The bottom line, and perhaps the most surprising one, is that Hassan Nasrallah is in retreat. Someone who began as a young, passionate revolutionary, and who led a jihadi war that was applauded from all sides, has become a corrupt politician, who lives within a tangle of interests. Today, it's not even clear if he knows how to define what Hezbollah's declared goal is, what his goal is, and if his final target is Jerusalem or Beirut.
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All of this is the result of 30 years of leadership, but mainly the last 15 years. Nasrallah did indeed call the Second Lebanon War a "divine victory," but from his perspective, the reality was completely different: it showed him the limits of his power. And when this reality combined with the Syrian civil war and the growing political crisis in Lebanon – in which Hezbollah has become an obstacle to the state's rehabilitation – Nasrallah has been forced to maneuver between the demands of his Iranian patrons, the needs of the Shiite population in the country, and his desire to maintain the struggle against Israel.
People will immediately say: he's still Israel's most dangerous enemy. He knows us better than anyone, and his open file against us is always maintained. But the leader who this month marks 30 years as Hezbollah leader is not the same leader who started out: the charisma has gone, and in its place, there is a pot belly and sweat, and a great bag of worries and things to do, problems that can't be solved with impassioned speeches.
On Feb. 16, 1992, IAF helicopters attacked the car of then Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi in southern Lebanon. At first, Israel considered abducting him as a bargaining chip to secure the release of Ron Arad, but when it became clear that it wasn't possible to implement the plan, he was assassinated from the air. His wife, son, and four guards were killed alongside him.
Following the assassination, Hezbollah launched a number of terrorist attacks in revenge. The first targeted the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, in which 29 people were killed; and the second, two years afterward, targeted the Jewish community building in the city, in which 85 died. Musawi, who was relatively moderate, was replaced by Hassan Nasrallah, who was more extreme than his predecessor.
Nasrallah ("God's Victory") was born in Beirut on 31st August 1960 to a Shiite family, the oldest of nine children. With the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war, the family moved to southern Lebanon, and Nasrallah joined the Amal organizations, which then led the Shiites in the country. He excelled at religious studies and aged 16 he was sent to learn with the Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in the Iraqi city of Najaf. There, he met Musawi, becoming one of his closest confidantes.
Complicated strategy
After the IDF invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Iran established Hezbollah. Musawi and Nasrallah left Amal and joined the new organization. Then, they operated under the name "Revolutionary Justice Organization," only formally announcing in 1985 the establishment of the Hezbollah organization ("Party of God").
With the IDF's withdrawal to the security zone in 1985, Hezbollah widened its activities. Nasrallah became the organization's senior commander and religious authority, and in 1987, when he was 27, he flew to the city of Qom in Iran to complete his religious studies. He returned after two years in order to lead the struggle against Amal, while Hezbollah was led by Subhi al-Tufayli. Following his success, he was actually kept at a distance by the Iranians, as he was seen as being too extreme. In 1990 he was returned to the fold, as part of a process in which Tufayli was replaced by Musawi, and began to stand out as the strongest figure in the organization.
After taking over from Musawi, Nasrallah took the organization in a radical direction. He focused on fighting the IDF in the security zone and launching rockets at the Galilee. During this period around 25 IDF soldiers were killed every year in southern Lebanon, mostly in battles with Hezbollah. The major events included: Operation Accountability in 1993; Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996; the February 1997 Ansariya ambush, in which 12 Shayetet 13 soldiers were killed; the ambush in which the Paratroopers commander Maj. Eitan Balachsan, First Lieutenants David Grant and Liraz Tito were killed in February 1999; and the IED that killed the Lebanon Liaison Unit commander, Brig. Gen. Erez Gerstein, NCO Imad Abu-Rish, Staff Sgt. Omer El-Kabetz and Israel Radio reporter Ilan Roeh, also in February 1999.
