Hezbollah has begun moving parts of its weapons arsenal from known warehouses and military sites to private properties, commercial storage facilities, farms and buildings owned or managed by people it trusts, a Lebanese security source told Eerm News.

The move is aimed at dispersing the group's weapons across a larger number of locations and making them harder to locate and access, the source said.

The operation does not mean Hezbollah is completely emptying its central warehouses, but rather involves “dismantling part of the storage network” by removing quantities of weapons, ammunition and equipment and distributing them among smaller sites that do not have an obvious military character, the source noted.

In some cases, the group is relying on properties belonging to individuals affiliated with it or considered trustworthy, including farms, commercial warehouses and private buildings. That makes it more difficult to establish a direct organizational link between a particular property and Hezbollah, the source said.

According to the security source, Hezbollah concluded from Israeli strikes during the war that large, fixed weapons depots had become increasingly vulnerable to detection and attack.

Distributing weapons and equipment among a larger number of smaller sites, by contrast, allows the group to preserve at least part of its arsenal while making it harder for any single strike or operation to eliminate a significant portion of its stockpiles.

Not all weapons can be moved in the same way, the source said. Some systems and equipment require suitable facilities, but small arms, ammunition, portable missiles, military equipment and spare parts can be distributed more easily among multiple locations.

The reported shift has added urgency to one of the most difficult questions facing the Lebanese army as it seeks to bring all weapons under state control: whether and how private homes and other privately owned properties should be searched.

Israel has argued that failing to inspect private properties leaves a loophole through which Hezbollah weapons could remain in areas the Lebanese army declares secured. Lebanon, meanwhile, has resisted turning the army's deployment into a broad campaign to search civilian homes, amid concerns that such operations could trigger tensions in southern communities and with Hezbollah more broadly.

Reuters reported last month that Israel wanted proposed inspections under an international verification mechanism to include private homes. Lebanese security officials said the army would require warrants to search individual houses. The question of how private properties would be searched, and who would have authority to conduct those searches, has remained one of the contentious issues in discussions over the mechanism.

The issue is particularly sensitive because Lebanon's Constitution protects the sanctity of the home.

In July, Prosecutor-General at the Court of Cassation Judge Ahmad al-Hajj said he had not issued an authorization allowing searches of private homes. Any such request, he said, would require prior approval from the public prosecutor's office based on serious information indicating that weapons were present.

Judicial authorities have nevertheless made clear that constitutional protection of a private property does not make the possession of military equipment inside it lawful. Any entry and search, however, must follow the procedures established by law.

The Lebanese security source said this created a significant practical challenge for the army. Finding a military site or a visible weapons warehouse is fundamentally different from suspecting a private home or a farm owned by a civilian.

“Hezbollah is fully aware of the sensitivity of the army entering homes, especially within the Shiite community,” the source said.

Storing weapons in private properties could therefore make efforts to locate them slower and more complicated, while increasing the risk of confrontation with residents, the source added.

The source said the danger was not simply what authorities might find during searches today, but the possibility that a weapons-storage network could remain spread across dozens of small sites even after known warehouses and military positions had been cleared.

Military and strategic expert Mohammad Youssef al-Nour said that if Hezbollah's reported distribution of weapons among private properties expands, it would present a more complicated challenge than conventional military warehouses.

“A central warehouse is a location that can be detected, monitored and brought under control, but distributing the assets across dozens of small sites multiplies the need for intelligence and makes the verification process longer and more complicated,” al-Nour told Erem News.

“The more serious problem emerges when weapons move into the civilian sphere, because the army then faces a security, legal and social equation at the same time,” he said. “It cannot treat every home as a military target, nor can it conduct random searches of private properties.”

Al-Nour said the success of the government's plan to bring weapons under state control should not be measured simply by the number of warehouses the army enters.

Instead, he said, authorities would need to determine whether they could prevent weapons from being transferred from known storage facilities to other locations.

“Dismantling a warehouse without knowing where the weapons went may simply move the problem rather than resolve it,” he said.