Hezbollah's hold on Lebanon

After a burst of high-intensity weekend warfare, Hezbollah proclaimed to the people of Lebanon that all had gone according to plan

- MARTIN REGG COHN

Men carry the coffin of a fighter killed in an Israeli strike this month in Nabatieh, Lebanon. Hezbollah acts as an armed statelet within a state - a Shia Muslim militia holding all of Lebanon hostage, Martin Regg Cohn writes.

Israel had been bloodied, supposedly. And Hezbollah’s honour restored, allegedly, by avenging the assassination of its top military commander.

“The country can take a breath and relax,” announced Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Lebanon’s Iranian-armed militia.

Israel and Hezbollah had been to the brink, and back, over a few deadly hours Sunday morning. With Hezbollah poised to fire hundreds of rockets at 5 a.m., Israel mounted a pre-emptive strike with 100 fighter jets destroying its launch sites, while the Lebanese militia force lobbed hundreds of drones and antiquated Katyusha rockets across the border (mostly intercepted).

By any measure, it was another fiasco for Hezbollah. But as always with Nasrallah, who has helmed it for three decades, there will be another time for “resistance” in a war without end.

“We will now reserve the right to respond at a later time” as needed, he insisted.

Nasrallah used almost the same words to me in the late 1990s, when I interviewed him in Hezbollah’s heavily guarded Beirut headquarters on the eve of another war with Israel. Lebanon has been at war with itself, and Israel, for a halfcentury — off and on.

But the warmongering waged by Nasrallah’s Party of God is unique around the world.