The parable of those who take protectors other than Allah is that of the spider who builds a house; and verily, the frailest of houses is the spider’s house—if they but knew.—Quran 29:41

The twelve-day Iran–Israel war that concluded on 24 June 2025 marked the culmination of a strategic transformation whose pivot point was Hezbollah’s collapse in late 2024. When Israeli forces launched Operation Rising Lion against Iran on 13 June, they did so with a freedom of action that would have been previously unthinkable. 

In 2024, Hezbollah’s arsenal was destroyed before it could be unleashed. It ceased to be an effective deterrent protecting Iran’s nuclear program. Hezbollah’s command structure was dismantled. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was dead. What followed was a cascading shift in the regional balance of power. Israel struck Iran’s air defences in October 2024, leaving its skies vulnerable. In December, Syrian rebels, sensing Hezbollah’s weakness, launched a lightning offensive and overthrew the Assad regime. Within 48 hours of Assad’s evacuation flight to Moscow, Israel launched Operation Bashan Arrow, destroying over eighty percent of Syria’s strategic military infrastructure and securing air supremacy over Syrian territory. With Hezbollah’s fangs pulled and Iranian and Syrian air defences obliterated, the corridor to Iran’s nuclear heartland lay exposed. The road to Tehran had been cleared by Hezbollah’s spectacular and unexpectedly swift downfall.

One day after the 7 October Hamas massacre in southern Israel, Hezbollah, Iran’s then-strongest proxy in the region, started firing rockets into the north of Israel. In the immediate aftermath of what is probably Israel’s deepest crisis since its founding, the threat that Hezbollah might unleash the full power of its arsenal and rain down hellfire on Israel loomed large. Hezbollah’s arsenal was formidable. According to the IDF and various independent sources, it included around 65,000 short-range, 4,800 middle-range, and 400 long-range missiles and rockets; hundreds of precision guided missiles; 140,000 mortars; hundreds of UAVs; about 100 anti-ship missiles; and a plethora of anti-tank missiles and small arms. In sheer projectile firepower, Hezbollah surpassed most NATO countries. Its force comprised around 50,000 well-trained and well-equipped full-time fighters, along with tens of thousands of reservists.

Public predictions as to the results of a full-scale conflict with Hezbollah were grim. Though official Israeli Home Front Command assessments remain classified, according to a report based on the analyses of more than 100 senior Israeli government and military officials, it was estimated that Hezbollah could fire thousands of projectiles a day, striking military and civilian targets, as well as critical national infrastructure anywhere in Israel. They predicted that the rate of fire would deplete Israel’s air defences within a few days, “leaving Israel exposed.”

In such a scenario, home front and military casualties (including injuries) would number in the thousands, destruction zones in the dozens, and public panic would quickly spread. Hospitals would be overwhelmed—even more than they were on 7 October. Israeli citizens were told to prepare 72-hour emergency kits. The Israel Electric Company prepared emergency provisions at the cost of about $193USD million. In a speech of 2024, Hezbollah’s late Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah declared, “There will not be a single place in Israel away from our missiles.”

Between October 2023 and July 2024, Israel and Hezbollah engaged in a tense standoff. Despite its vast arsenal and apocalyptic rhetoric, Hezbollah remained constrained—firing carefully measured volleys that avoided triggering total war. The IDF responded with airstrikes and artillery. While the IDF continued to focus on Gaza, Hezbollah appeared confident. Nasrallah said, “The Israelis cannot defend themselves at all [in this] situation.” In the same speech, he even threatened to attack Cyprus, a member of the European Union, which is a nuclear-armed bloc via France. The war in Gaza and the tit-for-tat exchanges with Hezbollah across the Israel–Lebanon border continued. Then, the tense standoff gave way to a sudden attack.

On 27 July, Hezbollah struck a football field in the northern Israeli Druze town of Majdal Shams, killing twelve children. In retaliation, on 30 July, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s Chief of Staff, whom the US has said helped plan the 1983 bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 Americans. The next day, Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in a secure compound in Tehran, revealing just how deeply Israel had penetrated the Ayatollah regime’s security apparatus. During this phase of steeper escalation, Hezbollah increased its rate of fire yet refrained from unleashing its full firepower—or so it seemed.

