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.

A year and a half of war has stripped Hezbollah of its leadership and much of its arsenal. To understand what the party is now, start with a map rather than a balance sheet. Hezbollah does not span Lebanon. It holds three pieces of the country and dominates the Shia third of the population, but it remains a stranger to the rest. That gap, between where it rules and where it does not, measures both its strength and its limits. The same geography explains the rest: why Israel can occupy the southern edge of the country without touching the capital, why a state that Hezbollah's veto long paralyzed is now pressing the party to disarm, and why its survival 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. Roughly ninety percent of residents there are Shia, and its 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 Hezbollah bloodied the Israeli army 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] The Assad regime fell in December 2024 and severed that corridor, doing 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, but the rough breakdown is well established: a third Shia, a third Sunni, a third Christian and Druze combined.[7] On a sectarian map, Hezbollah's red shrinks to its three zones. The rest of Lebanon belongs to communities that are not its base and, in most cases, openly oppose 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. The most striking is Jezzine, a Maronite-majority district surrounded by Muslim territory; another is 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. It carries 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: the other two-thirds of the country, which increasingly controls the state, is demanding that a Shia movement give up its weapons.

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 it named Nawaf Salam, a Sunni jurist who had presided over the International Court of Justice, 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. Past the February 2025 deadline, the army instead held 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 overlooks an Israeli town across the line.[16] Then the ceasefire collapsed. Iran's supreme leader was killed in late February 2026, Hezbollah fired rockets in response, and on March 16, 2026, Israel launched a second offensive. By late May its forces had crossed the Litani and seized Beaufort Castle, the Crusader fortress that commands 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 fibre-optic belt

Israel holds that ground under a weapon that has quietly redrawn the southern map. Since the fighting resumed in the spring of 2026, Hezbollah's most effective tool against Israeli forces has not been its rockets but the fibre-optic drone: a small first-person-view quadcopter that trails a hair-thin spool of optical fibre and carries its commands and its camera feed down the glass as pulses of light rather than over radio.[27] The fibre makes it nearly immune to the means Israel relies on. There is no radio link to jam, so the electronic-warfare umbrella that swats ordinary drones from the sky does nothing to it; there is no emission to trace, so it arrives unannounced. Israeli commanders concede there is little they can do about it, and acknowledge entering the war in Lebanon without the tools to stop it.[27]

A fibre-optic drone flies only as far as its spool unwinds, and the spools draw rings on the map. The reliable operational band today runs to about twenty kilometres, with some spools reaching thirty; fifty-kilometre reels have been demonstrated in other theatres, and Hezbollah claims to have fielded them.[27][29] From a single launch point north of the Litani, the length of the tether decides the target. A twenty-kilometre drone already reaches the Israeli border towns of Metula and Kiryat Shmona across the line, and the Lebanese ground south to Nabatieh. Stretch the spool to fifty kilometres and the same position ranges up the coast from Tyre to Sidon and, across the line, to the edge of Nahariya. Beirut, ninety-odd kilometres north, lies beyond all but the unproven prototypes.

That is why a line on a hillside is worth a war. By Israeli count Hezbollah's southern drone unit fields about a hundred specialists and had launched some hundred and sixty drones at Israeli forces by late spring, around ninety of them fibre-optic.[28] A party stripped of its leaders and its land bridge has found, in a three-hundred-dollar airframe and a reel of glass thread, a way to turn every hill within twenty kilometres of the line into a firing position it cannot be jammed out of. It is also the clearest reason the ceasefire's central demand was always geographic. Push Hezbollah north of the Litani and the cheap, unjammable drones that range the Israeli border belt must be carried that much further forward to fire. The strip Israel holds is not only ground. It is the buffer between those drones and its own towns.

The decapitated leadership

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

The command Israel killed

• Hassan Nasrallah — Secretary-General, 1992–2024 — Killed Sep 2024 — Led Hezbollah for 32 years; killed in the strike that flattened a block of Haret Hreik.
• Fuad Shukr — Top military commander — Killed Jul 2024 — The senior-most military figure, killed in the Dahieh weeks before the pager attacks.
• Ibrahim Aqil — Radwan special-forces commander — Killed Sep 2024 — Ran the elite Radwan force; killed within ten days of the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.
• Ibrahim Qubaisi — Missile and rocket commander — Killed Sep 2024 — Directed the missile arm; killed in the same September wave.
• Hashem Safieddine — Presumed successor; Executive Council head — Killed Oct 2024 — Killed in a bunker days after Nasrallah; confirmation took weeks.
• Ali Karaki — Southern-front commander — Killed Sep 2024 — Killed alongside Nasrallah on September 27.
• Haytham Tabatabai — De facto chief of staff — Killed Nov 2025 — Rebuilt the military command after the truce; the most senior figure lost since the ceasefire.
• Ali Rida Abbas — Bint Jbeil and Radwan commander — Killed 2026 — Killed in the 2026 fighting.

What is left

• Naim Qassem — Secretary-General since Oct 2024 — Leads now — Lifelong deputy and ideologue, a former chemistry teacher with no military background; refuses every demand to disarm.
• Muhammad Haydar — Senior military commander — Survives — The senior military figure still standing, by attrition more than design.
• Wafiq Safa — Security and liaison chief — Resigned Feb 2026 — Longtime security chief; resigned amid internal disputes, the first departure of its kind.