Nasrallah used the Israeli protests calling for the IDF to leave Lebanon to his advantage, exploiting them for a dual strategy: demoralizing the Israeli public and deterring the IDF from acting. These two parts worked well: the first ultimately led to every candidate in the 1999 elections (Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Yitzhak Mordechai) promising to withdraw from Lebanon if they won. Barak was elected and kept his promise.
Hezbollah was also successful with the second part of the strategy. Continued operational failures and large numbers of deaths led the IDF to withdraw from outposts and to reduce the number of operations. Hezbollah exploited this in order to strengthen its attacks on the outposts – mainly by placing IEDs on main routes and by firing anti-tank missiles, which were the cause of most of the deaths during the IDF's final year in the security zone.
Nasrallah is married to Fatima. His eldest son Hadi was killed in September 1997 in a clash with the Egoz Unit, who had initiated operational activity in southern Lebanon. The clashes were accompanied by heavy mortar fire from Hezbollah, something unusual during that period, immediately drawing the attention of then Egoz commander Moshe "Chico" Tamir. Contrary to instructions and the operational plans, he instructed his soldiers to bring the bodies of the Hezbollah dead to Israel.
Hadi Nasrallah's body was returned in June 1998. In return, Israel received the remains of Itamar Ilya, who was killed in the Ansariya ambush. This event significantly strengthened Nasrallah's position in Hezbollah: not only was he a leader who sent his fighters into battle, but also a father whose son fought for the common purpose.
He has four other children: Zainab, Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Mahdi. "He is an exemplary family man," says Brigadier-General (res.) Ram Yavne, formerly intelligence commander in the Northern Command and until three years ago Head of the Strategy Division in the Planning Directorate. "Unlike other senior Hezbollah figures, he's never been associated with impropriety." According to Yavne, "in Israel, we made of him more than he is, but honestly, we're not talking about someone who is very different from other Lebanese politicians we have known. Like many of them, he started as a revolutionary and became another calculating feudal Lebanese leader, who is busy all the time in fortifying his status as a patron of the Shiites within the internal Lebanese political system. He is extremely focused and mission-driven, connected to his role and politically astute."
The IDF withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000 was a formative event for Hezbollah. Then, Nasrallah was seen as a superhero in Lebanon and the Arab world at large. He delivered the "Spider Web" speech, in which he claimed that, despite its nuclear weapons and air force, Israel was weaker than a spider's web.
Until 2006 he was convinced that he could deliver a damaging blow to Israel, and he worked accordingly. This led to a number of terror attacks and attempted terror attacks, beginning with the abduction of IDF servicemen and the killing of the soldiers Benny Abraham, Adi Avitan, and Omer Souad on Mount Dov in October 2000, the failed abduction at Ghajar in 2005, and the abduction and killing of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in July 2006, which led to the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War.
"His outlook of Israel changed in 2006," Yavne says. "Afterwards he understood the limits of his power, and he was forced to manage a much more complicated strategy."
In the past, Nasrallah himself has admitted that, had he known what the results of the war would be – substantial destruction in Lebanon, mainly in Dahiya, the Shiite suburb of Beirut, he wouldn't have started it.
During the war, Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, came to Lebanon in an attempt to help Nasrallah. This led Israel to add a sixth goal to its five original war goals: the reduction of Iranian involvement in Lebanon.
Not only was this goal not achieved, but exactly the opposite happened: under Soleimani's leadership, Iran increased its hold on the country. The experts are divided on the Iranian motivation: some think that Iran didn't trust the capricious Nasrallah, who nearly destroyed the enormous project that had been built in Lebanon for the sake of the bodies of two soldiers; while others believe that Soleimani identified an opportunity to obstruct Israel with a powerful military force of missiles and rockets, one that would deter them from additional wars.
'Perceived as one of the people'
"Nasrallah is an extremely unique figure," says Brigadier-General Dror Shalom, who until around a year ago was the Head of the Research Division in the Military Intelligence Directorate. "Someone with a high personal level, with developed thinking, an abundance of charisma, and high emotional intelligence. These qualities are what made Hezbollah so popular.
