After every conflict between Hezbollah and Israel in the past 30 years, the Iran-backed armed Shiite group declares victory and either extends its influence over Lebanese politics, or tries to claw it back.

However, the outcome this time could overturn Lebanon's internal political process altogether, especially if Israel sets up a large occupation zone in southern areas near the border. Analysts say Lebanon's internal peace, based on the 1989 Taif Accord, could be shattered even after the war ends.

“Lebanon is looking at a day-after scenario in which communities could fall into warfare against each other,” said a senior diplomat in the region. The Taif agreement ended a 15-year civil war but ushered another 15 years of Syrian control.

Although a small, dysfunctional state that last managed to provide regular electricity to its population in the 1970s, the direction of Lebanon’s politics is an indicator of the wider regional, and even international, balance of power. Its society is the most open in the Arab Middle East, but its economy has been largely laissez faire since western powers carved the country out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s.

Until a financial collapse in 2019–2020, Lebanon was a regional banking centre, and large sums of private Arab funds remain stuck in the country’s system, or have disappeared.

In the run-up to the beginning of the US-Israel war on Iran on February 28, Hezbollah ignored pressure to disarm from the pro-western government of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. On March 1, it entered the war by launching rockets at Israel in response to the killing of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in the initial attacks.

Hezbollah followed the religious path set by the ayatollah. It was the only militia from the civil war period that kept its weapons and continued to exist as an armed group. Over the past 15 years, what were supposed to be Lebanese sovereign decisions to wage war or maintain peace, as well as the major foreign policy and security decisions, have been dominated by Hezbollah, causing rifts between Lebanon and Arab Gulf states.

Its entry into the latest war angered many Lebanese, who see the group as an extension of Iran. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, mostly Shiites, fled the Israeli bombardment this month, which has been mainly on the south and on the outskirts of Beirut.

The displaced Shiites generally have stayed clear of Christian and Sunni areas, or these communities refused to receive them, indicating heightened sectarian tension. A concentration of Israeli bombardment on Shiite areas, while sparing other communities, could lessen core support for Hezbollah and isolate the community.

“We have to wait until the end of the war to see how much of support for Hezbollah has peeled off,” the diplomat said.

Even Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, one of the most powerful politicians in Lebanon and usually a staunch supporter of the group, has been lukewarm in his support, and alluded the possibility of Hezbollah being disarmed.

“Everyone is waiting to see if Berri will make a clean break from Hezbollah,” the diplomat said, suggesting that an internecine conflict is also possible. Mr Berri, a Shiite, heads the Amal Movement that has clashed with Hezbollah at times in the 1980s and after the civil war ended.

However, the Amal Movement supported Hezbollah against Sunni and Druze factions during sectarian clashes in Beirut and the Chouf Mountains in 2008. A Qatari-brokered ceasefire avoided a civil war. Lebanon’s population of five to six million is estimated to be 60 per cent Muslim, according to the CIA Factbook.

Israel blocks return to south Lebanon

Unlike past conflicts, many of the Shiites displaced this time might not be able to go back to their homes afterwards because Israel has signalled that it intends to carve out a zone of control in south Lebanon.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces would advance further into south Lebanon “to establish a broader buffer zone". The zone would extend to the Litani River, about 30km from the border, according to Defence Minister Israel Katz.

This means that the mostly Shiite, and now mostly empty, city of Tyre, situated south of the point where the Litani runs to the sea, would be inside the zone. Israel had carved out a smaller zone from 1978 to 2000, initially to stop attacks by Palestinian guerrillas who were expelled from Jordan to Lebanon.

The violence during at period forced many in the south to flee to Beirut, where they settled on properties on the southern edge of the city, large parts of which were owned by the Maronite church. The dwellings became Beirut’s southern suburbs, the nerve centre of Hezbollah, something it partly replicated in southern Damascus during the 2011 to 2024 Syrian civil war.

Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian war was crucial for the survival of the dictator Bashar Al Assad, who was ousted in December 2024 by forces commanded by the current leader, Ahmad Al Shara. It also expanded a narcotic trade that brought Hezbollah billions of dollars in revenue, according to Middle East security officials. Mr Al Shara has been securing the border with Lebanon to halt any weapons flows to the group from Iran.

The Assad regime and Iran were instrumental in founding Hezbollah in 1982, to counter Israel and expand their regional influence.

Israel invaded Lebanon that same year, dislodging Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organisation from Beirut to Tunis, as Hezbollah replaced the PLO as Israel’s main foe in Lebanon. In 1996, Israel launched the Grapes of Wrath operation, also known as the April War, to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel.

In 2000, Israel's then Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled out his country’s forces from Lebanon, ending a 22-year occupation, in the belief that a security zone was no longer vital to defend Israel. However, another war erupted in 2006, after Hezbollah launched a cross-border raid into Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Shiites fled to Syria before going back to the south once the hostilities ended 40 days later with a ceasefire.

Another round of fighting began in October 2023, as Hezbollah launched rocket attacks on Israel in support of Hamas a day after the Palestinian militant group's raids on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza. It ended in November the following year with another ceasefire, after Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and many of the group’s high echelon, who operated in Lebanon and in Syria.

Hezbollah seeks post-war boost

A European official who met Mr Nasrallah in the 2000s said that Hezbollah is hoping to restore its original self-declared image as a Lebanese resistance movement after the current war in Lebanon ends. Israel has showed no indication that it would stop its advances in Lebanon once the war in Iran ends, and with Iranian supplies through Syria virtually cut off, Hezbollah's ability to force an Israeli withdrawal has been compromised.

“Hezbollah is hoping for a 1982 deja vu. It has been discredited by its wars on behalf of Iran and Hamas, as well as by its intervention in Syria, which was a debacle,” the official said.

Hezbollah intervened in majority Sunni Syria “on sectarian grounds“ and at the behest of Iran, contrary to Mr Nasrallah’s earlier assertions that the party was solely a national resistance movement against Israel.

“Nasrallah had told me that Hezbollah’s philosophy was purely resistance,“ the official said, referring to a meeting in 2003.

The likelihood of more Lebanese coalescing around Hezbollah as Israel carved more territory in the country is doubtful, the official said. He pointed to deepening political and societal fissures, stemming to a large degree from Hezbollah’s unilateral attacks outside Lebanon’s borders in recent years, that raise the risk of communal violence breaking out even if the war stops.

Many Shiites are now "homeless and are stigmatised", the official said. The Israeli zone could bring about "permanent demographic change" in Lebanon, with many Lebanese not willing to host the displaced for fear that Hezbollah might be among them and put their communities at risk of being targeted by Israel.

"Instead of defending the nation, Hezbollah has brought about a calamity,” the official said. Israel “does not care about the viability of the Lebanese state” and it suits it to have “unstable and fragile countries as neighbours to play with them”.

The failings of the current system were laid to bare by the financial meltdown in 2019, which plunged many Lebanese into poverty but for which no one has been held responsible. Adding to Lebanon’s woes is absence of a national figure who could unite the country around a new social contract that could restore rule of law, which started disintegrating well before the civil war.

"There is no Rafik Hariri,” said the official. The slain former prime minister was a key player in the Taif agreement and the subsequent rebuilding of the country. An international tribunal in the Hague sentenced in absentia three Hezbollah operatives to life in prison for involvement in Mr Hariri's assassination in February 2005.

The Taif Accord, signed on October 22, 1989, had clauses that called for an end to political sectarianism. However, even Mr Hariri did not act on them. The agreement also stipulated the disarming of all militias. Hezbollah, which enjoyed Syrian and Iranian protection, never did.