After October 7.. How the war redrew Lebanon’s security map

The repercussions of the October 7, 2023, attack were not just distant echoes heard in Lebanon; they were the spark that ignited a series of dramatic transformations, culminating in a radical redrawing of the country’s national security map. What began as a “support front” by Hezbollah to back Hamas in Gaza quickly escalated into an all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel, creating a new political and security reality that Lebanon continues to live under today.

Hamas’s attack was more than just a Palestinian operation against Israel; it was a regional watershed moment that reshaped the security balance across the Middle East. While global attention fixated on Gaza and Israel’s massive retaliation, Lebanon’s southern border was gradually dragged into the flames. As clashes widened, Lebanon ceased to be a bystander. It became a battlefield in its own right-a direct front in Israel’s war that lasted for months and altered the nation’s security landscape from Beirut and the southern suburbs to the Bekaa Valley.

In the early months after October 7, the confrontation along the southern frontier seemed to remain within the bounds of old, unspoken “rules of engagement”. Operations were primarily confined to the Shebaa Farms area, with mutual strikes targeting military sites within a restricted zone. But this fragile balance collapsed as Israel broadened its target bank deep inside Lebanese territory, responding to Hezbollah’s intensified rocket barrages into new areas of northern Israel.

The battlefield and the war

Daily clashes stretched across the entire Blue Line, from Naqoura in the west to Shebaa in the east. Artillery fire and air raids became routine, while Hezbollah launched dozens of rockets and drones toward Israeli villages. Southern Lebanese towns were transformed into frontlines; tens of thousands of residents fled northward, while the Lebanese government remained helpless to stop the slide into war. The Lebanese Army, in coordination with UNIFIL, could only conduct symbolic patrols that weaved through the relentless bombardment.

The most dangerous shift came when Israel decided to move the battle into Lebanon’s interior. Within months, Israeli jets struck Hezbollah’s strongholds in Beirut’s southern suburbs, training centers in the Bekaa, and even targets in the far north, pursuing both operatives and financial networks. Yet the strikes that changed the course of the war were those that decapitated Hezbollah’s entire leadership, beginning with Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, assassinated in a precision strike on a fortified shelter in the southern suburbs. The killing shattered the party’s centralized command structure. His successor, Hashem Safieddine, and several members of the Shura Council were eliminated soon after, leaving Hezbollah a body without a head, still moving, but stripped of strategic direction.

Attempts to replace this vacuum with a collective leadership faltered under constant Israeli drone strikes, which hunted down Hezbollah’s field commanders in the Bekaa and the south. Public appearances became almost suicidal for its cadres.

Immediate consequences

Israel’s precision operations collapsed the doctrine of “mutual deterrence” that had held since the 2006 war. Airstrikes could now hit any target, anywhere in Lebanon, plunging the entire country into insecurity. With assistance from Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers, Hezbollah tried to adapt, shifting its tactics, moving leaders in secrecy, and reorganizing cells. But the mass detonation of booby-trapped pagers carried by hundreds of fighters revealed the depth of Israeli penetration inside Hezbollah’s networks. The grim joke became: only those leaders not suspected of disloyalty had survived.

This unprecedented violence forced Hezbollah, through Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, to agree to a U.S.-backed ceasefire framework. The deal effectively allowed Israel to keep striking at any attempts by Hezbollah to rebuild its military infrastructure.

Paradoxically, Hezbollah’s military defeat triggered long-stalled political change. With the party’s grip weakened, the presidential deadlock was finally broken: Joseph Aoun was elected president, and a government was formed under Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. This raised hopes of monopolizing arms under state authority, disbanding militias, and beginning Lebanon’s reconstruction.

However, this government, although supported by Arab and international powers, was born in the midst of the storm. Despite Hezbollah’s participation in it, the party quickly sought to regain influence, pressuring the cabinet through its ministers to block decisions contrary to its security agenda. It also leveraged its street power to manufacture internal flashpoints, reminding everyone of its ability to destabilize. The episode at Beirut’s Raouche Rock, where Hezbollah supporters staged provocative rallies, symbolized these efforts to roll back Lebanon to the pre-war order.

Electing a president after years of paralysis had been a rare glimmer of hope, but Hezbollah’s disruptive tactics and the persistence of the war suffocated that optimism. Party-affiliated ministers clung to the rhetoric of providing “cover for the resistance,” while the government proved unable to make decisive moves on security or foreign relations.

Security: The impossible mission

Caught in the middle, Lebanon’s official security institutions -chiefly the army- faced their most challenging test. Their role shifted from “maintainers of order” to “crisis managers” in an environment beyond the state’s capacity.

To the north and east, Syria’s collapse severed Hezbollah’s traditional lifeline to Iran. To the south, relentless Israeli strikes and international calls to disarm Hezbollah compounded the pressure. Lebanon’s skies became a permanent corridor for Israeli drones, monitoring and eliminating Hezbollah’s field operatives at will.

The 2024 war erased Lebanon’s old security map, which once separated the “southern front” from a relatively safe hinterland. The new map is fluid and unstable: there are no safe zones, all of Lebanon lies within the strike radius, and the conflict has shifted into a limbo of “no war, no peace,” punctuated by assassinations and precision raids.

A nation in suspended war

Today, Lebanon lives under the shadow of a war that has not truly ended. A fragile government struggles to assert its authority. Hezbollah, though decapitated, is reorganizing for another round. Israel hovers overhead, ready to strike at the faintest sign of resurgence.

Since October 7, the south is no longer a dormant front but an active battlefield. Even Beirut itself is caught in the crossfire of political and security struggles, as Hezbollah maneuvers to reassert its dominance.

The October 7 attack reshaped the regional balance, but for Lebanon it marked an existential turning point. The country, long accustomed to “limited wars” confined to its southern border, now finds itself engulfed in a full-scale conflict. More than two years later, Lebanon lives under the reality of an undeclared, ongoing war: no clear ceasefire, institutions unable to secure the interior, and no political horizon guaranteeing lasting stability.

This is Lebanon’s new security map, not drawn by the Lebanese themselves, but imposed upon them from the heart of the Hezbollah-Israel conflict. And it raises a haunting question: can Lebanon ever return to being a stable state, or is its fate to remain a frontline for the wars of others in a region perpetually on the edge of eruption?