https://x.com/amalsaad_lb/status/2028535580150346222
The logic behind Hizbullah's decision to join the war:
1) First, the context: From November 2024 to March 1, 2026, Lebanon lived through what I would call “cease-fire warfare” — a new US-backed model of managed war or as Israel called it, a “dynamic truce”, which it used as cover for continued aerial strikes, assassinations, occupation of five strategic points, over 15,000 violations, 400+ killed, kidnappings, and blocked reconstruction. In short, Israel used the cease-fire to achieve what it failed to do during the actual 2 month war. The goal was not just to weaken Hizbullah militarily, but to erase the conditions that produce resistance, while a weak and servile Lebanese government that neither recognised nor defended South Lebanon looked on and tried to delegitimize and constrain Hizbullah’s resistance activity.
2) It is worth establishing from the outset that Hizbullah's decision to participate in the war was not primarily about supporting Iran strategically nor even about ideological solidarity after Khamenei’s assassination. Iran has been conducting a substantial military campaign of its own which has exceeded the expectations of its foes and friends alike, and which neither required nor was waiting on Hizbullah's participation to prosecute it. Hizbullah’s calculations were purely internal: to secure a more durable and robust ceasefire and beyond that, on emerging from any regional settlement with stronger domestic standing, having watched Saudi and other Arab leverage over Lebanese politics diminish as those actors absorb the costs of backing this military campaign against Iran.
3) Those who characterise this decision as a gamble, fundamentally misread the situation, for a gamble presupposes something of value left to lose. There was little, if anything, worth preserving after 15 months of ceasefire warfare that became an existential threat for Hizbullah and its Shia constituency, as well as for Lebanon as a whole, given Israel’s expansionist colonial ambitions. There was every indication the aggression would only deepen, with full-scale assault on Lebanon as its logical culmination. The choice confronting Hizbullah was therefore never between war and peace, but between slow annihilation within an Epstein-genocidal world order and dignified resistance with the possibility of victory.
4) Notably, in its statement yesterday, Hizbullah did not trouble itself to justify its decision domestically by invoking the considerable evidence available to it (as reported by Israeli media, Israeli cabinet discussions yesterday about expanding the war to Lebanon, 100,000 troops massed on the border, explicit invasion threats, etc.) This is likely because it has ceased to regard the current Lebanese government as a legitimate interlocutor. What it sees instead is a collaborationist , Vichy style authority it does not recognise and whose survival it does not expect, and which has in any case placed itself in violation of international law by criminalising the right of resistance to occupation.
5) The cabinet's ban today on Hizbullah's military activities will not be enforced for the simple reason that the army lacks both the will and the institutional coherence to enforce it. The army chief, Rudolf Haykal declined to act on an equivalent decision in August (tellingly, Haykal and PM Salam were reported today to have quarrelled openly over precisely this question) and there is no credible basis for expecting otherwise during active wartime, not least because any serious attempt to confront Hizbullah would risk fragmenting the army along the very fault lines such a confrontation would expose.
6) In light of the above, it becomes easier to understand Hizbullah's 15 months of restraint which should be read as a deliberate strategic patience serving several simultaneous purposes: allowing its community a period of respite and itself an opportunity to reconsolidate after a bruising war, while extending to the Lebanese state a nominal chance to resolve the occupation through diplomatic channels , not out of any genuine faith in that possibility, but in order to be seen to have exhausted it before returning to armed resistance. Hizbullah must have understood with reasonable certainty that a second and far more consequential round of war involving Iran was an inevitability, and that when it came, Iran would engage fully and without restraint, which would optimize the likelihood of, if not outright victory, denying the US and Israel one.
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