On the morning of 17 September, Israel announced that it had officially added the safe return of northern residents to their homes to its war goal and shifted the IDF’s focus northwards. In the afternoon of the same day, in one of the most sophisticated Trojan horse operations in military history, Israel remotely detonated thousands of explosive-rigged pagers that had been distributed among Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria. The operation resulted in at least 42 deaths and 3,500 injuries—thus removing thousands of fighters and mid-ranking commanders from the battlefield. The next day, Israel detonated a batch of explosive walkie talkies, killing twenty Hezbollah members and injuring 450. These back-to-back strikes paralysed Hezbollah’s operation, hindering its ability to synchronise rocket fire, logistics, and movements. The next blow came on 23 September, when the IDF launched Operation Northern Arrows, an extensive series of airstrikes in southern Lebanon and in the Dahiya district of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold. The Israel Air Force struck over 12,500 targets, hitting command centres, weapons storage facilities, launchers, and other military infrastructure, and taking out key personnel. 

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All this time, the Israel public was anticipating that at any minute the “real war” would begin, but the thousands-rocket volleys never came. Instead, on 27 September, the Israel Air Force struck a Hezbollah bunker in al Dahiya. The ordinance penetrated deep underground and caused the bunker to collapse in on itself, leading to the death of multiple high-ranking Hezbollah commanders, including, most importantly, Hassan Nasrallah. Four days later, while Hezbollah was still reeling, Israel launched a ground operation into southern Lebanon to dismantle military infrastructure entrenched there. On 27 November, Hezbollah was forced into a ceasefire. 

With its leadership wiped out, thousands of foot soldiers and mid-ranking commanders knocked out of the fight, communication networks compromised, and about eighty percent of its once-monstrous arsenal destroyed, Hezbollah was now a shadow of its former self. Reactions to Nasrallah’s assassination ranged from grief to jubilation, but the dominant thread was disbelief.

The Israeli public began to breathe a sigh of relief—the anticipated destruction and death everyone had thought Hezbollah capable of inflicting never came. The Middle East had changed. Hezbollah, one of the strongest regional actors, and indeed, one of the most powerful non-state actors in the world, was crippled. Its infamous leader, Nasrallah, was gone. Seemingly at the zenith of its power in the immediate wake of 7 October, by one year later, Hezbollah had been decimated.

How had Hezbollah fallen so swiftly? How could an organisation so deeply feared and with such a menacing arsenal collapse under the pressure of a few decisive blows, after having spent twenty years preparing for war? Why did Hezbollah’s promised firestorm never materialise? The answers lie in the collapse of long-held beliefs and trusted ideas, the collapse of what in Israeli strategic discourse is called the “concepzia.”

The Hebrew word concepzia can be roughly translated as “security paradigm”: a set of strategic assumptions and expectations that govern a security doctrine. But the word has negative undertones and more accurately translates to “security misconception.” That’s because these assumptions and expectations tend to become entrenched and their validity deteriorates over time, especially if they remain in place long after facts on the ground have changed.

In his seminal work, The Yom Kippur War, historian Abraham Rabinovich details how, in 1973, Israeli military intelligence clung to an outdated concepzia until mere hours before war broke out. They erroneously believed that Anwar Sadat would only go to war if two conditions were met. He wanted the Soviets to supply Scud missiles, capable of hitting Tel Aviv, to deter Israel from striking inside Egypt, and he wanted fighter-bombers capable of taking out the Israel Air Force. In reality, however, unbeknownst to Israeli intelligence, Sadat had moved past those conditions and would go to war without them if need be. “Sadat had abandoned ‘the concept’ but Israel continued to embrace it,” Rabinovich writes.