"Nasrallah is seen as one of the people, the public see him as of 'one of our own'; he has a religious title, and despite not being a religious authority, he walks in a robe and a turban and understands religion; he knows to use his professional environment and make use of it; and he was able to take advantage of the death of Hafez al-Assad in order to build close relations with his son, Bashar, and to a certain extent make Syria reliant on Hezbollah just as Hezbollah is reliant on Syria."
He has harnessed his intimate relations with Assad on a number of occasions for Hezbollah's benefit. When the Syrian civil war broke out, he hesitated over whether to come to Assad's aid, mainly because of strong criticism in Lebanon, but he joined the mission under the guidance of the Iranians and the leadership of his old friend Soleimani.
Nasrallah's right-hand man, Imad Mughniyeh, who was Hezbollah's military commander, was assassinated in February 2008, in an operation that has been attributed to Israel. "The assassination hit him hard," Shalom says. "He suddenly found himself alone at the discussion table, with few people that he could rely on. Soleimani entered this vacuum, and this is how decision-making in Hezbollah tilted, which until then had been wholly Lebanese, towards Iran."
After the assassination of Mughniyeh, Nasrallah bore the burden of a number of different powers in the organization's military command. The one who stood out at his side as senior military commander was Mustafa Badreddine, one of the senior activists in the organization under his leadership, who was involved in the biggest terror attacks the organization carried out in the 1980s against a range of Western targets. During the Syrian civil war, he became a burden for Nasrallah, and even before then for the Iranians, after a long series of sordid events were connected to him, including the methodical stealing of funds and relationships with lovers. He was assassinated in an explosion at a Hezbollah facility in the Damascus suburbs.
"Nasrallah is the one who ordered the assassination of Badreddine, because Badreddine began to act independently, and there was a fear that his criminal involvement would also infect Nasrallah and Soleimani," Shalom says. "It was an assassination within the family – Badreddin was the cousin and brother-in-law of Mughniyeh. Here Nasrallah acted like the mafia, in cold blood. For a moment it was reminiscent of the years that he was a young leader of a guerrilla organization."
The assassination is reminiscent of another assassination that Hezbollah was responsible for, and that has already rocked Lebanon for 17 years – the murder of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. All of the evidence and investigations led to the conclusion that the murder was carried out at the behest and with the approval of the most senior leadership in Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon even issued indictments against Hezbollah commanders at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
'He knew how to analyze us'
Over the years, Nasrallah presented himself as the leading expert on Israel in the Arab world. This is doubly true in the eyes of the Iranians: every time that the Israeli issue comes up, they rush to consult with the expert. Nasrallah and Khamenei have close relations: each year Nasrallah flies to Tehran to present his annual assessment to the Iranians. "At least until 2006 Nasrallah was Iran's exclusive intelligence commander on matters related to Israel," Shalom says. "When Khamenei wanted to know what was happening in Israel, he was the man. He knew to analyze us well, understood the political nuances and the public noises."
"In the eyes of the Iranians he is seen as their most senior non-Iranian Arab figure," Yavne says. "It's true that he's not seen as being at the heart of the regime there, but his position there is strong and stable, and of course he is one of the outside people who is most influential on Khameini and the regime. They get from him not only a Shiite, but also a bit of Arab."
But after the 2006 Second Lebanon War something broke for Nasrallah. The arrogance and the haughtiness were replaced with fear and insecurity. He spends most of his time in his bunker in the heart of Beirut, surrounded by guards. He maintains compartmentalization and an extreme level of security and hardly goes out. He holds most of his meetings there, and whoever comes to meet him goes through strict security, as well as deceptions so that he doesn't know exactly where he has been."
"He lives with a feeling of being constantly pursued," Shalom says. In his eyes, it's not only the Israelis who might kill him but also the Americans – especially after the assassination of Soleimani. In Lebanon, he has no shortage of enemies afraid. He is afraid." It has also resulted in harm to his image.
