From my home in Kibbutz Dafna, less than two kilometers from the Lebanese border, we have repeatedly heard powerful Israeli strikes over the past two weeks. At times, the windows shake. Sometimes, the sound of the explosion reaches us seconds after we see the smoke.
What is striking, however, is what we barely hear in return.
Two years have passed since Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut on Sept. 27, 2024. The obvious way to measure what has changed since then is to count commanders killed, tunnels exposed, weapons destroyed and infrastructure damaged. But the more important change may be harder to quantify: Who now sets the rules between Israel and Hezbollah?
For years, Nasrallah built his power around a carefully managed system of deterrence. Hezbollah did not need to be stronger than the Israel Defense Forces. It needed Israeli decision-makers to believe that any action in Lebanon could trigger a response whose cost was difficult to predict.
Several incidents illustrated how deeply that logic affected Israeli decisions. In September 2019, after Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles toward Avivim, the IDF staged a fake casualty evacuation as part of an effort to end the incident without wider escalation. In March 2023, a terrorist crossed from Lebanon and planted a powerful explosive device at Megiddo Junction, yet Israel refrained from a broad, overt response against Hezbollah. Months later, Hezbollah erected its now-famous tent in the Mount Dov area, and Israel again responded cautiously.
The incidents were different, and deterrence was mutual. Hezbollah also wanted to avoid all-out war. Yet by 2023, the organization appeared increasingly willing to test Israel’s boundaries while assuming that Jerusalem was highly motivated to avoid escalation.
Then came Oct. 7 and the war that followed.
The past two years have inflicted severe military damage on Hezbollah, but they have also changed the psychology of the northern front. Israel has altered its approach. It no longer waits only for Hezbollah to act before responding; it repeatedly strikes Hezbollah infrastructure, including deeper inside Lebanon, to prevent the organization from rebuilding military capabilities.
The fighting around the Ali al-Taher ridge is a useful example. In September, Israel said it had cleared Hezbollah fighters from tunnels beneath the strategic ridge, roughly 15 kilometers from the Israeli border. Iran had warned the United States that a full-scale Israeli assault there could trigger major retaliation. Yet Israeli military pressure around the ridge continued, including strikes and ground operations, without the confrontation developing into the broader escalation Tehran had threatened.
The more important point is not one ridge or operation. It is that strikes no longer automatically produce the kind of response that once shaped Israeli planning.
The balance has shifted
For years, Israeli leaders asked what Hezbollah would do if Israel killed a senior commander, struck Beirut or attacked strategic infrastructure. Those questions have not disappeared, nor should they. Any responsible government must consider the enemy’s response. But the balance has shifted: Hezbollah now has to calculate much more carefully what an Israeli response to its own actions could cost.
This does not mean Hezbollah has lost its ability to fight. March demonstrated the opposite. After Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the U.S.-Israeli strikes that opened the wider regional war on Feb. 28, Hezbollah entered the conflict on March 2 and launched sustained attacks on Israel. The fighting continued for months before easing significantly after a June ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, reached alongside the broader U.S.-Iran diplomatic track.
The ceasefire reduced the fighting, though it didn’t end Israeli operations in Lebanon. Since then, Israel has continued to strike Hezbollah targets, while Hezbollah has largely absorbed those blows without returning to sustained war.
Strikes on Lebanon no longer automatically produce the kind of response that once shaped Israeli planning.
March also prevents us from telling ourselves a comforting but inaccurate story. Hezbollah is not quiet because it is incapable of fighting. A more credible explanation is that, outside moments of major regional escalation, the expected price of initiating action against Israel has become much higher. Even a limited attack could trigger renewed strikes on commanders, weapons depots, underground infrastructure and other assets that have become harder to replace. March therefore reinforces the broader point: Even Hezbollah’s return to sustained war was shaped not only by its confrontation with Israel, but by a regional crisis centered on Iran.
There is also a second change since Nasrallah’s death: Hezbollah may be less autonomous. Nasrallah was not simply the commander of an Iranian proxy. Over decades, he accumulated unusual authority inside Lebanon and within Tehran’s regional network. He had direct access to Iran’s leadership, understood how to translate Iranian interests into Lebanese realities and retained considerable room for his own judgment.
A strategic shift, not a permanent condition
Lebanese cleric Naim Qassem does not possess Nasrallah’s standing. At the same time, Tehran appears to have become more directly involved in Hezbollah’s rebuilding and military recovery. Reuters reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sent roughly 100 officers to Lebanon after the 2024 ceasefire to help retrain fighters, oversee rearmament and restructure Hezbollah’s military command. An INSS analysis likewise described deeper Iranian involvement in Hezbollah’s reconstruction and rearmament.
That does not mean Tehran gives an order and Beirut automatically obeys. The events of March showed exactly the opposite. According to INSS, Iran needed nearly two days to persuade Hezbollah to enter the war after Khamenei’s killing. Hezbollah eventually joined the campaign in support of Iran, but such hesitation matters. It shows that the organization still has Lebanese interests and calculations of its own.
It also corrects an important misconception: Iranian influence does not always push Hezbollah toward restraint. In March, it pushed toward escalation.
Nor are Iran’s interests static. When Tehran itself faced a major regional war and the death of its supreme leader, mobilizing Hezbollah served an immediate Iranian need. Once the confrontation eased, preserving and rebuilding Hezbollah again became strategically important. For Tehran, the organization remains both an instrument that can be activated in a regional crisis and an asset whose military value must be protected for the future.
The more useful conclusion, therefore, is not that Iran explains Hezbollah’s current restraint. It is that Hezbollah’s leadership now operates inside a broader and more complicated strategic framework than it did under Nasrallah.
Since the death of Hezbollah’s decades-long leader, the terror organization may be less autonomous.
Every decision must now account for several competing pressures: the price Israel may impose; Hezbollah’s weakened military position; Lebanese political constraints; and the interests of the Iranian patron on which it increasingly depends for weapons, financing, expertise and reconstruction. Hezbollah retains the ability to decide, but its freedom to do so may no longer be what it was under Nasrallah. Sometimes those pressures point in the same direction; at other times, as March demonstrated, they do not.
That makes today’s relative quiet easy to misread. Hezbollah’s limited response to continuing Israeli operations does not necessarily mean that it has accepted the new reality. It may instead reflect a decision to buy time: to rebuild, study Israeli methods, move infrastructure deeper into Lebanon and wait for conditions in which the cost of acting becomes more acceptable.
Israel has already paid a devastating price for interpreting quiet as proof of lasting deterrence. One of the lessons of Oct. 7 is that the absence of action today does not necessarily mean acceptance of the status quo. Sometimes, it is simply the period in which an enemy prepares to challenge it later.
The current situation is therefore better understood as a strategic shift, not a permanent condition. Hezbollah is weaker, more cautious and perhaps more dependent on Tehran than the organization Nasrallah led. It remains armed and is working to rebuild.
Nasrallah spent years creating a reality in which every Israeli action in Lebanon forced Jerusalem to think first about Hezbollah’s response. Two years after his death, that reality has changed. Today, before Hezbollah acts, its leaders must ask the question they once forced Israeli decision-makers to ask: What will be the price of our next move?
From Kibbutz Dafna, the change is audible. The strikes across the border are still loud. The response is often not. That silence is an achievement. It is not a guarantee. For now, Hezbollah no longer sets the rules.
