On 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas-led attack on Israel, Hezbollah opened a front from southern Lebanon and called it a war of support for the Palestinians of Gaza. According to Jad Dilati, a political analyst from Nabatieh, it took the decision “completely unilaterally, without any cabinet decision or governmental consensus”. He made the point to Al Jazeera’s Justin Salhani in Beirut. Nobody consulted the cabinet. Dilati says nobody asked the people of the south either, though they would carry the cost.
Three years have passed, and the cost is still being counted.
The vortex
Before that October, Hezbollah was the dominant force in Lebanon, political and military at once. It could make governments and break them. It stood behind Bashar al-Assad in Syria and had allies in Iraq and Yemen. In 2019 its supporters confronted protesters who were demanding reform. In 2023 it held a military parade in the south and pitched tents in the Shebaa Farms. In Dilati’s account, the group went to war “genuinely believing that it was operating from a position of strength”, relying on its precision missiles and its tunnels.
Analysts say it had not grasped how deeply Israeli intelligence had penetrated its ranks. For eleven months the two sides exchanged fire, with Israel striking more than five times for every Hezbollah attack, and tens of thousands of people fled on both sides of the border. Then came September 2024. The pagers exploded, nearly 500 people were killed on the 23rd alone, and Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated, reportedly after he had accepted a ceasefire. His successor, Hashem Safieddine, was killed as well.
“When Nasrallah was amenable to a ceasefire, Israel was on the offensive,” said Nicholas Blanford, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who has written a book on the group. “Hezbollah got sucked into a vortex which culminated in the decapitation of their leadership.”
Israel invaded in October 2024. A ceasefire followed in November, but Israeli troops stayed for more than two months and kept five positions inside Lebanon. In December the Assad government fell in Damascus, and with it went the routes that had carried supplies from Iran. Over the next fourteen months, Al Jazeera reports, Israel committed more than 10,000 violations of the truce. In March 2026 Hezbollah fired rockets for the first time in more than a year, citing those violations and the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei. Israel escalated and invaded again.
The arithmetic of the south
More than 9,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since 2024. More than 1.2 million were displaced, and hundreds of thousands still are. Israel holds land up to 10 km deep from the border, where dozens of villages are now uninhabited rubble. The World Bank says the economy shrank by more than 6 percent in 2026. The reconstruction estimate of about $11bn, drawn up after the 2024 war, is likely now higher.
“This looks like a long occupation,” Blanford said.
In Beirut the war produced something the party had long prevented. It helped bring Joseph Aoun to the presidency and produced a government that, in Blanford’s words, “took a much stronger line against [the group]”. In August 2025 Hezbollah denounced the cabinet’s disarmament plan as serving Israel and vowed to keep its weapons. The state went ahead anyway, and in February 2026 it said the army needed four months for the second phase. It now says openly that it is working to disarm the group under a framework agreement with Israel, a country it is negotiating with. It is also expanding its own public services, which eats into the welfare network that once bound so many families to the party.
One reflection suggests itself. An armed movement that claims to protect a community is rarely asked, until afterwards, whom it consulted before it went to war.
Still, the party is weakened, not destroyed. It keeps its capacity to fight and remains the most popular representative of Lebanon’s Shia. Analysts and diplomats say claims about its weakness are overstated. “There is no alternative politically for the Shia community at the moment,” Blanford said. Displaced Shia families sheltering in other communities’ areas feel exposed, and that pushes them back towards Hezbollah “as communal protection, rightly or wrongly”. But Dilati sees a group “in a legitimacy crisis that it has not faced before”. He reports that former supporters say “Iran left them behind” and “they don’t want wars anymore”. Blanford warns that people who lost their homes, villages and farmland “may think life was good before and may start blaming Hezbollah.” Both men tie the party’s future to the war on Iran.
A city without its signposts
The place in whose name the front was opened has been unmade. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, more than 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed since October 2023. The figure opens a photo series by Maram Humaid and Abdelhakim Abu Riash that puts archive pictures of streets, markets and public buildings beside new ones taken three years into the war. The destruction has already been counted building by building and expressed in percentages.
UNESCO keeps a narrower ledger, one of memory. It has verified damage to 164 cultural sites since 7 October 2023: 128 buildings of historical or artistic interest, 14 religious sites, nine monuments, eight archaeological sites, two museums and three depositories of movable cultural property. That count was last updated on 24 March 2026, and the figures were republished by the United Nations the following day. The agency works mainly from satellite imagery analysed by UNITAR/UNOSAT. Since the ceasefire of 10 October 2025 it has added rapid checks on the ground where access and security allow.
The list includes the Great Omari Mosque, Gaza’s oldest. It also includes Qasr al-Basha, the ancient Samaritan Bathhouse, al-Qissariya Market and the Church of Saint Porphyrius complex. Some are ruins. Others still stand, badly damaged.
For thousands of years Gaza was a crossroads of civilisations, and these buildings carried that history. They were also how ordinary people found their way: a mosque on one corner, a market on another, the routes to school and to work. When the landmarks went, the streets around them changed too. In whole neighbourhoods, the city its people learned to read has been erased.