On Hezbollah – Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker:

‘In its early years, Hezbollah gained a reputation for fostering unrestrained violence, with links to suicide bombings, kidnappings, and torture. But, after the 2006 war, the Western official met with Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders, and came away convinced that they had become more reasonable. “Nasrallah never took notes, but the people around him did, and he always followed up,” the official said. “I wouldn’t want to spend a weekend with him, or have a meal. But he’s a smart, rational person.” By most accounts, Israel’s leaders have not tried to kill Nasrallah again. “I think if the Israelis had wanted to kill him, they would have,” Ryan Crocker, a former American Ambassador to Lebanon, told me. “He’s the devil they know.” On October 7th, Nasrallah called on other Arab nations to support the Palestinian cause, by “affirming their unity in blood, word, and action.” Yet, at least at the beginning, his organization was measured in its strikes; it expended only a fraction of its arsenal, and refrained from using its long-range guided missiles, which could devastate neighborhoods and institutions across Israel. The Israelis launched counterstrikes in roughly equal measure, emphasizing that the violence was controlled.
But, as the exchanges continued, the destruction steadily increased, with the number of daily strikes on each side creeping up from about ten to, at times, dozens. Israel says that it has killed more than thirty Hezbollah leaders and some three hundred fighters. Its agents have apparently even struck inside Lebanon; in April, a woman lured Mohammad Surur, an important financial facilitator for Hezbollah and Hamas, to a villa outside Beirut, where he was interrogated, beaten, and killed. He was found shot several times, with cash scattered around his body, indicating that robbery was not a motive. The rumor in Beirut was that the assassination was carried out by a secret Israeli unit called Nili, named for a Jewish organization that spied on the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.’

(…)

‘In a speech this spring, Nasrallah hinted at the extent of his opponents’ intelligence gathering. “Your smartphone hears everything you’re saying and takes all of your data,” he said. “It can find your precise location—which room you’re in, whether you’re in the front of the car or the back. Does Israel need more than that?” He issued a plea to his followers in the south: “Break your phone, my brother! Bury it. Put it in an iron box and lock it up.”’

(…)

‘Habib told me that, in the early months of the conflict, it was the Israelis who had increased the intensity of the attacks—but lately Hezbollah had been ratcheting up, too. “The Iranians want us to escalate, so we are escalating,” he said. Habib, who had made several visits to Iran over the years, left little doubt that the clerics in Tehran were ultimately in charge of his troops; Iranian operatives were working alongside Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. “The Iranians control every bullet we have,” he said.
Earlier that week, the Israelis had killed one of Habib’s peers, a senior Hezbollah leader named Taleb Abdallah. Habib shrugged when I mentioned it. “It’s nothing,” he said. “For every man who is martyred, there is another waiting in line to take his place.”’

(…)

‘As Lebanon’s Shiite militias coalesced into Hezbollah, they launched a spectacularly brutal campaign of political violence, led by a bloodthirsty commando named Imad Mughniyeh. Suicide bombers killed more than a hundred people in two bombings at an Israeli military headquarters in Tyre, and fifty-eight soldiers at the French Army’s barracks in Beirut; an assault on the U.S. Marine barracks there left two hundred and forty-one dead. In 1983, a truck bomb went off at the American Embassy. Ryan Crocker, then a young Foreign Service officer, was in his office on the fourth floor. “There was a brilliant flash of light and then a very powerful wind,” he told me. Crocker shared the floor with the C.I.A.; seconds after the blast, he went into the hallway to check the damage. “Where the C.I.A. station was supposed to be, I was looking at the Mediterranean,” he said. Sixty-three people were killed.
More than a hundred Westerners were kidnapped in the area during those years. Baer told me that when he worked for the C.I.A. in Lebanon he received daily transcripts of Hezbollah’s intercepted radio chatter. One of the speakers was Hassan Nasrallah. “We knew that Nasrallah was in touch with the kidnappers,” Baer said. “He was in the circle that was coördinating them.” Among those kidnapped were William Higgins, a U.S. Marine colonel working for a United Nations peacekeeping force, and William Buckley, the C.I.A. station chief; both were tortured and killed. After Buckley’s death, the agency’s director, William Casey, sent a team to Lebanon to eliminate Hezbollah leaders wherever they could find them. “We had authority, direct from Casey, to kill every one of them,” John Maguire, a former C.I.A. operative, said. In 1985, Hezbollah-aligned militants hijacked a T.W.A. passenger jet and took it on a zigzagging odyssey across the Mediterranean. Maguire and others spent weeks following the plane, intending to retake it. Yet each time the C.I.A. team prepared to storm the plane it took off, he said. Years later, he learned that the team’s movements had been relayed to the hijackers by Soviet intelligence officials, likely working in concert with American double agents. The hijackers killed a Navy diver named Robert Stethem, but ultimately released the other passengers and escaped.’

(…)

‘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.’

(…)

‘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.’

(…)

‘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.’

(…)

‘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.”’

(…)

‘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.’

Read the article here.

Giving smartphones for a holy cause is not that easy, not even for the brothers of Hezbollah is my guess.

I visited Lebanon for the first time in 2007, Hezbollah took me to the border with Israel. A Hezbollah minister answered my questions with a sense of humor and tried to seduce my fixer-translator in between.

No one really knows what Iran wants. And since Netanyahu kidnapped Israel, it’s possible to know what Netanyahu wants, only what’s good for him. But even in that case mistakes are possible. Also the ruthless can bring themselves down.
The 2006-war was also a mistake.

The guess is that Nasrallah doesn’t think that the destruction of Lebanon is a price worth paying. At least, that’s what he thinks till now.