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- Thousands of Hezbollah supporters gathered in a Lebanese village for a mass burial of those who died during the war with Israel.
- The militant group frames its latest conflict with Israel as a victory, but for many Lebanese it looks very much like defeat.
- Trucks bearing 95 coffins were swarmed by villagers, many desperate to touch a loved one’s casket.
AITAROUN, Lebanon — The procession of coffins was heard long before it came into view, a chorus of ambulance sirens drowning out the crowd assembled at the main square of this devastated village.
“Arise, Aitaroun! This is the time of martyrs, and blood, and victory,” said an announcer, as four flatbed trucks rumbled to the square bearing 95 coffins. The dead were villagers killed or who died during the war between the militant group Hezbollah and Israel last year. They had been buried elsewhere while Aitaroun remained in Israeli hands.
The Israeli withdrawal early last month spurred what amounted to a homecoming, first for Aitaroun’s living, who returned in the thousands the morning soldiers left; and now, on this Friday in February, its dead.
In its myth-making and propaganda, Hezbollah portrays the war as a victory, a greater and more significant triumph than when it repulsed the Israeli military during the last major engagement between the two sides in 2006.
But the militant group now has to contend with an aftermath that for many Lebanese, including some Hezbollah partisans, looks very much like defeat.
Thousands of its fighters and supporters are dead, the upper echelons of its leadership decimated. Wide swaths of pro-Hezbollah areas are all but flattened; almost 100,000 people remain displaced and Israeli forces still occupy parts of Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s opponents are intent on defanging the Iran-backed group once considered one of the world’s top paramilitary factions and Lebanon’s most powerful political party.
More than three months after a cease-fire with Israel, Hezbollah’s performance in the war, its role in Lebanon’s future and its position as the vanguard of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” remain a matter of bitter debate.
Yet despite being at its weakest in years, Hezbollah retains a loyal following, a reality that appeared in full force with the thousands that descended on Aitaroun for the mass reburial ceremony.
Villagers swarmed the trucks, many desperate to touch a loved one’s coffin. The more able-bodied climbed onto the flatbeds to do just that. To the side, women wailed, beating their chests or throwing fistfuls of rice and rose petals.
“This is a historic moment,” the announcer said. “This is an exceptional moment, here in this square.
“Be proud, Aitaroun, of the heroes.”
Hezbollah weathered Israel’s onslaught last year, but its leaders acknowledge missteps that punctured the group’s long-cultivated air of near-invincibility in the region.
Hezbollah took days to house the displaced, even as Israeli air assaults forced more than a million people from their homes. The group had vowed its arsenal of long-range missiles would level Israeli cities the instant Lebanese cities were targeted. But that never happened.
Hezbollah’s leadership appeared to have no sense of how deeply Israeli intelligence had penetrated its ranks, booby-trapping the group’s pagers and walkie-talkies and picking off its senior commanders, culminating in the assassination of its secretary-general of 32 years, Hassan Nasrallah.
“This was a very large vulnerability, that we were exposed to this extent,” said Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s new secretary-general, in a recent speech. “What happened is an exceptional matter and a surprise.”
It’s in loyalist communities such as Aitaroun that the consequences of that surprise are most deeply felt.
When Hezbollah started a rocket campaign against northern Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian militant group Hamas a day after its Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel, Aitaroun, which lies slightly more than a mile from the border with Israel, immediately became a staging ground for Hezbollah operatives and a target for Israeli strikes.
Israel escalated its attacks in September 2024, then invaded southern Lebanon in a bid to dislodge Hezbollah. In the 70 days before the cease-fire took effect, Aitaroun lost 51 Hezbollah operatives fighting there and elsewhere in the south, along with 16 women, 10 civil defense workers and five children.
Mayor Salim Murad said two-thirds of Aitaroun’s 3,800 housing units are either destroyed or badly damaged. Water facilities, electricity and other infrastructure are all but obliterated.
But it’s a price many at the mass burial said they were willing to pay.
“We accept this because it’s our land, and it’s worth the blood spilled,” said Fayrooz Al-Hijazi, who lost several family members — civilians, she said — in an Israeli strike on Aitou, a Christian town in Lebanon’s north where some Aitaroun residents took refuge during the war.
Though her house was destroyed, she insisted the Resistance — as she referred to Hezbollah — had more support than ever.
“Look at all the people in the square. The fact they’re here — that’s your victory,” she said, adding her two boys were already playing with plastic assault rifles and were intent on joining Hezbollah when they grew up.
“If before we were 2% with the Resistance, now we’re 100%. All the Israelis did was enliven this spirit.”
Abdullah Mohammad, a 40-year-old cleric handing out sweets and sugary tea to mourners, dismissed the notion that Hezbollah no longer posed a deterrent to Israeli attacks. Many Lebanese consider Hezbollah more capable than the army and credit it with driving out Israeli forces in 2006 and for ably defending Lebanon until 2023.
