The map of Hezbollah's Lebanon: where the party rules, where it cannot, and who is left to lead it

Hezbollah's power has always been geographic: rooted in three Shia zones and absent from most of a country divided among Christians, Sunnis and Druze, occupied in the south by Israel, and now governed by a state pressing it to disarm. A map of where the party rules, where it cannot, and who is left to lead it.

By the Middle East Desk · June 2026 · 13 min read

Hezbollah's power has always been geographic. It is rooted in three Shia zones and absent from most of a country divided among Christians, Sunnis and Druze, occupied in the south by Israel, and now governed by a state trying, for the first time in a generation, to take back the monopoly on force.

To understand what Hezbollah is in 2026, after a year and a half of war stripped away its leadership and much of its arsenal, it helps to start with a map rather than a balance sheet. The party is not coextensive with Lebanon. It is rooted in three pieces of it, dominant in the Shia third of the population and largely a stranger to the rest, and the gap between where it rules and where it does not is the truest measure of both its strength and its limits. The same geography explains why Israel can occupy the country's southern edge without touching the capital, why a Lebanese state long paralyzed by Hezbollah's veto is suddenly pressing it to disarm, and why the party's survival now depends on three zones it no longer fully controls.

The three strongholds

Hezbollah's territory is a triangle. Its political and organizational heart is the Dahieh, the dense belt of Shia municipalities immediately south of Beirut, where roughly ninety percent of residents are Shia and the formal southern suburb, four municipalities including Haret Hreik and Ghobeiry, holds several hundred thousand people.[1] Haret Hreik was the party's command district, home to its political offices, its Al-Manar media apparatus, and the social-service network, Jihad al-Bina and the rest, that made the area, in the words of one account, "functionally inseparable" from Hezbollah itself.[2] It was here that Israel killed Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, 2024, with a strike that flattened a block.

The second leg is the Shia south, the hill country and coastal hinterland historically called Jabal Amel, running from the Litani River to the Israeli border across the Nabatieh and South governorates.[3] Nabatieh, the administrative hub, registers more than ninety percent Shia voters; Bint Jbeil, four kilometers from the border, is where Nasrallah gave his "spider web" victory speech in 2000 and where the Israeli army was bloodied in 2006.[4] The border villages of the south, Aita al-Shaab, Maroun al-Ras, Kfar Kila, Khiam, are the fortified front line from which Hezbollah has fought every round, and which Israel has now largely destroyed.

The third leg is the deepest and least visible: Baalbek-Hermel, the northern Bekaa Valley. Baalbek city is a Hezbollah stronghold; Hermel registers ninety-eight percent Shia.[5] The Bekaa is the party's strategic rear, the home of training bases, weapons stores and the overland arms road that carried Iranian materiel from Tehran through Iraq and Syria into Lebanon along the Beirut-Damascus highway.[6] That corridor was severed in December 2024 when the Assad regime fell, an event that did more lasting damage to Hezbollah's logistics than any single Israeli strike.

Where Hezbollah is not at home

The strongholds are real, but they are a minority of the country. Lebanon has not held a census since 1932; the working estimate is that the population is roughly a third Shia, a third Sunni, and a third Christian and Druze combined.[7] On a sectarian map, Hezbollah's red shrinks to its three zones, and the rest of Lebanon belongs to communities that are not its base and, in most cases, are openly hostile to its arms.

The Christian heartland sits in the mountains above and north of Beirut: the Kesrouan, which votes overwhelmingly Christian and houses the Maronite Patriarchate, the Metn, the coastal district of Jbeil, and the northern highlands of Zgharta and Bsharri.[8] Pockets of Christian Lebanon survive even inside the Shia south, most strikingly Jezzine, a Maronite-majority district surrounded by Muslim territory, and the cluster of villages in the Bint Jbeil district, Rmeish, Ain Ebel, Debel, Qlayaa, sometimes called the Christian "square."[9] Their fate in the recent war is its own data point: Rmeish, a Maronite village, came through with under one percent of its structures damaged, having explicitly refused to let the fighting in, while Shia villages a few kilometers away were leveled.[10]

The Sunni community, comparable in size to the Shia, anchors the north, around Tripoli, Lebanon's second city, and the impoverished Akkar plain, with a second weight in the southern port of Sidon and in west Beirut.[11] The Druze, a twentieth of the country, hold the Chouf and Aley mountains southeast of the capital, the political fief of the Jumblatt family.[12] None of these communities is Hezbollah's ground. The party's military monopoly has never extended to them, and the disarmament pressure now bearing down on it draws its political energy from exactly this map: a Shia movement is being asked to give up its weapons by a state the other two-thirds of the country increasingly controls.

Where the state governs

For most of the last two decades that demand would have been unthinkable, because the Lebanese state was too weak and too divided to make it. That changed in early 2025. A 26-month presidential vacuum ended on January 9, 2025, when parliament elected Joseph Aoun, the Maronite former army commander, with 99 of 128 votes; days later Nawaf Salam, a Sunni jurist who had presided over the International Court of Justice, was named prime minister.[13] Both were opposed by the Hezbollah-Amal bloc, and both took office promising to bring all weapons under state control.

