Habib told me that, in his younger days, he moved to Asunción, Paraguay, on orders from Hezbollah. Though he was happy to show off his fluent Spanish, when I asked about his activities in Paraguay he would say only that he “worked as a businessman.” South America—particularly the “triple frontier,” where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet—has long been regarded not just as a center for drug smuggling and money laundering but also as an important base for Hezbollah. In the nineties, Buenos Aires was the scene of two bloody bombings linked to Hezbollah: one at the Israeli Embassy, which killed twenty-nine people, and another at a Jewish community center, which killed eighty-five. During his time in Paraguay, Habib said, he was detained and questioned by American agents, though he declined to say why. He was ultimately released. After several years, he returned to Lebanon and rose through the ranks.

 

In 1990, after fifteen years of fighting, the civil war came to an end. Lebanese leaders, most of whom had built their own militias, agreed to share power among the country’s various sects. Under the agreement, the militias were required to hand over their weapons—and they all did, except Hezbollah. The Israelis were still occupying a swath of southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah insisted that it needed to keep its arms. “The feeling at the time was that they were still fighting the occupation,” Marwan Hamadeh, a former cabinet minister, told me. “But it was understood that once the Israelis withdrew this reason would dissolve.”

In 1992, Hezbollah fielded candidates in Lebanon’s first postwar elections. It had built an extensive network of schools and health clinics, and there were hopes that it would evolve into an ordinary political party. That same year, Israeli helicopters fired on a convoy in southern Lebanon and killed Musawi, the group’s leader. His job went to Nasrallah, a thirty-one-year-old cleric from a slum in a Beirut neighborhood called Karantina—a former quarantine site. Habib was not surprised by the appointment. “It was an Iranian order,” he said. Nasrallah had distinguished himself as charismatic and studious. Perhaps decisively, he had also spent two years studying in Qom, the holy Shiite city in Iran.

As leader, Nasrallah quickly dispelled any hope of peace. Baer told me, “The Israelis killed Musawi because he was dangerous, and what they got in his place was someone far more dangerous.” One of Hezbollah’s first acts under his leadership was to plot the assassination of Crocker, the American Ambassador, presumably because Nasrallah blamed the Americans for Musawi’s death. Crocker told me the C.I.A. informed him that a suicide bomber planned to crash a vehicle—a yellow car—into his convoy. Crocker hurried out of the country and returned only after the government of Syria, which had occupied parts of Lebanon since early in the civil war, promised to insure his safety.

Several Lebanese officials described Nasrallah as a devoted family man. In 1997, one of his sons was killed fighting the Israelis, which has since become a main source of his credibility. One of Nasrallah’s pleasures, a Lebanese leader who knows him told me, is studying religious texts. Western officials also note his asceticism. “He’s married to the cause, it seems,” Crocker said. Occasionally, Nasrallah ventures aboveground to play soccer in an indoor stadium near the group’s headquarters. Qassem told me that his boss favors the Brazilian national team.

In speeches and interviews, Nasrallah is gleefully combative, often speaking in colloquial Arabic, rather than in the formal diction favored by other leaders in the Arab world. He makes a point of demonstrating how closely he studies his enemies, often turning their words against them. In 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a sprawling military operation to uncover Hezbollah tunnels in Israel. Nasrallah told an interviewer that Netanyahu had succeeded only in frightening his own citizens. If he himself wanted to convince Israelis that Hezbollah was capable of an invasion, “it would require hard work,” he said, grinning. “But Netanyahu . . . spared me these efforts.” He added, “May he keep talking!”

In 2000, Israeli soldiers, after eighteen years in southern Lebanon, finally retreated across the border, in a procession of tanks and troop carriers. Nasrallah became a hero across the Arab world. “They forced the Israelis out of Lebanon under fire,” Baer said. “No one had ever done that.” For Israel, the myth of its invincibility—built up in a five-decade run of victories over Arab states—was shattered.

