Hollowing Out Lebanon: How Pressure on Hezbollah Could Save It

The conditions for confronting Hezbollah have rarely looked more favourable – and that makes the current moment highly dangerous to mishandle.

Israel's campaigns of 2024 and spring 2026 have inflicted serious damage: most of Hezbollah's senior command killed, tunnel networks destroyed, the elite Radwan Force degraded and the limits of Hezbollah deterrence exposed. Its political standing among Lebanese Shia – never unconditional – has been shaken by the catastrophic costs its 'support front' strategy has imposed on communities in the south and the Beqaa that did not choose the war that has been ongoing since 8 October 2023.

Crucially, Hezbollah's role within Iran's regional architecture has itself changed: from an autonomous strategic deterrent capable of independent action, its role as support front was a downgrade, coordinating fire alongside direct Iranian missile strikes rather than acting as the primary shock absorber for Israeli retaliation against Iran. The strategic case for its heavy weapons has weakened accordingly.

Lebanon's new government, under President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, has declared an intent to extend the Lebanese Armed Forces' (LAF) monopoly over arms and restore full state sovereignty. The government formally banned Hezbollah's military activities on 2 March 2026 – the most assertive such declaration any Lebanese government has ever made. Beirut is, at least rhetorically, aligned with demands for disarmament. Britain, alongside nine other nations, signed a joint statement in March 2026 affirming support for exactly this agenda. This convergence is historically rare, and for a period after the 2024 ceasefire, it appeared to be producing tentative progress. Lebanese and Israeli officials held regular US-facilitated talks at a UN base in southern Lebanon over phased Hezbollah disarmament, while the Lebanese Army removed thousands of rockets and missiles from the south during the first phase of implementation. The UN’s Security Council mission report from December 2025 similarly described a “window of opportunity for political engagement.”

But it also creates a serious strategic risk. Any limited momentum behind gradual disarmament before last summer’s escalation between the US, Israel and Iran has now largely collapsed amid new conflict. Hezbollah can be degraded from the air and ground by the IDF, but can the Lebanese state inherit the political and security space Hezbollah loses? If it cannot, military pressure may preserve the very argument that has sustained the group since its founding: that the state is absent, weak or unable to protect its own citizens from external attack.

Why Disarmament Cannot be Forced

Military pressure alone has never offered strategic resolution in Lebanon. Without a political plan, it just brings blood, destruction and civilian misery (on both sides of the Blue Line), while leaving the underlying balance of power unresolved. Hezbollah has been weakened, but following years of regional conflict, a pandemic, a massive economic crash and the explosion of its port, Lebanese state institutions are objectively not yet strong enough to absorb the consequences of forcing the issue now. This, even while political dynamics in Israel push harder and harder for expanded military operations. The more Israel’s campaign damages the Lebanese state’s credibility, the more impossible the disarmament task becomes.

Pressing Beirut for rapid disarmament while Israel maintains territorial control inside Lebanon has been self-defeating for years. The mechanism is well understood. When the Lebanese state cannot deliver security or sovereignty, Hezbollah can present its weapons as a defensive necessity rather than a destabilising anomaly. The arms are not the whole problem – the state’s absence is. For example, those Hezbollah fighters that have been detained by the authorities while transporting weapons reportedly defended their actions in court by insisting they were ‘trying to defend our land’, reflecting how the organisation still embeds its military role within a narrative of communal protection, while prosecutions resulted only in relatively minor weapons charges and symbolic fines.

There is also a more practical question that most tend to sidestep: what does disarming Hezbollah actually mean? Even Senator Lindsey Graham, when he threatened the party in December 2025, spoke only of ‘heavy weapons.’ President Aoun himself, when he proposed to Iranian official Ali Larijani in August 2025 that Hezbollah surrender its missiles, focused specifically on weapons of strategic reach – not the full arsenal. No credible plan exists for confiscating light weapons, RPGs and drones from private residences across the Shia community. Secretary Rubio's stated ambition – training the LAF to ‘go after elements of Hezbollah and dismantle them’ – describes a process that could morph into civil conflict.

