Hezbollah’s military thinking is layered, cumulative, and difficult to penetrate. No academic researcher, and not even an intelligence analyst, can credibly claim to have gathered all its components, analyzed them in full, or understood how they interact.
That complexity also shapes how the party learns and extracts lessons. Hezbollah’s added advantage, however, is the speed with which it adapts. The clearest evidence is the change in its security and military performance between two wars separated by only 15 months — a period in which the party remained under continuous fire.
The 2024 war forced Hezbollah into a painful review of how it fought, how it deployed, and how much of its command structure could survive when the opening blows came hard and fast. The lessons were not drawn in seminar rooms, but by fighters and commanders who had lived the previous battle, absorbed its losses, and then found themselves preparing for the next one before the smoke had cleared.
This account rests on interviews conducted over roughly a year after the 2024 war with Hezbollah security and military officials. They say no visual or audio documentation can be presented because of the latest “harsh security lessons.” Israel was conducting its own review at the same time, using the final months before the renewed confrontation to rehearse for a long, multi-front war that Hezbollah and Iran were watching closely.
Fighting from 2024 to 2026
In Tel Aviv’s planning view, the southern Lebanon battlefield is divided into two sectors: eastern and western. Its divisions are deployed accordingly, based on the type of force each sector requires and on near-compulsory entry routes imposed by the terrain — routes that have shaped the battlefield since 1978.
Hezbollah divides the south differently, into three sectors: western, central, and eastern. Responsibility is split between the Nasr Unit, which handles the eastern and central sectors south of the Litani River, and the Aziz Unit, which covers the western sector. The Badr Unit, now heavily discussed again in Israeli commentary during the 2026 confrontation, is responsible for the area north of the Litani.
The Radwan forces were among Israel’s central concerns in the previous war, when it demanded that they be pushed north of the Litani. Their presence has returned to Israeli discussion in the current war, with claims in early March that around 1,000 fighters were active. But Radwan is not tied to a fixed territory. It is an elite force that can be redeployed according to the needs of each battle.
The figure of 1,000 Radwan fighters cited by Israel comes from its own claim that 2,500 members of the unit remained combat-capable after the 2024 war, out of an original force of 5,000, most of whom were wounded in the pager and walkie-talkie attacks of September that year.
By Israel’s own account, then, another 1,500 Radwan fighters have yet to enter the battle. Hezbollah does not comment on these figures, either publicly or in the private meetings conducted for this article and series.
What stands out in discussions of numbers, however, is a repeated observation made by several planning commanders — including those working on information files — and by field commanders who fought in 2006, Syria, the “support” front, and the 2024 battle of the ‘Possessors of Great Strength.’ They agree that the large number of fighters placed on alert along the front in 2024 sometimes obstructed operations and contributed to losses and martyrdoms.
A planning commander tells The Cradle:
“There is an area that can only hold, for example, eight brothers for defense… Any extra brother is effectively a martyr or wounded. In Uli al-Ba’s [Possessors of Great Strength], there was a major rush on several fronts that could not be controlled, and this is what increased the number of martyrs.”
A field commander puts the problem more concretely:
“During my rounds, I would see excess numbers of fighters to the point that there were not enough trees for them to hide under… The lesson lies in studying the place, understanding the human need, movement lines, and the possibility of camouflage.”
By contrast, what stands out in this war — at least in the Israeli narrative — is repeated talk of smaller groups, usually no more than five or six fighters, and sometimes only three or four at forward points, particularly in ambushes. That suggests the lesson was absorbed. In Hezbollah’s own accounts, supply and rotation lines for fighters also improved and worked more effectively in the 2026 war.
Many of the villages and towns that witnessed fierce clashes in 2024 returned to the battlefield in 2026, though some names were absent because of the massive destruction Israel inflicted during the 15 months of the previous ceasefire agreement.
Adaisseh, a first-line confrontation point, saw intense clashes in the previous war but not in the current one, while Khiam was central in both. Taybeh and Rabb al-Thalathine in the eastern sector saw medium-intensity clashes in 2024 but became much hotter fronts this time. Beit Lif, the legendary Bint Jbeil, and Ainatha, among others, also stood out more clearly in the current round.
Even so, in both wars, Hezbollah worked to ensure that confrontation remained present along the main axes and within specific villages and towns, even if only to obstruct the enemy, for both symbolic and operational reasons.
Bayyadah, Maqam Shamaa, and the Ramiyeh–Qouzah–Aita al-Shaab triangle in the western sector remained active, as did Yaroun and Maroun al-Ras in the central sector, and Houla and Markaba in the east.
According to the former field commander, it was decided that each area would be handled on the basis that “the brothers would perform their duty there until their last breath,” or withdraw from it, based on fire cover from the second and third echelons in the confrontation, using new tools.
“In other words, any spot emptied of resistance will not necessarily be empty of resistance, because there are several means of dealing with the Israeli army there.”
As for the decision — whether to remain until the last breath, to hit and run, or to withdraw to another position or facility — it was left to the fighters on the ground to make autonomously and personally.
source: The Cradle