The premise of Hezbollah’s armed campaign was effectively gone. But Lebanon, with a weak central government and a tiny, ill-trained Army, was too feeble to disarm the militia, which had the backing of the Syrian Army. “Hezbollah said no,” Hamadeh, the former cabinet minister, told me. “This is when the big divorce started in Lebanon.”

In July, 2006, Hezbollah fighters slipped across the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. In exchange for their return, they demanded the release of several Lebanese prisoners. Instead, Israeli forces struck aggressively. They fired rockets and artillery, and, after Hezbollah responded in kind, they sent in the Air Force. A week into the campaign, General Amos Yadlin, the head of Israeli military intelligence, told his country’s leaders that nearly all Hezbollah’s most advanced rockets were destroyed or disabled. But Hezbollah was still bombarding northern Israel, killing civilians and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. “I said, ‘It’s time to finish the war,’ ” Yadlin told me in Tel Aviv. He recommended either halting the air campaign or mounting a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Israel’s leaders ordered the invasion. “The Prime Minister vowed to destroy Nasrallah, to destroy Hezbollah,” Yadlin said. In retrospect, he added, this seemed like too much to promise.

The I.D.F. soldiers had to make their way through rocky, unfamiliar terrain, where Hezbollah fighters mounted ambushes and then escaped to hidden bunkers. (After the war, I toured one abandoned bunker, a warren of bunk beds and storage rooms buried under a hundred feet of rock. Fortified with steel girders, it had survived with no apparent damage.) The fight that Yadlin had urged leaders to finish quickly lasted more than a month. Hezbollah fired some four thousand rockets, hitting cities across northern Israel. A former I.D.F. officer who joined the fighting told me that the problem was the invasion had no clear purpose. “Hezbollah started the war, and we had to do something about it, without knowing what that something was,” he said.

Finally, the two sides agreed to a ceasefire: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which called for Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters past the Litani River, which winds across Lebanon north of the Israeli border. They were to be replaced by fifteen thousand soldiers from the Lebanese Army and as many as fifteen thousand U.N. peacekeepers.

For both sides, the evident lesson was that the war had been a mistake. Israel had lost a hundred and twenty-one soldiers. And, though Hezbollah had avoided destruction (“winning by not losing,” as Yadlin put it), as many as seven hundred of its fighters had been killed. In Lebanon, nearly a thousand civilians had died, and much of the country was in ruins.

In a speech televised a few days after the fighting ended, Nasrallah admitted that he had miscalculated in sending his men to kidnap Israelis. “If I thought on July 11th that there was even a one-per-cent chance that the capturing operation would lead to the kind of war that unfolded, would I still carry out such an operation? Absolutely not,” he said. More important, he seemed to have sobered about the realities of war. “I believe that Nasrallah knows that the destruction of Israel is completely impossible,” the Western official told me.

Still, even as the border went quiet, Hezbollah began a remarkable military buildup. With Iran’s help, it expanded its arsenal to include long-range, precision-guided missiles, capable of destroying Israeli ports, airports, and electrical grids. Hezbollah became the spearhead of an ambitious campaign to project Iranian power throughout the region. The vision—guided by the Quds Force, the foreign arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard—was to strengthen local Shiite militias, often at the expense of the states where they were based; they would surround Israel with hostile forces and protect the Iranian regime from attack. As native Arabic speakers, Hezbollah fighters could operate abroad more easily than their Persian-speaking patrons. At Iran’s behest, they fanned out from country to country, becoming embroiled in a series of conflicts that ultimately had repercussions around the world.

On a previous visit to Lebanon, I attended a funeral for two Hezbollah soldiers who had been killed while fighting abroad. At the ceremony, held in the Bekaa Valley, not far from the base where the group had formed, the head of Hezbollah’s executive council declared that the deaths were to be celebrated. “You can’t have dignity without young blood,” he said. Portraits of the young men hung above the crowd, and a brass band bleated out upbeat music, like a Sousa march at a football game. To emphasize Hezbollah’s resolve, hundreds of soldiers marched in precise formation, unsmiling and staring straight ahead, with their rifles across their chests, their fatigues pressed, and their boots gleaming. On orders, they jerked their heads to the right and left.