The state's writ is strongest precisely where Hezbollah is weakest: in central Beirut, the Christian mountains and north, and the Sunni cities, where the army and government function more or less normally. It is weakest, still, in the three strongholds. But the balance is shifting. Under the November 2024 ceasefire the army deployed some 10,000 troops south of the Litani, its largest southern presence in decades, closing smuggling crossings and dismantling arms depots; in January 2026 it declared the first phase of disarmament south of the river complete.[14] In September 2025 the cabinet approved a phased plan for a state monopoly on arms, beginning in the south and ending in the Bekaa; all five Shia ministers walked out in protest.[15] The army's posture in the south is telling about the limits of the project: it deploys alongside Hezbollah rather than against it, acting only on sites reported to the ceasefire monitors, for fear that a direct confrontation could reopen the civil war.[14]

What Israel holds

The fourth layer on the map is the one drawn by Israel. The November 2024 ceasefire required an Israeli withdrawal, but past the February 2025 deadline the army stayed at five fortified hilltop positions inside Lebanon, Labbouneh on the coast, Jabal Blat, Jal al-Deir, a post near Markaba, and Hamames Hill near Khiam, the deepest at about 1.5 kilometers in, each chosen to overlook an Israeli town across the line.[16] Then the ceasefire collapsed. After the killing of Iran's supreme leader in late February 2026 and Hezbollah's rocket fire in response, Israel launched a second offensive on March 16, 2026; by late May its forces had crossed the Litani and seized Beaufort Castle, the Crusader fortress commanding the river valley.[17] By mid-2026 Israel held an estimated 570 to 600 square kilometers of southern Lebanon and had ordered the evacuation of 29 towns, pushing the displacement line north of the Litani to the Zahrani River, well beyond anything the 2024 war had taken.[18]

The occupation is narrow and deep rather than broad: a southern strip and a set of commanding heights, leaving Tyre, Nabatieh and the rest of the south depopulated but not garrisoned. It does not reach Beirut, the mountains, or the Bekaa. What it does is sever Hezbollah from the border it built its identity defending, and hold the high ground from which the party once watched Israel.

The decapitated leadership

The map explains the party's reach. Its leadership roster explains its fragility. Over thirteen months Israel killed almost the entire senior command. Fuad Shukr, the top military commander, died in July 2024. The pager and walkie-talkie attacks of September 17 and 18 maimed thousands of operatives in a single stroke. Within ten days Israel killed Ibrahim Aqil, who ran the elite Radwan force; Ibrahim Qubaisi, who ran the missiles; then Nasrallah himself, alongside the southern-front commander Ali Karaki, on September 27. His presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine, was killed in a bunker days later, though confirmation took weeks.[19] The killing did not stop with the ceasefire. Haytham Tabatabai, who had rebuilt himself into the de facto chief of staff, was killed in the Dahieh in November 2025, the most senior figure lost since the truce; the Bint Jbeil and Radwan commander Ali Rida Abbas was killed in the 2026 fighting.[20]

The command Israel killed, and who is left

• Hassan Nasrallah (Killed Sep 2024) — Secretary-General for 32 years; killed in the Haret Hreik strike.
• Hashem Safieddine (Killed Oct 2024) — Nasrallah's presumed successor, killed in a bunker days after him.
• Shukr · Aqil · Qubaisi (Killed 2024) — The military command, the Radwan force and the missile arm, all killed within weeks.
• Haytham Tabatabai (Killed Nov 2025) — Rebuilt himself into de facto chief of staff before being killed in the Dahieh.
• Naim Qassem (Leads now) — Secretary-General since Oct 2024. Lifelong deputy and ideologue; no military background.
• Muhammad Haydar (Survives) — The senior military figure still standing, by attrition more than design.

Killings per IDF and Hezbollah confirmations, 2024–2026; surviving roles as of June 2026.

What remains is a leadership thinner and grayer than at any point in the party's history. The secretary-general is Naim Qassem, the 73-year-old cleric and former chemistry teacher who served as Nasrallah's deputy for more than three decades and stepped up in October 2024.[21] An ideologue without a military background, he has chosen visibility where Nasrallah chose the bunker, and has refused every demand to disarm in language that leaves little room: "Disarmament is extermination, and this is something we cannot accept," he said in May 2026; the choice, he told supporters, was "either victory or martyrdom."[22] Below him the surviving command is functional rather than commanding. Muhammad Haydar is the senior military figure still standing, by attrition more than design; the longtime security chief Wafiq Safa resigned in February 2026 amid internal disputes, the first departure of its kind.[23]

Disarmament is extermination, and this is something we cannot accept. — Naim Qassem, Hezbollah Secretary-General, May 2026

The strategic picture behind the roster is a slow squeeze. Assad's fall closed the land route from Iran; a Lebanese flight ban closed the air route; Iran's transfers fell short of what the party demanded, and its own financial institution, Al-Qard al-Hassan, froze payments, leaving the Dahieh's reconstruction stalled with residents told to wait.[24] And yet the party is not finished. An Israeli research center estimated in early 2026 that Hezbollah still fielded 40,000 to 50,000 fighters and some 25,000 rockets, and judged that its pace of rebuilding "exceeds the scope" of Israel's efforts to stop it.[25] The honest assessment from Lebanese analysts is of a smaller, cheaper, more agile Hezbollah, degraded but not destroyed, its leadership penetrated by the intelligence that keeps killing it, choosing rhetorical defiance over a fight it would lose.[26]

The map and the roster point to the same conclusion. Hezbollah's strength was never the whole of Lebanon; it was the depth of three Shia zones and the leadership that turned them into a state within the state. The zones remain, battered and occupied at the edge. The leadership that ran them is mostly dead. What the party is rebuilding, in the rubble of the Dahieh and the villages of the south, is the harder thing to replace.

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