The concepzia was so deeply entrenched that multiple sources of intelligence indicating an immediate threat were misinterpreted, downplayed, or dismissed, filtered through the outdated mental model. There was a visible troop build-up across the Suez Canal. Human intelligence was pouring in from the Syrian front. Signals intelligence revealed troop movements, logistical preparations, and communications suggesting imminent war. On 5 October, Ashraf Marwan, a top Egyptian official and informant for Israel—and Sadat’s own son-in-law—summoned the head of Mossad to London to warn him that Egypt and Syria would launch a war the next day. But key decision-makers in Israeli intelligence still clung to a set of assumptions that were no longer grounded in reality, and they failed to initiate war preparations in time.

Fifty years later, another erroneous concepzia led Israel to disaster on 7 October. Israel made the fatal mistake of believing Hamas had been deterred, that it was more focused on domestic affairs, and that it was incapable of launching a large and murderous attack. Again, this misconception was due to operational and conceptual failures such as misinterpreted and dismissed intelligence, over-reliance on digital surveillance technology, misreading of the enemy, and failure of imagination—different time, different details, same underlying mistakes.

Since at least 2000, when Israel unilaterally pulled out of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah had been developing a concepzia of its own. Hezbollah perceived the Israeli withdrawal as a monumental victory that increased the organisation’s status in Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world. On 26 May 2000, Nasrallah gave a speech in which he said, “This Israel… is actually weaker than a spider’s web... Israeli society is war-weary and lacks the resilience to endure a bloody conflict or suffer casualties. Israel may appear strong from the outside, but it’s easily destroyed and defeated.” Nasrallah’s key takeaway was that Israel could be deterred or even defeated by guerrilla persistence and ideological steadfastness. “The era of defeats is over; the era of victories has begun.”

Over the next six years, Hezbollah built fortified positions and tunnels, stockpiled weapons and equipment, and embedded its assets among the villages of southern Lebanon. This period was also characterised by cross-border skirmishes, sniper fire, short-range rocket attacks, and the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers. (Their bodies were returned in exchange for 435 prisoners in a January 2004 deal.) Despite spurts of violence, this was a period of relative quiet. But Hezbollah was not deterred—it was preparing for battle. Israel interpreted this period as one of low-intensity containment on its northern front. Hezbollah believed that Israel’s responses to provocations would remain limited, below the threshold of all-out war. In July 2006, that calculation proved incorrect, when Israel responded to the kidnapping of another two of its soldiers by launching a war in southern Lebanon.

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Israel failed to achieve its core objectives in the 2006 Lebanon War: neutralising Hezbollah, stopping rocket fire, retrieving the bodies of the abducted soldiers. This was primarily due to an over-reliance on airpower; a delayed, incoherent ground campaign; insufficient preparedness; and other strategic and tactical miscalculations. As the Winograd Commission, which examined Israel’s wartime political and military decision-making, summarised: “Israel initiated a long war, which ended without its clear military victory.”

While Hezbollah suffered losses, it emerged emboldened. It had proven, once again, that guerrilla warfare and sustained rocket attacks against the home front could counter the full weight of the IDF’s conventional power. With Iranian funding, Hezbollah set out to rebuild and expand its arsenal. But then Hezbollah’s concepzia started to slip increasingly out of sync with reality on the ground. Israel’s approach to Hezbollah was starting to undergo seismic recalibrations. The Winograd Commission Report triggered the deepest overhaul of Israel’s political-security architecture since the Agranat Commission of 1973. One of the changes Israel instituted was to allocate the bulk of its intelligence resources to a laser focus on Hezbollah.

The shift was at once conceptual and operational. Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, developed advanced cyber capabilities to intercept Hezbollah’s cellular and digital communications and embedded intelligence officers within combat units to streamline information flow to frontline troops and to the air force. Drones and satellites conducted continuous passes over southern Lebanon, documenting the slightest architectural irregularities—a new rooftop, a hidden hatch—that could indicate weapons stockpiles or fortified positions. Collaboration with the US National Security Agency was expanded. Israel leveraged its geographic proximity to insert undercover commandos into Lebanese territory for high-risk intelligence-gathering operations.