Hezbollah has few tanks and no air force; it relies on missiles, drones, and a deep reserve of fighters. Its leaders claim to have a hundred thousand troops. Western officials estimate that the real number may be closer to sixty thousand, divided among active fighters, reservists, and villagers who might be willing to pick up a gun if called upon. The core of the force is composed of fighters who are recruited as young as grade-school age, then trained and indoctrinated for years before being deployed to protect Shiite interests in Lebanon or abroad.

In 2011, as the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was threatened by a popular uprising, Iran called for help to save him. During the next few years, Nasrallah sent in thousands of fighters, declaring that he would “not allow Syria to fall into the hands of America or Israel or infidels.” Habib, the commander I met in southern Lebanon, was among them. He fought on the decisive battlefronts of Palmyra and Homs, where he sustained an injury that left a long, twisting scar. Habib told me that three thousand Hezbollah fighters died in the mission to save Assad—losses so severe that, according to Western officials, Hezbollah had to loosen its recruitment standards to accommodate mercenaries and others.

The rebels in Syria had their own source of foreign reinforcements: Hamas. Remarkably, that meant fighters from Hezbollah and Hamas faced one another on the battlefield. “We don’t like Hamas—they fought us in Syria,” Habib told me. But now, in the conflict with Israel, things were different, he said: “They are not our allies or our friends, but they are fighting our enemy.”

Even in 2024, with the rebels in Syria mostly subdued, hundreds of Hezbollah combatants were still operating there. Israeli officials said that Iran had mounted a long campaign to “Lebanize” Syria, by attempting to build a Shiite militia similar to Hezbollah, with fighters principally from Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Since 2016, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes in Syria. In April, one of them killed Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who oversaw Iranian efforts in Lebanon and Syria, and who reportedly served on Hezbollah’s leadership council. His death prompted Iran to fire more than three hundred missiles and drones at Israel.

Though Syria was Hezbollah’s most intense foreign entanglement, it was just part of the group’s effort to expand Iran’s sphere of influence. In Iraq, the Quds Force and Hezbollah propped up Shiite forces so powerful that, as a former American official told me, “they have captured the state.” With sympathetic regimes in Iraq and Syria, the Iranians came to dominate an unbroken string of weak or failed states, known as the Axis of Resistance, which stretches hundreds of miles from their border to the Mediterranean. That has allowed Iran to transport material—including missile components—overland.

During my recent visit to Lebanon, I met a Hezbollah commander who had been active in several of these foreign conflicts. Normally based in the Bekaa Valley, the commander, whom I’ll call Hassan, had come to Beirut to visit an ailing relative. He was too worried about being seen with an American to meet in public, so we talked in a car, parked under a tree in view of the Mediterranean. Hassan, who appeared to be in his forties, told me that he’d been with Hezbollah since 1994, when his family moved to Beirut after being forced to flee their village near the Israeli border. “You can join when you’re seven years old,” he said. He was now overseeing antitank- and anti-aircraft-missile teams, and had two teen-age sons enlisted in the group. He had fought the Israelis in 2006, firing at Merkava tanks; in Syria in 2011; and in Iraq in 2014, helping to drive isis from its stronghold in Mosul.

In 2017, Hassan went to Yemen, where the Houthi tribal militia had overrun the capital three years before. The Houthis adhere to a faith only distantly related to Shia Islam, but they attracted support from Iran and its allies. In less than a decade, Hezbollah operatives helped turn a ragtag contingent of men in pickup trucks into a formidable army wielding sophisticated weapons; Hassan trained them to use Russian-made Kornet antitank missiles. After Hezbollah began rocketing Israel in October, the Houthis joined in, launching the first of dozens of attacks on oil tankers and cargo ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The vessels were forced to sail thousands of miles around Africa, disrupting global shipping. “The Houthis are scarily effective,” Hassan said. Last week, they carried out a drone strike in Tel Aviv.