"Until the Second Lebanon War he was the superhero of the Shiites, but also of many Sunnis in the Middle East, who saw him as someone fighting for them against Israel," says Brigadier-General (res.) Ronen Manalis, former Chief IDF Spokesperson and Head of the Lebanon Division for Northern Command Intelligence, and head of Gadi Eizenkot's office. "Then, everything he said was set in stone – the "ba'd ba'd [his promise to launch missiles beyond the city of Haifa] speech and the damage done to INS Hanit. In the last few years, he has been caught making a number of lies, bragged about a number of operations that were supposedly carried out. His self-confidence has also been harmed, and he is extremely deterred by Israeli abilities."
Far from being wild
To a great extent, Nasrallah has gone from being a pursuer to being pursued. Israel has tried to strengthen these feelings in a number of ways and announcements – from then Prime Minister Netanyahu revealed the precision missile factories, to information about the organization's involvement in terror activities in Syria, Lebanon, and other countries.
"He's no longer ready to fight like he was," Dror Shalom says. "He's not crazy and he's not capricious like some people think. He can be deterred, and in this regard, it's good that he's in this position. It's no exaggeration to say that he's become an asset for us. If they asked me, I wouldn't recommend assassinating him tomorrow morning."
Ram Yavne agrees: "Nasrallah has become extremely calculated, far from being wild. He's over it. He understood the limits of power. From our perspective, there's a burden and an asset: a burden because of Hezbollah's military abilities, and an asset because he is very deterred.
"Most of Nasrallah's worries today are about internal Lebanese issues. His schedule is mostly devoted to political meetings and the ongoing management of Hezbollah. Over the last few years, it became a humungous organization with tens of thousands of salaries a month. It's not that he's concerned by the situation of every Shiite family in Lebanon, but he has big headaches that he didn't have when he was only the head of a terror organization.
"The turning point for this issue was the murder of Hariri. It drew Nasrallah into Lebanese politics and turned him into one of its leading players. Today he has the person most capable of getting things done in Lebanon, not only because he is the head of the largest group, but mainly because Hezbollah is the most organized force. But this power also operates against him. He is seen in the eyes of many as part of the problem, of the corruption, of the deteriorating economic situation – and he doesn't have any solutions."
"Nasrallah has become a national Lebanese figure," Manalis says. "He no longer fights and kills those who he wants to. He needs to also take into account general Lebanese considerations, because the state is collapsing in almost every respect. He can't ignore everyone and do what he wants, and he lives in constant tension between his status as the defender of the Shiites and his desire to be seen as the defender of Lebanon."
Massive arsenal
He is extremely disturbed every time some new corruption is attributed to Hezbollah, by the drug smuggling and the trade in foreign currency. In recent months he has been busy dealing with internal Lebanese criticism about the preferential treatment for the Shiite population in comparison to the rest of the Lebanese population, which finds expression in the distribution of food packages and gas station vouchers to Shiites, all thanks to Iranian assistance, while the country groans under paralyzing scarcity.
But Hezbollah too is subject to a range of problems and difficulties. "He is the secretary-general of an organization in crisis, which needs to reinvent itself," Sharon says. "After the IDF withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, the story of a jihadi organization that gets up in the morning and fights is no longer relevant to him, and definitely not after the Second Lebanon War. There's a lot of criticism of him from activists who want a more combative stance. For him the story of a jihadi organization that doesn't do jihad is extremely problematic."
In order to preserve the jihadi idea, Nasrallah led the tunnels project – the digging of assault tunnels from Lebanese territory into Israel, which were supposed to assist in the occupation of communities and outposts in the Galilee and in large numbers of Israeli deaths or abductees. Hezbollah dug them secretly for nearly a decade, and the IDF discovered them in December 2018.