“You lose a battle? Maybe, no problem. But are we broken? No,” he said. He pointed to a spot up the road, which he said was the farthest Israeli troops reached.
“A whole army, with U.S. support and the best weapons, and they couldn’t advance more than a mile into this village? They did more damage during the cease-fire. And that proves the Resistance needs to stay.”
But not everyone in Hezbollah’s orbit was so quick to brush off their losses.
In the nearby hamlet of Bustan, Ahmad Al-Ahmad, 43, sat with his family on the wreckage of his patio. On the hill before him, a water tower lay smashed and a cupola of a mosque was askew.
Trees lining the main thoroughfare appeared to have been systematically cut down by Israelis with chain saws. Chopping down the trees “was just vandalism” to discourage people from returning to the village, Al-Ahmad said.
Not a single structure in Bustan survived Israel’s offensive, he said, including the house Al-Ahmad built with money he earned working for more than two decades in Berlin. He completed construction only last year and was planning to move in with his family before the war began; he even enrolled his children in local schools.
“Germany was good to me, but here, the sun, the air — it’s just different. The kids were so excited to move back,” he said, his voice wistful. But he had no money for repairs, and the promised compensation from Hezbollah had yet to materialize.
With a resigned tone, he said he would return to Berlin to work, but wouldn’t rebuild so long as Hezbollah remained dominant in southern Lebanon.
“If you can fight Israel, do it,” he said, adding with an Arabic expression, “But if you can’t, don’t ‘sell talk’ to people.”
Others were more scathing.
“People talk about victory. What victory? All this destruction and death? What was this for?” said Ali, a 49-year-old merchant in Tyre, who gave only his first name to avoid reprisals.
“Hezbollah must pay to fix this. And if they don’t, we’re going to kick them out.”
How Hezbollah manages reconstruction will determine its staying power, analysts say. After the 2006 war, it oversaw a rapid rehabilitation effort. But the damage this time (estimated at $14 billion by the World Bank) and a years-long economic crisis in Lebanon, precludes quick solutions.
“It’s not just Hezbollah that’s impoverished. Everyone is,” said Mona Fawaz, professor of urban studies and planning at American University of Beirut.
“People who before wouldn’t want the party to spend money on them now wait for anyone to give them cash.”
The group has dispatched crews to assess damage to homes and distributed checks between $800 to $12,000 for preliminary repairs and rent. But many recipients complain it’s not enough and speak of delays of more than a month to cash them. Hezbollah officials say they have already disbursed more than $300 million, but few Lebanese believe the group has the funds to compensate for the damage.
In the past, Hezbollah could rely on Iran, which helped establish the group in the 1980s and long supplied weapons, training and pallets of cash, either through Syria or by air into Beirut airport.
Now, Tehran has its own financial problems, and the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad last year denied Hezbollah its logistics pipeline. The Lebanese government has taken a firmer line against Hezbollah-related smuggling. On March 1, Lebanon’s Finance Ministry announced it interdicted a suitcase with $2.5 million from someone arriving at Beirut airport — presumably a cash infusion for the group.
The liquidity crunch has forced Hezbollah to reach out to the state, other Lebanese parties and the international community. It recently backed a Cabinet viewed as inimical to its interests in a bid to unlock reconstruction funds.
“Hezbollah’s priority now is reconstruction, and this requires new political work in terms of relationships,” said Kassem Kassir, a Lebanese Hezbollah expert who is close to the group.
But the anger many Lebanese feel toward Hezbollah for dragging the country into an ill-conceived war will make outreach an uphill battle, said Michael Young, senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
“It’s probably us Lebanese who end up paying for this, one way or another, so there’s a great deal of mistrust of Hezbollah,” he said.
The cease-fire, which is overseen by the U.S., stipulates the group must withdraw from southern Lebanon and for the Lebanese army to take its stead. Recent weeks have seen troops and a United Nations monitoring mission dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in the area, a hitherto impossible step.
Though Hezbollah is playing along for now, there’s little expectation it would accept a more thorough disarmament, said Karim el-Mufti, a senior lecturer in global affairs at Sciences Po, a university in Paris.
“They’re on the back foot now, but they know armed struggle will have its time again,” he said.
It’s a struggle many are willing to continue. In Aitaroun, Al-Hijazi said the fight against Israel wasn’t a function of a political party or faction.
“It’s the people of the land who are the Resistance, and they were there before Hezbollah,” she said. “If Hezbollah leaves, I’ll be the Resistance.”
Al-Hijazi joined her relatives in the square, beating her chest to the rhythm of a funereal dirge, tears streaming down her cheek.
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