Hassan spoke with the assurance of someone engaged in what he believes to be a great cause. He told me that he and most of his comrades were eager for a showdown with Israel, to prove to the world how overrated its military is. “The Israelis are still living in 1967,” he said. “That’s over. We can put a missile into the flat where Bibi is meeting with his ministers.” He brushed aside concerns of a counterattack, describing a vast network of protective tunnels. “We have tunnels for cars, tunnels for trucks, tunnels for railroad cars,” he said. I asked Hassan how the war between Hezbollah and the Israelis could ever be resolved. “Very simple,” he said. “When they leave on the same boat they came in on.”

With a promontory on the Mediterranean and eighteen official religions, Beirut is one of the world’s most dazzling and sophisticated capitals. But strife and dysfunction, long bearable parts of life there, have driven the city to paralysis. Electricity sometimes runs for only an hour a day; trash piles up in the streets for months on end; and poverty, once mostly invisible, reveals itself in the homeless people who roam the streets. Residents of Beirut used to speak proudly of their resilience. These days, the word is regarded as a sour joke.

Amid these problems, Lebanon has been without a President and a functioning legislature since 2022. According to the constitution, parliament elects the President, and the candidate favored by Hezbollah—with Iran’s backing—has been unable to secure the necessary votes. Hezbollah’s elected representatives are seen as unusually competent (“some of the hardest-working people in parliament,” a cabinet member told me), but their main task is to secure a head of state sympathetic to their priorities. Whenever members of the opposition move to elect a President on their own, the Hezbollah representatives and their allies walk out of the chamber, making a quorum impossible. Since 2022, this drama has repeated itself dozens of times. The former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told me, “Parliament is unable to exercise even its most basic powers.”

The hollowing out of the Lebanese state dates to at least 2005. That Valentine’s Day, a truck bomb exploded in downtown Beirut, killing Rafik Hariri, the charismatic and pro-Western former Prime Minister, and twenty-one others. The assassination set off a popular uprising against Hariri’s presumed killers: Hezbollah and its Syrian backers, who still maintained thousands of soldiers in Lebanon.

Within two months, the Syrians departed, and the demonstrations were hailed as a turning point for Lebanon. Instead, Hezbollah used the tumult to secure its power. At least two Lebanese officials who tried to investigate Hezbollah’s role in Hariri’s murder were murdered themselves. When an international tribunal indicted four members of the group, Nasrallah threatened to ignite a civil war, and he refused to turn over the suspects. In 2008, after the government tried to curtail Hezbollah’s power, Nasrallah ordered his fighters to fan out across western Beirut. Lebanese leaders backed down, signalling that they would henceforth leave Hezbollah alone.

The group’s growing presence in domestic politics failed to normalize it. In August, 2020, a warehouse at the Port of Beirut, holding an estimated five and a half million pounds of ammonium nitrate, exploded, sending out shock waves so intense that some ten thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed. Hezbollah had substantial control over the port, and a long list of politicians knew that the ammonium nitrate was stored there. But, when a Lebanese judge began to look into the explosion, Hezbollah’s supporters led a march to the Palace of Justice to demand that he stop. They made a point of passing Ain el-Remmaneh, the Christian neighborhood where the civil war began, in 1975. “What they were saying was ‘If this investigation goes ahead, we’re willing to go to war,’ ” Michael Young, a Lebanese columnist and an editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told me.

As the official investigation stalled, private citizens took up the inquiry. One of the most prominent, an activist named Lokman Slim, raised questions about who was responsible for the explosion. “The first accused is the group with the greatest influence—by that I mean the Hezbollah militia,” he told the TV network Al-Hadath in January, 2021. The information he’d gathered suggested that Hezbollah had imported the ammonium nitrate, a key component in bombs, in order to ship it to Syria.

