, that its units and departments had been made independent of each other, with plans prepared in advance so they could act without orders from the centre.

The three agree on two things: that Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel took part in rebuilding Hezbollah’s military command after 2024, and that the force moved towards smaller, more autonomous units. They disagree on the thing that matters most. Reuters attributes the change to the Guard. Middle East Eye’s sources credit Hezbollah’s own return to the guerrilla model of its early years, and describe the decision to enter the 2026 war as Qassem’s, supported by Iran. Reuters’ own senior Lebanese security source said Iran helped pace the war, not choose its targets.

Neither Hezbollah nor Iran has acknowledged a supervisory role. Iran’s foreign minister has said that Iran supports Hezbollah “from afar” and does not intervene in its decisions. What Iran did put on the record is coordination: on 11 March 2026 the Revolutionary Guard announced its first joint missile operation with Hezbollah from Lebanese territory, and the UN Secretary-General recorded it. The United States re-designated Hezbollah in August 2026 as serving Iran “under the command of” the Qods Force; that is the US government’s legal characterisation, set out without public evidence.

Graded against Vigil’s standard, the reorganisation is reported and corroborated as a change towards compartmented units with Iranian help, and not established as an Iranian design or as Iranian command. No new unit name, no new regional command and no change to the Radwan Force appears in any non-Israeli source.

The 2026 test

The 2026 war is the rare case in which the organisation’s functions were tested in public after its reorganisation. Each observation below is read for what it establishes and what it does not.

A named campaign, timed with Iran. On 11 March Hezbollah announced a campaign it called “Eaten Straw”, and the same day the Revolutionary Guard announced its joint operation. That establishes operational planning ten days into the war, and a working channel to Iran that both sides announced. It does not establish who in Hezbollah authorised it, or whether Iran planned it.

A pause on cue. UNIFIL’s radar detected no fire from north to south of the Blue Line from 17 to 20 April, the opening days of a US-brokered cessation between Israel and Lebanon; Hezbollah resumed its attacks on 21 April. A force-wide halt and a resumption on a date are strong evidence of central control over fire. They do not establish the command’s form, and the radar cannot see anti-tank missiles or small drones.

Sustained fire at scale. Between 21 February and 20 June 2026 UNIFIL detected 6,929 trajectories from north to south of the Blue Line, many of which did not cross it — against 1,540 in the same months of 2024, when the front was limited, and about 4,500 in the ten weeks of the autumn 2024 escalation. On Vigil’s arithmetic, the 2026 daily rate was close to that 2024 peak. That establishes a launch capacity sustained over three and a half months. It does not establish the size of the stockpile, which firing measures only from the spending side, and a trajectory is not a projectile.

A new weapon in the middle of the war. From late April, the Secretary-General reported, Hezbollah “increasingly used” fibre-optic guided explosive drones, which caused casualties among Israeli forces in southern Lebanon. A Hezbollah commander described to Reuters a dedicated drone unit working with its procurement team. That establishes adaptation in wartime, which is an organisational capacity in its own right. It does not establish a production base: local assembly from commercial parts is the converging assessment, resting on Israeli and analysts’ inference.

Ground fighting without holding ground. Israeli forces lost 36 soldiers in Lebanon by 20 June, according to the UN, and the IDF crossed the Litani on 30 May. Hezbollah fought the ground operation for three months and did not stop it. An analyst at CSIS described a force “far weaker” than before 2024, and an Israeli research centre counts most of its fire as falling within a few kilometres of the border.

A stop, and a changed pattern. Within two days of the 19 June ceasefire, fire detectable by UNIFIL stopped and did not return. Since then the IDF has reported explosive-drone attacks on its troops inside Lebanon, and AP reported in September that Hezbollah had claimed none of them. No radar-detected fire, no claims, and attacks confined to Israeli forces on Lebanese soil, as Israel attributes them, is a pattern that holds only if something is enforcing it. It does not establish what that something is.

The pattern runs one way. Every function the war tested was used, and most were held together across time — paused, sustained, stopped. Almost none can be traced to a structure the public can see, and for none is the replacement of losses shown.

Command

The command that the 2026 war reveals is a command that works, not one that can be drawn. It directed a named campaign, coordinated with an outside partner, stopped its fire on two occasions and kept a narrow pattern of activity for four months after the ceasefire. Those are the functions of strategic direction and the transmission of orders, and they survived.