The assassination of Imad Mughniyeh in 2008 was one of the first clear outcomes of Israel’s post-2006 intelligence overhaul. Mughniyeh was the architect of Hezbollah’s external operations, and a man with unparalleled access to the IRGC. He had a hand in the 1983 US Marine barracks bombing, the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing, and the 1994 Jewish Community Centre bombing in Buenos Aires, as well as many other attacks and multiple plane hijackings. 

The Mossad mapped out his routine: no bodyguards, predictable timing, repeated visits to an apartment in Damascus that was generally considered safe territory for Hezbollah personnel. The CIA designed a small explosive device. Mossad agents planted it inside the headrest of Mughniyeh’s SUV. At 10:45 PM, after attending a meeting with Iranian and Hezbollah commanders, Mughniyeh opened the door of the vehicle and the device was remotely triggered. He was killed instantly.

Despite the strategic blow of Mughniyeh’s assassination and a partial understanding of Israel’s ongoing intelligence overhaul, Nasrallah’s concepzia continued to hold sway over Hezbollah in the years that followed. He read Israel’s expanded surveillance and targeted operations not as a prelude to a future in which Israel could cripple Hezbollah, but as a more effective form of deterrence operating within the perceived “rules of the game” established post-2006. The concepzia remained rigidly focused on Hezbollah’s supposed resilience and Israel’s presumed fragility.

Meanwhile, Israel continued to clandestinely exploit Hezbollah’s vulnerabilities. In 2012, Unit 8200 obtained a trove of data on Hezbollah assets and operations, including locations of command centres, weapons storage facilities, underground bunkers, and other military sites. Nasrallah stated publicly that he believed Israel had been deterred and that the Israelis would not be able to stop Hezbollah from unleashing large missile strikes against the Jewish state in the future. He said, “In the end, there will still be targets, missile sites, or missile platforms that remain untouched in the first strike. And if we have only these remaining missiles… even just a few of them are capable of turning the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israelis into hell.”

But Israel’s critical intelligence breakthrough in 2012 was followed by a decade of relentless preparation and operations, mostly in Syria but extending into Lebanon. In a sustained offensive with both aerial and covert elements, the country systematically targeted Iranian arms transfers and Iranian and Hezbollah military infrastructure. Hezbollah, meanwhile, became deeply mired in the Syrian Civil War, deploying thousands of fighters to prop up the Assad regime. This engagement, while expanding Hezbollah’s operational experience and regional influence, also diverted its focus and exposed it to Israeli intelligence gathering. As the Saudi state-affiliated publication Al Majalla reported, “Hezbollah members’ activities, habits, routines, action in combat, and even participation at social events were all recorded … operating in foreign and unregulated environments, the group struggled to maintain internal surveillance and discipline.” Israeli intelligence agencies had the opening they needed to accurately map Hezbollah activities and capabilities. Hezbollah knew that it had been exposed to adversarial intelligence operations during its involvement in Syria, but it never grasped how systematic the Israeli infiltration had been. 

Over the following decade, Nasrallah continued to view Israel’s clandestine campaign as manageable interdictions within an established deterrence framework. His knowledge of Israeli penetration remained perilously partial. For example, he understood that Israel could hack Hezbollah’s digital communications networks, so he opted for lower tech communications equipment, implementing the use of pagers and walkie talkies. He didn’t know that Israel had orchestrated this scenario—creating the need for lower-tech equipment in the first place, as part of a broader strategy. The explosive devices were intended as a “red button,” a secret weapon that could land a devastating blow in the event of a war. Nasrallah also knew that Israel was aware of the locations of a number of weapons in Hezbollah’s arsenal, but he didn’t know that Israel had placed tracking devices on some missiles. During this time, as Ronen Bergman notes, “Israel was very restrained in not using its understanding of Hezbollah… Not Nasrallah, not anyone else in the leadership, understood how deep Israel has infiltrated their ranks.” 

For Nasrallah, the 7 October war began by surprise—Hamas informed Hezbollah just thirty minutes before it launched its assault. Nonetheless, Hezbollah jumped into the war on 8 October. Former Israeli Secretary of Defence Yoav Gallant urged the security cabinet to strike Hezbollah first, but he was outvoted, and Israel chose to focus on first confronting Hamas and attempting to rescue the hostages. But the perception of the Hezbollah threat had changed: a major conflict with Hezbollah was now generally considered simply a matter of time, and likely to occur in the very near future.