Three weeks after Slim’s TV appearance, he was found dead in an abandoned car in southern Lebanon, shot five times in the head and once in the back. His murder has not been solved, and Hezbollah denies involvement. But his wife, Monika Borgmann, told me, “Hezbollah killed Lokman,” pointing out that Hezbollah supporters had previously showed up at their home and accused him of treachery. Borgmann counts him as the eighteenth prominent Lebanese to have been assassinated since 2005.

To many, Slim’s murder was emblematic of a larger collapse. Less than a year before, the country’s banking system had imploded. The troubles were traced to the central bank, whose governor, Riad Salameh, had thrown open the public treasury to a succession of Lebanese governments. Some eighty billion dollars—considerably more than the national G.D.P.—went missing. The prevailing belief was that the treasury had been looted by political parties, including Hezbollah. As with the port explosion, official investigations went nowhere. “The political class protected itself,” Patrick Mardini, a Lebanese economist, told me.

In the ensuing crisis, the country’s G.D.P. dropped by half and its poverty rate tripled—an economic collapse that the World Bank ranks among the worst in centuries. For months, protesters demanded that the entire political establishment be swept away. While most of the country’s leaders disappeared from view, Hezbollah stepped forward. As demonstrators chanted, “Revolution!,” the group’s fighters went into the streets to beat them. Nasrallah gave a scolding speech to those who, “at this bad and sensitive time,” wanted to overthrow the existing order. He told them, “Listen to this advice from me: you are wasting your time, you are exhausting yourselves, you are exhausting the country, you are wasting the country’s time.” Decades earlier, Hezbollah had built its reputation as a vanguard for the oppressed. Now it was a defender of the status quo—in which, not incidentally, it was the most powerful force.

During my visit, there were widespread grumblings that Hezbollah might be dragging the country into a war. Some, especially members of Lebanon’s Christian community, even suggested that an Israeli strike would be welcome. “I think if the Israelis attacked Hezbollah, a lot of people would cheer,” a guest said at a dinner party that I attended. Others spoke in darker terms, arguing that Hezbollah’s takeover of the state had irreparably widened sectarian divisions. “The social contract in Lebanon is broken—none of the communities coöperate anymore,” Young, the Carnegie editor, told me. “If the Israelis attack, and they destroy Lebanon, I think there’s a good chance Lebanon will never come together again.”

Last October, when Hezbollah followed the Hamas attacks by sending rockets into northern Israel, leaders in Jerusalem feared they were planning to do more. Cabinet ministers began preparing for a broad strike on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon—especially the group’s long-range missiles. But American intelligence showed that Hezbollah had made no substantial preparations for further strikes, so the U.S. pressed Israel to reconsider. A senior American official told me that President Biden and others were on the phone all night, trying to talk the Israelis down. There were moderating voices in the cabinet, too: Netanyahu’s recently formed unity government included two new ministers, who opposed the operation. At the last moment, as the planes were in the air, Israel called off the strike. “We were very, very, very close,” a senior Israeli official who regularly attends cabinet meetings said.

In the following days, as Hezbollah’s bombardments continued, the Israeli government ordered the area near the northern border evacuated. Since then, some sixty thousand displaced Israelis have been living at government expense in private homes and apartments in other parts of the country. In Lebanon, about ninety thousand civilians have fled the area. Both sides of the seventy-five-mile-wide frontier have been largely depopulated, except for soldiers.

During my visit, I went to Malkiya, an Israeli kibbutz a couple hundred yards from the border. Before the war started, Malkiya had a population of about five hundred, and was surrounded by vineyards and fruit trees. Now it is nearly empty, the fields blasted. Itai Kroiz, the kibbutz’s leader and an I.D.F. soldier, drove me around in a golf cart. “Here, on your right,” he said, gesturing at a collapsed home, “that was hit by a rocket.” He pointed out farms and orchards burned by Hezbollah attacks. “The rockets came yesterday, and the day before, and the day before,” he said. A little farther along was the Malkiya Travel Hotel, where tourists from Israel’s cities used to come to enjoy the countryside. “It’s empty, of course.”

