BEIRUT (AFP) — Hezbollah suffered heavy losses in a war with Israel more than a year ago, but the Shia movement has now regrouped only to end up fighting what it has called an “existential battle” and which some warn could be its last.

Lebanon was drawn into the Middle East war last week when the terror group, funded and armed by Iran, attacked Israel in response to the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes.

Israel, which had continued to strike targets in Lebanon even before the war, despite a 2024 ceasefire with Hezbollah, claiming repeated Hezbollah violations, has since launched deadly air attacks, sent ground troops into border areas and issued evacuation warnings that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

On Friday, Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said the movement was ready for a long confrontation.

“This is an existential battle… we will not allow the enemy to achieve its goal of eliminating our existence,” he said.

A Hezbollah source requesting anonymity said the group had gone “all in.”

Either Hezbollah “is finished or it establishes a new equation involving Israel’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon and a halt to its attacks,” he told AFP.

The source said Hezbollah decided to fight months ago but was waiting for a change in the regional status quo, “which it found in the US-Israeli war on Iran.”

The group, he added, “knows well that whatever the outcome of that war, its turn would come and Israel would not hesitate to launch a broad campaign against it.”

Israel kept striking Lebanon after the 2024 ceasefire, killing around 500 people, including many fighters from Hezbollah, which initially refrained from........

© The Times of Israel