Support for Hezbollah among Lebanon’s Shia communities is rooted more in structural grievances with a state that has long failed to provide security, services or economic stability than in unconditional sectarian loyalty. Any attempt to turn the LAF directly against Hezbollah in this environment risks splitting the army along sectarian lines. The LAF commander has been explicit: confrontation with Hezbollah would place the LAF on a collision course with the Shia community as a whole. Pushing Beirut into forced internal disarmament under these conditions is not a policy – it is a potential trigger for collapse. The LAF is not unwilling, but it is currently incapable of fully absorbing that confrontation without fracturing. As LAF Commander General Rodolphe Haykal reportedly warned during the Security Council’s December 2025 visit, the LAF “would not be acting as a proxy for Israel” by forcibly entering private homes in southern Lebanon while simultaneously attempting to build confidence with a population devastated by war.

Hezbollah's financial support for the south has now been exhausted, while government ministries lack the resources to compensate. The Ministry of Social Affairs has signalled readiness to provide cash assistance for shelter to reduce reliance on non-state actors – but delivery has been minimal. This is the window.

This is where Britain's record matters. Since 2013, UK support has funded 84 operating bases along the Syrian border, alongside training, vehicles and equipment – reflecting an explicit recognition that border security is a precondition for state authority, not a consequence of it. Over £150 million committed since 2009, and a new Integrated Security Fund-backed training facility opened in Zahrani in 2025, reflect an approach that has always treated the LAF as one strand of a broader security architecture, degrading ISIS and AQ whilst undermining Hezbollah’s insistence that its arms are vital to defend Lebanese sovereignty.

But that logic now needs to be extended. As the operational tempo has increased, the army has been pulled into policing and civil order roles it was not designed to perform: food provision, evacuation coordination and internal stability operations. The Internal Security Forces (ISF) and civilian agencies are being asked to fill gaps they were never resourced to fill. Thoughtful INSS analysis notes that the sequencing and breadth of institution-building now matters as much as scale. The ISF needs dedicated investment in parallel with the LAF, not as an afterthought once the army reaches its limits.

The State-Absorption Problem

Israel has won this round militarily but now has no obvious exit strategy beyond periodic escalation and eventual withdrawal. The harder question – the one that will determine whether any gains hold – is whether the Lebanese state can inherit the space Hezbollah loses. If it cannot, the vacuum will not remain empty; UN officials have repeatedly warned that the space would be “filled by actors outside state authority.”

Despite a nominal ceasefire extended by 45 days in mid-May 2026 under Resolution 1701, Israel has continued to expand its ground operations. The IDF has pushed beyond its own self-declared buffer zone, with the cabinet approving further offensive plans even as truce talks continue. Reports that the US has urged Israel to halt strikes on Lebanese dams ahead of those talks suggest that even Washington sees the threshold at which infrastructure destruction becomes politically catastrophic for the state it says it wants to strengthen.

Hezbollah has threatened to topple the Lebanese government as strikes expand. That is a reminder that it still has the capacity to exploit state fragility as a political instrument, whatever its military condition. The concern about more overt violence between the State and Hezbollah remains, as does that of political targeting and even a return to assassinations.

Why Strike Beirut?

As talk of further escalation grows, the strategic purpose of a major strike on Beirut needs much sharper scrutiny. Of course, Hezbollah still has assets that can be targeted, but questions remain as to whether any remaining target would change the organisation’s political calculus enough to justify the damage such strikes do to Lebanese civilians and the state.

One regional assessment has framed Lebanon as the arena in which Iran’s proxy architecture is now under greatest pressure; that may be true, but it also makes Lebanon more vulnerable, not less. Even more major attacks on Beirut would be unlikely to make disarmament more credible, or to strengthen a government already struggling to assert sovereignty. More likely, it would reinforce Hezbollah’s claim that the state cannot protect its own citizens, while giving Iran further reason to keep Lebanon tied to the wider confrontation. President Aoun reportedly made precisely this argument to Security Council members in December 2025, warning that continued Israeli violations were fuelling Hezbollah’s narrative while simultaneously undermining the Lebanese state’s authority.

That dynamic has already been reinforced – at least rhetorically - by the LAF’s tactical withdrawal from parts of the southern border in the face of the IDF’s advance, which many within southern Shia communities interpreted as further evidence that only Hezbollah was willing or able to confront Israel directly.