Kroiz came to Malkiya in 2014, drawn, like many Israelis, by the area’s pastoral atmosphere and affordable homes. “It was a dream to live in a place like this,” he said. Kroiz could often see Hezbollah fighters across the border, driving in their pickup trucks. “They would take photos of us,” he said. Sometimes Israeli planes would bomb them, but mostly the border was quiet. Then came the attacks in October, and the order to evacuate. “People come every now and then to check on their homes and their trees, but it’s a ghost town,” Kroiz said.

The mass evacuations have created a painful dilemma for Israel’s leaders. The temporary housing is costing more than a hundred million dollars a month, and the government has effectively abandoned a large part of its own territory. “It’s not sustainable,” a member of the Israeli cabinet told me. “People need to go home.”

At a café in Tel Aviv, I met Shay Levy and Alona Govrin, who had fled Malkiya with their two young children on October 7th. Since then, they have been living in a government-funded two-bedroom apartment. Levy, who used to lead tour groups to the Balkans, has been giving lectures about the region at community centers; his wife, Malkiya’s former director of cultural projects, has been working as a nutritionist. Their son, Kerem, was in kindergarten in Malkiya when the family had to leave; he recently completed the school year in Tel Aviv. “Most of the time, we are O.K.,” Govrin told me. “We have our lives.”

But the family’s future is uncertain. Just before the October 7th attack, they bought a plot of land in Malkiya, where they were planning to build a home. A similar parcel in Tel Aviv is far beyond their means, and they worry that the threat of war makes it impossible to sell their lot at home. “We don’t know if we will go back to Malkiya,” Govrin said. “How could we ever feel safe? Maybe it’s over for that place.”

Nasrallah has said that, once the Israelis end their military operations in Gaza, Hezbollah will stop shelling. But, even if he honored that pledge, few Israeli officials believe that a ceasefire alone would persuade the evacuated citizens to return to their homes. Israeli officials have contemplated sending the military to clear the Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon. Such an operation would be fraught with risk, and at least in the short term it would make matters worse.

U.S. officials have been trying to broker an agreement that would secure the border without an invasion. The deal, outlined by Amos Hochstein, an American negotiator, would resemble Security Council Resolution 1701, the accord from 2006 in which Hezbollah agreed to withdraw to the Litani River. But that agreement didn’t stick; after the war, Hezbollah fighters returned. Until shooting started last October, they moved freely along the border, effectively barring the Lebanese Army and the U.N. from places they didn’t want them. American officials say that, this time, they’re hopeful they can induce Hezbollah to back off. Since October, Israeli air strikes have destroyed billions of dollars’ worth of Hezbollah towers, bunkers, and other infrastructure—effectively razing everything aboveground, according to the senior American official. Hezbollah’s leadership in the field has been similarly diminished. “The Israelis are killing a lot of colonels,” a former senior U.S. military officer told me.

For Israel, the central problem inherent in a peace deal is that the Hezbollah fighters aren’t merely stationed in southern Lebanon—they live there. “Who will make sure the Hezbollah fighters don’t sneak back in, like they did so many times before?” Eyal Hulata, a former Israeli national-security adviser, said. “Even if we could find a solution, there won’t be anyone to verify it.”

In recent years, both Israel and Lebanon have demonstrated willingness to compromise. In 2022, Hochstein and French diplomats brokered a deal in which the two countries successfully delineated their maritime border, an issue made especially sensitive by expectations of substantial offshore natural-gas reserves. Officials in Lebanon and Israel told me that Hezbollah ultimately approved the arrangement. “Hezbollah signed off on a document that has the word ‘Israel’ in it fifteen times,” Hulata said.

The Western official who has met Nasrallah told me that he has no intention of goading the Israelis into a big fight. He drew a contrast with Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader. “Sinwar doesn’t care about the Palestinian people who have been killed,” he said. “Nasrallah would never have ordered the October 7th attack. He doesn’t want to see Lebanon destroyed.”

