After over a year of launching aerial attacks against northern Israel, Hezbollah has reportedly begun to crack as the Iran-backed terror group has experienced a wave of desertions, sources told the Arabic independent online newspaper Elaph in a report published Sunday.
Hezbollah’s membership was reportedly shaken after pager explosions saw 1000s of its members wounded, its leadership eliminated in Israeli airstrikes, including Hezbollah head Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and now an Israeli ground operation into southern Lebanon.
Those defecting, according to the source, are not reporting when summoned by senior terrorists and not waiting in their assigned locations. Other terrorists have reportedly fled to Syrian territory with their families, attempting to avoid any confrontation with Israel at close range.
Trying to survive its members’s abandonment, sources told Elaph that the terror group has begun sending reinforcements to southern Lebanon to confront Israeli soldiers.
As a result of combatants abandoning their posts, Hezbollah is now reportedly struggling to communicate with its men on the ground. There are also fears that the defections, now mainly a phenomenon in southern Lebanon, will spread to terrorists throughout the country, the source claimed.
The confrontations on the southern border and escape by Hezbollah combatants have reportedly left the group struggling to recruit new terrorists to fuel its fight against Israel.
Hezbollah's attacks on Israel
Hezbollah began firing on Israel only a day after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel - forming part of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance.’ In addition to some soldiers, the rocket fire has killed a number of civilians, including 12 Druze children in Majdal Shams, and forced tens of thousands of Israelis to evacuate their homes.
The constant fire and increasing civilian toll eventually pushed the war cabinet to expand the goals of the Israel-Hamas War to include the safe return of Israel’s northern residents.
The ground operations, which were not without controversy from Israel’s Western allies and the United Nations, have seen numerous Hezbollah structures destroyed - including tunnels that would have enabled the terror group to reenact their own October 7 attacks in the North.