Shalom, who was then Head of the Research Division, estimated that Hezbollah wouldn't use the tunnels and suggested not dealing with them immediately, but instead monitoring them. "I said that Nasrallah expected this. Even with the project for precision missiles, he could have gone crazier, but he didn't."
The then Chief of Staff, Gadi Eizenkot, thought differently, and the IDF destroyed the tunnels. "We removed from Nasrallah an extremely significant, unique ability," Manalis says. "He knows that he hasn't actually got the ability to beat us in war, and therefore he is looking for consciousness achievements. The tunnels were supposed to provide him with this – a surprise move that would significantly harm Israel."
Following the exposure and the destruction of the six tunnels, Hezbollah abandoned the idea of underground activity. However, the organization is investing a lot in equipping itself with weapons and capabilities produced in Iran – from drones and unmanned aerial vehicles to cyber capabilities, and this is in addition to the "regular" military equipment in rockets and missiles, anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft weapons, IEDs, and a range of personal and departmental weapons.
Almost all of this equipment comes in an ongoing supply from Iran, mainly on flights via Syria. In the years following the Lebanese civil war Israel was prevented from acting against the smuggling; it only began doing so at the height of the Syrian civil war, in the middle of the last decade. Since then, over the past few years, Israel has attacked thousands of these kinds of weapon deliveries but has focused mainly on precision missiles.
In the other areas, Hezbollah has gathered a massive arsenal, which has turned it into the largest terror organization in the world. Today it has 150,000 rockets and missiles, which can reach the whole of Israel and are hidden in different places in Lebanon, mainly in the south. It is trying to produce precision capabilities for the missiles through smuggling, which will allow the upgrading of existing rockets, or self-produced missiles, which are being made in secret Lebanese underground factories. This project is being carried out jointly in Iran and Lebanon; last year the IDF revealed the name of the head of the project on the Hezbollah side, Haj Khalil Harb, one of the senior figures in the organization, and someone seen as close to Nasrallah.
As a result of this, the whole of Lebanon has become a future fighting arena that is flooded with weapons. Nasrallah well understands the meaning of a warlike this: destruction and devastation in Israel, but significantly greater, possibly fatal, damage to his organization and Lebanon itself.
The long years in the bunker and his age have taken their toll. Today Nasrallah is less healthy than he once was. He suffers from weight and breathing problems, which find their expression in asthma. The speech that he gave last May, in which he frequently coughed, led to rumors regarding his health, but it seems like he was sick with corona. More recently there have been unconfirmed rumors that he has contracted a malignant disease and is being treated at a hospital in Beirut.
He starts his day relatively early in the morning and finishes it in the small hours of the night. Around him are a small cadre of advisors and confidantes, but only a few of them help him in making decisions. The assassination of his two confidante-advisors – Mughniyeh and Soleimani – has left him isolated.
His trust of the organization's senior military figures is limited. Some of them are involved on behalf of the Iranians in wars elsewhere: Ibrahim Akhil, who was the Hezbollah's commander in the southern arena, and who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in February 2000, is an advisor to the Houthis in Yemen; Ali Hassan Tabtabai, who was the commander in the Nabatieh Governorate and is subject to the individual sanctions imposed by the United States on a number of senior Hezbollah figures, is busy in Iraq.
"They're all midgets next to him, he doesn't really count them," Shalom says. "He's alone at the summit, extremely centralizing, and that's made him extremely careful and calculating. On the one hand, it's good for Israel because he's suspicious; on the other hand, he is still liable to make mistakes." The possibility of such a mistake is the main focus of concern in Israel. Naturally, we look at Nasrallah through military lenses – will he act against us, and under what conditions? Since 2006 Nasrallah has used the "equations method" with regards to Israel: what he "allows" and "doesn't allow" Israel to do.
"He's not concerned by IAF attacks on Iranian and Syrian targets in Syria," Manelis says. "Of course, he doesn't like capabilities that were supposed to reach him being taken away, but he acts as if it's not his battle. However, he is extremely sensitive about harm to Lebanese people. He is not willing to show any restraint about that at all." The equations method began in 2014, in relation to attacks on Lebanese territory, after the IAF attacked a weapons delivery in the area of Baalbek, in order to demonstrate that, from his perspective, Lebanon was out of bounds.