Some officials in Israel have signalled wariness of an all-out conflict. “We don’t have to solve every problem at once,” the cabinet member told me. “If we can enter into a serious diplomatic process, I think there is a good chance we can avoid a war.” Others offered less optimistic predictions. The senior Israeli official told me, “Would we prefer to have a full-scale war with Hezbollah right now? I would prefer not to. For now, we would prefer to finish with Hamas.” Yet he was resigned to the idea that there would be a showdown eventually. “We will go to war with them one day—maybe a year, maybe two years,” he said. A second senior American official, who meets often with Israel’s leaders, told me he worried that they might be overconfident about their ability to keep a conflict under control. “The Israelis think they are the masters of the military-escalation ladder,” he said. “But all you need is one mistake—and there’s an all-out war.”

Such a war could wreak terrible destruction. In April, when Iran and its allies launched more than three hundred drones and missiles, Israel’s air-defense network was able to almost entirely thwart the attack. But Hezbollah’s participation was relatively minor. Some Israeli officials I spoke to envisioned a war on four fronts—with Hamas to the south, the West Bank to the east, Hezbollah to the north, and Iran. “If Iran had fired more missiles and Hezbollah had unleashed a major barrage, the Israeli defenses would have been overwhelmed,” James Jeffrey, a former U.S. special envoy in the Middle East, told me. “This is the nightmare scenario. It’s existential.”

A recent paper, from the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University, in Herzliya, estimated that, even without Iranian assistance, Hezbollah could fire three thousand missiles a day into Israel for weeks on end. The senior American official noted that Israeli leaders believe they could destroy most of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles in a week to ten days. But in that period, he added, Hezbollah would be firing missiles every day. A former American military officer familiar with Israel’s preparations told me that its leaders would likely prioritize defending such sensitive installations as seaports, electrical plants, and the nuclear reactor at Dimona, leaving population centers more open to attack. “There would be many civilian deaths on both sides,” he said. “Much of Lebanon would be destroyed.”

For some Israelis, that scenario is reason enough to consider a far-reaching strike against Hezbollah—and to argue that such an attack should have launched even before October 7th. “We would have had complete surprise,” Jacob Nagel, a former Israeli national-security adviser, told me. “We could have neutralized the threat. Now it’s too late—Hezbollah has moved everything. We have to find it all again.”

How Tehran would react to such an Israeli strike or an invasion is unclear, but the fear in both Tel Aviv and Washington is that a war would draw in Iran, and possibly the U.S. “We don’t believe Iran wants a big war,” the second senior American official said. But no one really knows. In June, Iranian officials said that if Israel launched a major campaign in Lebanon it would provoke an “obliterating war.”

In any event, as a former Israeli official told me, the prospect of eliminating Hezbollah’s missile forces entirely from the air is probably an illusion. The group maintains anti-aircraft missiles that could menace Israeli jets, and some of its missile installations would almost certainly survive a first strike. To fully secure the northern border, “there would have to be a ground invasion,” Hulata, the former national-security adviser, said. Israel has about half the weapons needed to neutralize Hezbollah’s missiles and push back its ground forces without risking heavy casualties, the former American military officer told me. To fully restock its arsenal would take roughly twelve months if the U.S. keeps supplying arms at the current rate.

A final variable is Israel’s national psyche, which was profoundly damaged by the government’s failure to protect the country on October 7th. In the week I spent there, the resolve to subdue Hamas appeared undiminished, but a mood of self-doubt seemed to grip the country. In one conversation, I asked a senior Israeli national-security official how he could be sure of Hezbollah’s condition. “We are confident,” he said—and then stopped himself. “But we are not bragging about our intelligence. Especially not after October 7th. We have good capabilities, but we must be humble.”

On the ground, Hezbollah seemed anything but humble. The group’s ultimate dream is not just to thwart the I.D.F. in southern Lebanon. It is, in the words of its founding charter, Israel’s “final obliteration from existence and the liberation of venerable Jerusalem from the talons of occupation.” When I asked Habib, the Hezbollah commander, about the possibility of pulling back from the border in order to stave off a war, he nodded in the direction of Israel. “The only direction I’m going is that way,” he said.