In a speech of November 2023, Nasrallah seemed aware that the 7 October attacks had ushered in a shift. Referring to the war on the Israel–Lebanon border he said, “It is a real battle, different from all the other battles that the resistance fought in Lebanon, whether before 2000 or in 2006 and after.” But that awareness does not appear to have altered Hezbollah’s strategic calculus. Nasrallah continued to believe, as he had for the previous seventeen years, that Israel would remain critically averse to escalation. His assumptions remained tethered to a paradigm that held until 6 October, and he believed that he could wage a low-intensity skirmish, controlling the pace of escalation. He hadn’t grasped the fact that 7 October had persuaded the Israeli security establishment that escalation was now inevitable. He mistook patience for impotence. This strategic misconception, in conjunction with his unawareness of just how deeply Israel had penetrated Hezbollah’s ranks, set the stage for the knockout blows that included Nasrallah’s assassination and led to the dismantling of Hezbollah.

Between October 2023 and September 2024, the signs for Nasrallah were ominous, though he failed to heed them. His calculated, limited volleys across the border, were designed to exert pressure and cause disruption without triggering the war he believed Israel still fundamentally wished to avoid. Yet, the increasing precision and scope of Israeli strikes was undeniable. The elimination of senior figures like IRGC General Razi al-Moussawi in December, followed by Hamas deputy leader Saleh Al-Arouri in Beirut and Hezbollah’s own Radwan Force commander Wisam Tawil in January, demonstrated Israel’s expanding reach, intent, and resolve. The assassination of Fuad Shukr in late July further underscored this shift. What Nasrallah perceived as a period of controlled escalation was, in reality, a steady tightening of the noose. While Israel’s focus was fixed on Gaza, Hezbollah’s outdated concepzia was able to linger on, its flaws not yet exposed by direct, total confrontation.

“Just as Israel developed a catastrophic blindness to Hamas’s intent and capabilities, despite the plethora of warning signs, so too did Hezbollah deceive itself with false narratives about Israeli intent and capabilities later in the war,” military and strategic affairs analyst Yaakov Lappin later commented.

In the end, Hezbollah’s downfall was not the result of a single battle lost or a lapse in resolve, but the sudden and total collapse of a strategic worldview. For nearly two decades, Hezbollah’s leadership clung to the belief that its vast arsenal and perceived resilience rendered it untouchable; that Israeli society was too fragile, too risk-averse to absorb a full-scale war; and that its deterrent shield would forever protect both itself and Iran’s regional and nuclear ambitions. This illusion—once so deeply entrenched it shaped the calculations of adversaries and allies alike—was shattered in a matter of weeks.

The anticipated storm of missiles never came. The devastation that Israeli society braced for failed to materialise. Instead, it was Hezbollah’s command structure, communications network, military capabilities, and long-held mythos that crumbled. The spider’s web image Nasrallah once used to describe Israel became a metaphor for Hezbollah’s own undoing: a brittle illusion of fortitude that collapsed under pressure.

Iran’s regional hegemonic project lost its anchor in Lebanon. This collapse triggered a cascade: as Hezbollah faltered, its deterrence gone, Israel dismantled Iran’s air defences in October 2024, rebels toppled the Assad regime in December, and Israel seized the moment to destroy Syria’s strategic infrastructure, securing the corridor to Iran. By the time Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, what would once have provoked devastating retaliation from Hezbollah now unfolded without Hezbollah launching even one rocket.

Hezbollah’s collapse is a reminder that strategic misconceptions—however long-lived or widely accepted—can persist right up until the moment they are violently disproven. The concepzia that sustained Hezbollah, much like those that have led Israel to disaster in previous decades and before 7 October, proved fatally flawed when tested by shifting reality on the ground. The object lesson here is that you should never mistake yesterday’s concepzia for tomorrow’s security.