Lebanon is now caught between two external logics that both weaken the state. Israel presents intensifying attacks on Lebanon as necessary self-defence against Hezbollah; Iran has every incentive to keep Hezbollah tied to the conflict so that Beirut remains a card in Tehran’s hands. Lebanon may be where Iran’s proxy architecture is under greatest pressure, but it is also where that pressure can do the most damage if the state is not strong enough to absorb the outcome. The danger is not that Hezbollah emerges from this moment militarily restored. It is that Lebanon emerges politically weaker – and that Hezbollah survives by turning that weakness into its central argument.

How Tactical Success Becomes Political Failure

The drone war adds a further self-sustaining dynamic. Hezbollah’s fibre-optic FPV drone campaign against IDF positions shows significant lessons learned from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Israeli startups are mobilising at dedicated counter-drone hackathons in response. This is an iterative contest of improvisation and counter-improvisation, recalling the IED struggle of the 1990s Security Zone. It drives escalation according to its own operational logic, not necessarily according to a political strategy.

More damaging still is the pattern of conduct on the ground. Testimonies by serving soldiers document widespread looting and the deliberate destruction of civilian homes by IDF soldiers, with commanding officers largely looking away. Soldiers describe an ‘unofficial mission’ of stripping villages and flattening homes without a stated military justification. A Shia population watching its villages emptied far beyond the front lines, looted and razed, will not look to the Lebanese state as its guarantor. It will look to the organisation that claims to be fighting back.

This is the core risk. One analysis of Israeli targeting doctrine argues that the mountains of rubble left behind are not a byproduct but a strategic output – the non-return of displaced populations and the destruction of communal life presented as features, not failures. In 2016, then-Chief of MI6 Alex Younger evoked Tacitus in noting that, in Aleppo, Russia and the Syrian regime ‘seek to make a desert and call it peace.’ Whether or not that judgement or this comparison is fully accepted by readers, the political consequence is clear. A Lebanese state stripped of the population it is supposed to govern and with a dysfunctional economy, discredited as absent or complicit, with territory occupied by a foreign military and under heavy, constant bombardment, obviously cannot absorb Hezbollah’s disarmament.

Iran understands this. Despite Hezbollah’s battlefield losses, Tehran has continued to provide significant financial and material support since last summer’s shootout with the US and Israel, deploying hundreds of IRGC commanders to rebuild and restructure the organisation following its 2024 decimation, while blending Syrian and Iraqi fighters into its units.

Tehran’s proxy model is under unprecedented strain, but that does not make it harmless. As Iran becomes more isolated and its regional network weakens, Lebanon becomes more valuable as one of the few remaining regional cards it can still play. Iran has every incentive to keep Hezbollah militarily relevant, prevent a durable Lebanon-Israel ceasefire and ensure that Beirut’s sovereignty remains conditional on Tehran’s needs.

Hezbollah’s degradation therefore does not automatically produce Lebanese sovereignty, especially as Hezbollah has largely gone back to its roots as an IRGC-trained guerilla organisation fighting an insurgency against a far superior conventional force. Without a stronger state, Lebanon may instead become the place where Iran fights to preserve what remains of its proxy architecture.

Netanyahu’s stated goal of total dismantlement is, therefore, an unachievable bar. It risks discrediting real military gains by setting a standard that only indefinite occupation could hope to satisfy.

Consolidation, Not Collapse

Avoiding this outcome requires a shift in the operational logic of the counter-Hezbollah effort – away from direct confrontation and an attempt at forced internal disarmament which is subsumed into a far larger forced population movement out of southern Lebanon. This should be followed by significant moves towards interdiction, enforcement of arms embargoes and the active construction of Lebanese state authority as the credible alternative. The goal is to turn sovereignty from a slogan into an administrative fact: functioning border controls, a genuine monopoly on arms and a security sector that Shia communities can engage with on terms other than communal siege.