In the first terrorist attack, an IED was targeted at an IDF patrol in the area of Mount Dov, which resulted in light injuries to a number of soldiers. In the second attack an IED was used against a force operating on the border fence with Syria, resulting in serious injuries to an officer and light injuries to a number of soldiers. Essentially, Nasrallah succeeded in dissuading Israel from operating in Lebanon. During the next stage, he tried to dissuade Israel from harming Hezbollah figures outside Lebanon as well.
The equations method
On Jan. 18, 2015, according to foreign sources, Israel assassinated Jihad Mughniyah, the son of Imad Mughniyah, while he was on patrol in the Syrian Golan. Also killed were a number of senior Iranian and Hezbollah figures, including the Iranian general Ali Allahdadi, who served as the Revolutionary Guard's advisor to the Syrian Army, the Iranian Colonel Abu Ali Tabtabai, and Mohamad Issa, who ran the Syrian portfolio in Hezbollah.
The intention of Iran and Hezbollah was to establish offensive capabilities in the Golan against Israel, which would allow them to maintain quiet in Lebanon and not endanger Hezbollah while maintaining an active front against Israel from Syria. The program still exists, despite the obstacles Israel has placed in its path, including methodical harm that has been attributed to it towards local activists, mainly Druze, which Hezbollah is trying to deploy in the Golan.
Following the assassination of Imad Mughniyah and the senior figures who accompanied him, Hezbollah launched anti-tank missiles in the direction of a Givati convoy on the slopes of Mount Dov. Captain Yochai Kalangel and Sergeant Dor Chaim Nini were killed, and seven other soldiers were injured.
Nasrallah spoke at the memorial to those who were killed during the attack: "They killed us in the light of day, we killed them in the light of day. They killed us around 11:30 in the morning, we killed them at 11:30. They focused on two cars, we focused on two cars. Hezbollah will respond to every Israeli attack in the future. We don't want war, but we aren't weak and we're not afraid of war."
Nasrallah tried to implement this equations policy in the summer of 2020. After a Hezbollah activist was killed in an attack that was attributed to the IAF at Damascus Airport, the three Hezbollah fighters tried to reach the Gladiolus outpost on Mount Dov in order to kill soldiers. They arrived in the light of day, armed with sophisticated sniper rifles, but the IDF – who tracked them throughout their steep climb towards the outpost – opened fire in their direction in order to get them to turn back to Lebanon. This action led to strong internal IDF criticism. Senior officers claimed that it was a symbol of weakness and cowardice, and that it would have been preferable to kill the terrorists or to capture them.
After some time, Hezbollah again tried to avenge this event, among other ways via sniper fire in the direction of a force that operated close to Manara, and later fired a number of Katyusha rockets towards Israeli territory. Only after the IDF responded relatively aggressively, including a targeted attack on a road in southern Lebanon, did the tension subside.
But whoever is looking for evidence of the possibility that Nasrallah might stop showing discretion can actually find it elsewhere. In August 2018 two events intersected. In the first, the IDF attacked and killed a squad of armed drone launchers, who were going to carry out a launch in the direction of IDF outposts in the Golan Heights. The one responsible for this was Hassan Soleimini, without the approval or knowledge of Nasrallah, even though the squad were Hezbollah members. In the second event, which was also attributed to Israel, special equipment for Hezbollah's precision missile project was destroyed in Beirut.
Nasrallah found it hard to show restraint, and ordered a focused attack: anti-tank missiles were fired in the direction of a military ambulance, which was traveling in a closed area in the Avivim sector. It was only because of luck that the event ended without casualties; if the five soldiers in the vehicle had been killed, the IDF would have responded aggressively and the sector would have experienced the escalation that Nasrallah was seeking to avoid.