Portraits via Wikimedia Commons — Nasrallah, Safieddine, Shukr (Khamenei.ir), Qassem (M. Shahrestani), Safa (Tasnim News Agency), CC BY 4.0; Aqil, U.S. State Department (public domain). No photograph is publicly available for Qubaisi, Karaki, Tabatabai, Abbas or Haydar. 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]

Hezbollah as Iran's forward deterrent

Step back from Lebanon and Hezbollah's place in a larger calculation comes into view. For two decades the party was the single most important piece of Iran's deterrent against Israel, and it deterred not by what it did but by what it threatened: a wall of rockets, and now drones, aimed at northern Israel that made any strike on Iran itself a two-front affair. Iran's wager was that Israel would not march on Tehran while a hundred thousand projectiles sat on its northern border. Hezbollah was the cost Iran imposed in advance.

That is the same logic that runs through the strategy Israel calls mowing the grass — the doctrine of cutting a hostile force back every few years without trying to destroy it, built for Gaza and now debated as a model for Iran. (The War Dispatch examined that debate in a companion piece.) A state that can raise the price of a strike high enough is not a lawn to be mowed on a schedule; it is a wasps' nest, and Hezbollah was the largest part of how Iran raised that price. The war of 2024 to 2026 was, among other things, Israel's attempt to pull that card: to degrade the forward deterrent enough that it could one day strike Iran without paying the northern bill.

It half-worked, and the failed half is the half that matters. Israel killed Hezbollah's command, severed its supply line, and drove its fighters back from the border. But an Israeli research centre judged in early 2026 that the party still fielded tens of thousands of fighters and some twenty-five thousand rockets, and that its pace of rebuilding "exceeds the scope" of Israel's effort to stop it.[25] The forward deterrent was battered, not broken, and the fibre-optic drone is restoring it on the cheap: a weapon that needs no land bridge from Iran, no costly missile, and no leadership to speak of, only a hill and a reel of glass. The card Israel tried to pull is being reprinted.

What the memorandum says about Lebanon

The interim memorandum the United States and Iran are signing in Geneva this week names Lebanon once, in its first operative clause. The parties declare the "immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon," and pledge to ensure "the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon."[30] That is the whole of it. The text names neither Israel nor Hezbollah; the party enters only through the phrase "their allies in the current war," and on that single hook hangs the entire dispute over what the deal means for the south.

Iran reads itself and Hezbollah as one side of the bargain, the United States and Israel as the other. "Any continued occupation of Lebanese territory," its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the day after the text emerged, "will be regarded by us as a violation of the memorandum of understanding."[31] Israel, which signed nothing, rejects the premise. "Trump's agreement does not bind us," the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said; the defence minister, Israel Katz, declared that the army would hold its security zones in Lebanon "without any time limit."[32] The American ambassador took Israel's side, calling the fight with Hezbollah unconnected to the Iran deal. The memorandum orders no Israeli withdrawal, sets no timeline, and says nothing about disarming Hezbollah; all of that is pushed to a separate Lebanese-Israeli track that Hezbollah is not party to and rejects in advance.

Any military attack by Israel against Lebanon from this point forward, as well as any continued occupation of Lebanese territory, will be regarded by us as a violation of the memorandum of understanding. — Abbas Araghchi, Iranian Foreign Minister, June 16, 2026

Naim Qassem, who has refused every demand to surrender the party's arms, nonetheless called the deal a "great victory," thanking Iran for "linking the Lebanese arena" to the accord and reading into it a guarantee that Tehran will press for an Israeli pullout in the next round of talks.[33] It is a revealing thing to claim about a document that does not mention him. The memorandum's missing line — the withdrawal it does not require, the disarmament it does not order — is the space into which Hezbollah and Israel are now pouring their own meanings. The deal ends the war on paper and leaves the question the war was fought over exactly where it found it.

The question the map leaves open

The geography explains the party's reach and its limits; it does not settle its future, and the memorandum just signed leaves that future where the war found it. The crux is the oldest question in Lebanon, sharpened now to a point: will Hezbollah give up its guns?

The case that it must is the strongest it has ever been. The state is more capable than at any time in a generation; the other two-thirds of the country want the weapons gone; the land bridge from Iran is severed, the money is short, and the leadership that built the arsenal is dead. A government led by a former army commander has declared a monopoly on force and begun, in the south, to enforce it.

The case that it will not is stronger still. Disarmament is, in Qassem's word, "extermination": the weapons are the party's reason to exist and the last veto it holds over a state the other communities increasingly run. The army deploys beside Hezbollah rather than against it, unwilling to risk a civil war. The fibre-optic drone has made the arsenal cheap to rebuild faster than anyone can take it apart. And the deal the party just called a victory asks it to give up nothing.

On the reading of the Lebanese analysts who watch the party closest, the likelier outcome is the one the south has always produced: not disarmament, not open defiance, but a smaller, cheaper, more agile party that keeps its guns and waits for the next round.[26] Hezbollah's strength was never the whole of Lebanon. It was the depth of three Shia zones, the leadership that turned them into a state within the state, and the deterrent that made Iran expensive to attack. The zones remain, battered and occupied at their edge. The leadership is mostly dead. The deterrent has been called once and is being rebuilt on the cheap. What the war broke, the map suggests, the party is already learning to do without.

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