On the disarmament question itself, there is actually more consensus than the current noise suggests. The real problem has always been heavy weapons: precision missiles, strategic rocket systems and the IRGC command-and-control infrastructure that makes Hezbollah an Iranian forward asset. Nobody credibly proposes, or could implement, the confiscation of light weapons from private homes across the Shia community (nor, really, is an effort to try and prevent Hezbollah from using new-generation fibre-optic FPV drones realistic). A DDR framework phased geographically and by weapon category - starting with the most strategically dangerous systems in the south of the country and progressing towards Sidon, the Bekaa valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs - offers a realistic path that the binary of forced disarmament or permanent impasse cannot.

The experience of Israel's Security Zone from 1985 to 2000 is the cautionary tale: prolonged occupation consolidated a supremely resilient ‘Resistance’ identity around a genuinely besieged and downtrodden Shiite population and proved generative for the very movement it was intended to suppress.

The current campaign risks the same outcome at far greater scale, against a Lebanese state considerably more fragile than the one that existed then.

Israeli operations must be disciplined enough not to hollow out that state so thoroughly that there is no viable institution left to inherit the ground Hezbollah loses.

Britain is better placed than most to act on this, and the window is narrowing. Its decade-long programme of LAF support gives it institutional knowledge, established relationships with the Lebanese military and credibility with Beirut that few partners can match. Foreign Secretary Lammy’s visit to Lebanon in July 2025 reaffirmed that commitment. The task now is to translate it into concrete action at a moment of real institutional fragility, or the £40 million in UK humanitarian and security support committed since March 2026 risks becoming life support rather than institutional support to a recovering state.

Beyond the obvious support to the LAF, three targeted areas of activity are needed urgently, if Lebanon is not to become the next Gaza:

• First, ring-fenced UK investment in the ISF and civilian security agencies as a parallel track designed to give the Lebanese state a non-military security presence in Shia communities. The LAF can hold territory, but it cannot alone build the administrative legitimacy that makes disarmament politically sustainable.
• Second, active UK diplomacy to ensure the forthcoming international support conference for Lebanese security forces produces binding, resourced commitments rather than statements of intent – and that reconstruction funding is explicitly conditioned on LAF deployment milestones and weapons handover progress.
• Third, sustained British pressure on Washington to condition its engagement with Israel on operational restraint in Lebanon. The March joint statement called for no further widening of the conflict. That call now needs to be backed by consequences, not repeated without effect. Critically, that pressure must also secure a reciprocal Israeli commitment – withdrawal from the five occupied positions and two buffer zones – without which the Lebanese government has no political ground on which to stand when demanding Hezbollah disarm.

With UNIFIL's mandate set to expire at the end of 2026 and Lebanon's Prime Minister already calling for a new international security presence in the south, decisions taken in the coming months will shape the architecture of southern Lebanon and the wider Levant for a generation. The Secretary-General's options paper on a post-UNIFIL monitoring architecture is due imminently. Whatever successor mechanism is proposed must be agreed and resourced before UNIFIL stands down – the gap between its withdrawal and any replacement will be Hezbollah's opportunity to reconstitute, whatever its current condition.

A Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration framework, phased geographically and paired with sustained investment in Lebanese civilian institutions, offers a more durable path than the current binary of forced disarmament or impasse. The purpose of disarmament, in the end, is to integrate Lebanon's Shia community into the state – not to alienate it through a campaign it experiences as collective punishment.

This Window is Already Closing

Hezbollah is weaker than it has been in a generation and is under overt foreign influence. Lebanon's government has stated its intent and has leaders who want change. International alignment, however fragile, exists. Britain has many potential partners in this effort: France, Germany, the Gulf states and, for now, the US all share an interest, to varying degrees, in containing Iran’s regional reach while creating a more stable Levant.

The case for Lebanese state consolidation is, in this light, inseparable from this broader case. That is exactly why security in Lebanon cannot be treated as a choice, or as something to be outsourced simply to Washington's preferences, or Israeli operational timetables and stated national security necessities.

Without far more operational discipline from Israel, some more strategic coherence from Washington and a genuine British commitment to institution-building alongside the bevy of other countries with interests in Lebanese stability and sovereignty over the coming months, the campaign risks the worst of all outcomes: rescuing Hezbollah politically with the Lebanese state too hollowed out to inherit any political or geographic space Hezbollah loses.

That is not in anyone's interest – least of all Britain's.

© Alex King, 2026, published by RUSI with permission of the author.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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