"With this event, Nasrallah climbed a tree," Shalom says. "He gave a speech and promised a response, and he didn't know how to climb down from the tree in time. He entered a dangerous dynamic, operated against his desire and gave a green light to an operation that could have led to an escalation.
"It's true that there's mutual deterrence between Hezbollah and Israel, but they are deterred more than us. We have no interest in war, and they are a jihadi organization that isn't meeting its goal. Today Hezbollah is looking for a purpose. It's attacked for corruption, and because of this it's holding up the country. Nasrallah himself is still seen as a hero, but the organization itself has been damaged."
Two main questions keep Nasrallah researchers busy. The first – is he an Iranian protégé or a Lebanese patriot? The second – is his final aim to control Lebanon or to continue his journey towards Jerusalem. Regarding the first question, the prevailing view is that he is first of all loyal to Lebanon, and only afterward to Iran. Because of this, he is extremely careful on operational issues, and even on military armaments.
"He's not an Iranian puppet," Shalom says. "He could have gone much crazier with the precision project like the Iranians wanted, but he avoided it. He is a Lebanese Shiite leader, whose main motivation is internal Lebanese, and not Iranian."
Ram Yavne thinks that the Iranians don't have the ability to tell Nasrallah what to do. "Things are managed with dialogue. Even in an extreme case they make requests, and he has his own considerations."
This doesn't mean that, if Israel attacks Iran, Hezbollah will stand to the side. But even then, the estimation in Israel is that Nasrallah will give a measured response, one that will show identification with his patron and funder, but won't lead to the destruction of Lebanon, and even to his own demise.
The second question engages Nasrallah much more. As mentioned, Lebanon is in crisis, mainly because of the fact that Hezbollah is holding it by the throat and preventing its rehabilitation. "If in the past he was seen as part of the solution, today it's already clear to everyone that he is the main problem," Yavne says.
Evidence of this was provided last month, when Saad Hariri, the son of the murdered Prime Minister, who himself served as Lebanese Prime Minister, announced that he was retiring from politics. He gave a strong feeling of despair at the chances of rehabilitating the Land of Cedars, especially while the donor countries, primarily Saudi Arabia and France, have stated that they won't help Lebanon before it solves the issue of corruption – coded words for removing itself from Hezbollah's control.
"Nasrallah is seen today around the world as someone who is holding Lebanon up," Yavne says. "It's already clear that he won't advance Lebanon economically, that no tourist will visit. It disturbs him a lot."
But it seems that Nasrallah won't end this chokehold. As the leader of the Shiites, whose size today is far greater than it was at the end of the Lebanese civil war, he wants to control the country in practice, not merely in title. "Nasrallah was very surprised when Hamas took control of Gaza," Shalom says. "It also clarified his worldview: he wants to control, without being responsible for sewage, electricity, water, and education."
Who's next in line?
Nasrallah is addicted to Israeli media. All the major newspapers are translated for him every day. His estimates rely on military and political commentators in Israel, and he is convinced that they express the government's policy – exactly like the person who is closest to him, the Lebanese journalist Ibrahim el-Amin, editor of the Al Akhbar newspaper.
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"He is much more tired today and much more disturbed," says Brigadier-General Dror Shalom (res.). "You don't need to belittle him: he's a serious person, but he and his organization are in crisis. He has passed his prime."
Israeli intelligence is often concerned with the question of who will replace Nasrallah when he dies or decides to retire. Today the subject isn't on the agenda, and the organization doesn't have a particular stand-out candidate, although there are those who think that Iran's preferred candidate is Hashem Safi Al Din, who today serves as the head of Hezbollah's Executive Council.
"We don't need to get excited about Nasrallah, but also not to be excessively suspicious of him," Shalom thinks. "He is a strong leader, but he is in decline. From being a young revolutionary, full of fire who dazzled the region, he has become an old leader who is full of worries. He's no longer the same Nasrallah."
