Yesterday, reports emerged that Hizballah had appointed Hashem Safieddine, a relative of his late predecessor Hassan Nasrallah, as its new secretary general, though the Iran-backed terror group subsequently denied this. Hanin Ghaddar analyzes what Israel’s elimination of Nasrallah portends for the organization.

[R]eplacing the charismatic longtime leader will be very difficult. He has become inseparable from the group’s brand, and is identified with successes such as Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and the perceived summer 2006 “divine victory” against Israel. Nasrallah served as a father figure for many Lebanese Shiites, who regarded him as their provider and protector. Whoever succeeds him will not have an enviable job, given the eviscerated condition of the group and the likely dark days ahead. Yet the resulting void will provide opportunities for the international community to advocate better leadership for Lebanese Shiites and the entire nation.

Since October 2023, when Hizballah committed to support Hamas’s fight against Israel, its trio of first-tier commanders, Fuad Shukr, Ibrahim Aqil, and Ali Karaki, along with most of its second-tier commanders, have been killed. Given this loss of personnel along with the infrastructural blows and associated weakening of trust, it will be an arduous yearslong task to rebuild the group’s military prowess.

Moreover, Nasrallah himself served a principal role in restructuring Hizballah military activities and coordinating with Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Thus, the connective tissue between Lebanon and Iran has now been cut.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.