By the end of 2024, most of Hezbollah’s senior leadership has been eliminated, its ranks decimated by Israel’s audacious pager and walkie-talkie attacks and more than a year of aerial bombardment in southern Lebanon and in the group’s stronghold of Dahiyeh in southern Beirut.

Before his assassination, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that the group reaching a cease-fire in Lebanon without one in Gaza would be an admission of defeat. It is impossible to square Nasrallah’s own words with the claims to victory made by Hezbollah’s supporters, including those of Nasrallah’s son.

The other major difference between 2006 and 2024 is that Israel is emboldened by its success in Lebanon, and it has signaled that it has no intention of accepting the old status quo. Israel claims that it continues to strike targets in Lebanon despite the cease-fire because Hezbollah still has not withdrawn its forces to north of the Litani River.

The fact that Hezbollah agreed to the cease-fire deal with all of its humiliating conditions, such as agreeing to allow the Lebanese army to dismantle the group’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon, demonstrates the group’s exhaustion and a lack of appetite to continue the conflict with Israel—at least at the same intensity as before the agreement.

Under normal circumstances, Israel continuing to strike targets in Lebanon this intensely would demand a meaningful response from the fundamentalist Shiite militia, and such a cease-fire agreement would not be expected to hold under such conditions. However, with much of Hezbollah’s offensive capabilities spent or degraded after more than a year of continuous warfare, and its deterrence strategy fundamentally destroyed, it is not clear what capacities Hezbollah even has left to respond with.

Hezbollah is now in self-preservation mode, but it will still be playing the long game, hoping that it can ultimately refuse to comply with the agreement’s conditions, just as it refused to comply with Resolution 1701, and that neither the Lebanese Army nor the Israeli government will follow through on enforcing it.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime, on the other hand, has demonstrated that it has the patience, capacity, and willpower to endure an indefinite conflict with Hezbollah for the moment—even in the face of International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

The mood among the Lebanese people has also shifted against what Hezbollah calls “the resistance,” with polls showing that the group is increasingly unpopular. There is little appetite for the forever war that Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, wants to fight against Israel at the expense of Lebanese blood and infrastructure. While Hezbollah maintains overwhelming support among Lebanon’s minority Shiite population, its relationship with the other sects and, more importantly, the political parties and militias that represent the interests of those groups within Lebanon, has been strained to a breaking point.

Hezbollah now finds itself in the most perilous moment since its foundation. It must rebuild its broken statelet within Lebanon, amid a wider population that is angry at the group for launching and losing a costly war. For what seems like the first time, the Lebanese electorate is asking what price it has to pay to maintain Hezbollah’s stranglehold on the country as it pursues its conflict with Israel.

Hezbollah will now try and lick its wounds while it repairs and rebuilds its capabilities. It will gradually attempt to return to the pre-war status quo of total political dominance over Lebanon, while also trying to obfuscate its ambitions to maintain its military presence in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah still has no intention of complying with Resolution 1701, but with a much more hostile Lebanese population than in 2006, the Assad regime gone, and an Israeli opponent that seems to have no intention of returning to that status quo, the task ahead is daunting.

Much like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxy organizations, including Hezbollah, were weakened by then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, so too has Hezbollah been critically damaged by the loss of its charismatic figurehead, Nasrallah. Esmail Qaani and Naim Qassem have already proven to be less effective than their predecessors, and Iran’s Axis of Resistance has looked rudderless and without a clear strategy in the face of regional and international developments.

The suggestion that the disparate constituencies and factions that make up the Lebanese state could unite to disarm Hezbollah and enforce Resolution 1701, even with international support, would have been considered absurd even after several months of this round of warfare with Israel. Nobody in Lebanon, not even the most die-hard anti-Hezbollah figures, would ever profess support for Israel’s campaign of wanton devastation in Lebanon, which includes the murder of journalists and medical workers, as well as the destruction of civilian infrastructure. Yet this war has provided an opening for the Lebanese state to act in a manner that would have been impossible a year ago.

The Lebanese people are now faced with a historic opportunity to dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure and to take back control of their country’s political destiny and turn it into one that prioritizes their future, security, and prosperity, and not the interests of Iran. That demands a country in which the defense of Lebanon is solely in the hands of the Lebanese Army, not a militant group that takes its orders from a foreign power.

This will not be an easy task for Lebanese society, subjugated over the course of many years by Hezbollah through a campaign of assassinations, coercion, and intimidation. Hezbollah has already shown it is more than prepared to deploy violence to maintain its hold over Lebanon, and it will not give up its weapons without a fight. Even broken and desperate, Hezbollah remains a formidable military force within Lebanon, and Lebanese politicians may not have the stomach to take the action required to force Hezbollah to comply with international law and disarm. Iran certainly has no intention of letting Lebanon go, and it will do all it can to keep Lebanon subjugated under the control of its proxy paramilitary.

The true extent of Hezbollah’s current weakness, however, is not most evident in Lebanon, where its hegemony remains intact despite its degradation. It has manifested in its failure to stop the toppling of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Despite everything that Hezbollah has lost following its catastrophic decision to launch a war against Israel following the events of Oct. 7, 2023, it is the loss of this land bridge to Iran that may well be the fatal blow.

The collapse of Assad’s forces in Syria was so sudden and unexpected that it took even the most knowledgeable experts by surprise. In early October, I had reported that a Syrian rebel offensive, spearheaded by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was planned in northwest Syria. It wasn’t even a true secret, as the offensive was telegraphed weeks, if not months, ahead of time, and contacts in Idlib spoke openly about the plans for a major operation against the Assad regime.

Even with this advanced notice, the regime’s forces in Aleppo, no longer bolstered by battle-hardened Hezbollah fighters, disintegrated on first contact with its enemy. Despite the billions of dollars Russia and Iran have pumped into Syria, and the considerable losses Hezbollah has suffered at the hands of the Syrian rebels, the anti-Assad rebellion not only survived, but managed to topple Assad’s regime in under a fortnight, and, with it, the only land route into Lebanon that Iran relies upon to maintain Hezbollah’s arsenal.

As the rebel offensive advanced across Syria, Hezbollah was nowhere to be seen. Whether it lacked the capacity to enter the Syrian conflict again at that moment or whether it was keeping its powder dry for a potential backlash in Lebanon against its rule remains unclear. In either case, Hezbollah’s failure to deploy to Syria to help stem the HTS offensive, even when it became clear that the offensive would permanently cut Hezbollah off from its patron in Tehran, is a potentially fatal admission of weakness.

Hezbollah has absolutely no intention of removing its knife from Lebanon’s throat, but for the first time in my lifetime, it is no longer the only actor with control over Lebanon’s destiny.

Today Hezbollah is broken and decapitated, it is totally isolated politically in Lebanon, and it is cut off from the support of its sponsor Iran.

The rebirth and ultimate victory of the Syrian revolution marks a turning point, not just for Syria but for Lebanon, too, if it wishes to be anything more than an Iranian missile base—a moment in time when the Lebanese can follow on from Syria’s lead, seize control of their destiny, and permanently dismantle Hezbollah.