What cannot be said is what holds them. The Jihad Council, which the US government described in 2017 as Hezbollah’s highest military body, lost members in 2024; whether it still sits as a council is not reported by anyone. The analysts who have written on it describe strategic authority concentrated under Qassem and wider latitude for mid-level commanders, which is consistent with the compartmented units the investigations describe and with the speed at which fire stopped in June. It is an analysts’ reading, not a documented structure. A command that can stop a war is a fact. A command that has been restored to its pre-2024 shape is not.

Force generation

Survival and regeneration are different findings, and the second is the one the record barely touches.

Hezbollah published no overall toll for the 2026 war. Israel claimed more than a thousand fighters killed by April; Reuters reported in May that sources in Hezbollah put the toll at up to several thousand, which its media office denied. Lebanon’s health ministry counts all deaths together and does not separate fighters. No figure for the organisation’s present manpower is reliable, and none is given here.

What would show regeneration is the replacement itself: named commanders, recorded recruitment and training, specialists — launch crews, drone operators, signallers — replaced at the rate they were lost. The record holds Hezbollah’s statement that it refilled its posts, the reported Iranian role in retraining fighters after 2024, and Israeli accounts both of recruitment and of difficulty recruiting. It holds a drone unit that grew during the war. It does not hold evidence that the losses of 2026 are being replaced now.

The arsenal problem

Weapon stocks are the measure most often used to say how strong Hezbollah is, and the least able to bear it.

The estimates for its arsenal before October 2023 range from about 75,000 rockets and missiles (an Israeli research centre) through 130,000 (CSIS, in 2018) to more than 150,000 (the IDF). The claims of what was destroyed are almost all Israeli: the IDF said 70–80 per cent by the end of 2024 and 85–90 per cent by March 2026; Israel’s prime minister has given lower and lower remainders without evidence. The one non-Israeli check found, US intelligence officials quoted anonymously by Reuters in December 2024, said Hezbollah had lost more than half. Reuters’ sources say it restocked for months before the 2026 war with Iranian help and its own production; an Israeli centre put its stock on the eve of the war at up to about 25,000 rockets and missiles. These figures do not share a baseline, and a percentage of one cannot be checked against another.

The arsenal is also not the organisation. A force can keep its command, its fighters and its launch crews with a smaller stock, as the 2026 rate of fire suggests Hezbollah did. It can hold weapons it cannot use because the people or the command to use them are gone. And firing reveals only what was spent: 6,929 trajectories say how much Hezbollah could launch in four months, not how much it held at the start or holds now.

After the second war

If Hezbollah rebuilt between December 2024 and March 2026, it did so under conditions that the second war tightened.

Israel holds what the UN calls a forward defence line up to 10 kilometres into Lebanon, and continues to strike. The Lebanese cabinet has banned Hezbollah’s military and security activity since 2 March 2026, and the army is mandated to take its arms; it reports clearing sites south of the Litani, while no takeover north of it has been announced or verified since the ceasefire. The land route through Syria closed with the Assad government in December 2024, and Lebanon has barred Iranian flights since February 2025. Iranian money is asserted by the US Treasury, a Reuters report of $200 million in September is disputed by the State Department, and no weapon used in 2026 has been traced to a new delivery. Hezbollah has not accepted any of it: on 15 October a Hezbollah member of parliament claimed as the organisation’s own a vehicle loaded with explosives that the army had seized ten days earlier, “to confront the Israeli occupation”, and called the cabinet’s ban void.

That claim is one piece of evidence about the organisation after the second war: matériel was moving inside Lebanon, and Hezbollah says so. It is not evidence of how much, or from where. The constraints are real; how far each binds is the question the next year will answer.

What we can actually say

The model the public record supports has four parts.

The organisation survived, and it could fight. That is documented by the 2026 war itself, on the UN’s record.

Its command worked. It could open a campaign, pause and resume it on a date, coordinate with Iran, and stop. Those functions are documented. The structure that performs them is not: no military successor has been named, and the organisation does not publish its form.

The force changed. It fought with less depth and range than before, with far more drones, and — on three investigations’ account — in smaller, compartmented units rebuilt with Iranian help. That change is reported and corroborated; who authored it is disputed.

Regeneration is the unknown. The war shows what Hezbollah could still spend in 2026. It does not show what it can replace.

That is closest to the reading this Note set out to test, with one modification: the record does not merely fail to show the old structure; it contains positive, if anonymous, evidence that the structure changed. It is not proof that the pre-2024 command is gone — Hezbollah publishes nothing that would show it, and a gap in the public record is graded no higher than the visibility of the thing. What can be said with confidence is narrower: the 2026 war answered whether Hezbollah survived. It did not answer what Hezbollah has become, and it left open the question that will decide the next war — whether it can replace what it lost in this one.