Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 27 November 2024. © Richard Kemp

Whatever happened to Hezbollah’s solidarity with its jihadist brothers in Gaza? That was the pretext for launching its war of aggression against Israel the day after Hamas’s October 7 orgy of murder, rape, kidnapping and torture. Yet despite the Hezbollah leadership’s cast iron guarantees that ‘the Lebanon front will not stop before stopping the aggression on Gaza’, it seems they couldn’t even be bothered to mention the Gaza Strip in their desperation for a ceasefire. Nothing could be more telling of the once hubris-filled Hezbollah’s sorry state after a year of mauling by Israel.

Their leaders have been taken out by the dozen, huge numbers of fighters cut down, rockets and launchers blown to smithereens and all of the village strongholds in southern Lebanon razed to the ground. Many terrorists have fled for their lives into neighbouring Syria in the face of the IDF bulldozer. This has become the fate of the fanatical and murderous gangsters that until recently were thought of as the most powerful paramilitary force the world had ever seen.

The blow that this ceasefire represents to the Iranian regime is every bit as great. Hezbollah, painstakingly built up at enormous expense over 40 years, was their flagship, the most important part of the ‘ring of fire’ put in place to burn Israel to death. The vessel may not yet have been sunk but it is certainly filling up with water. Manning the pumps rather than continuing to fire broadsides was seen by the ayatollahs as the best way of salvaging something from the wreckage.

As the IDF continued to hammer Hezbollah, its remaining leadership also feared uprising by rival factions in Lebanon, where long standing animosities have been held at bay by its hitherto unchallenged stranglehold on the country. It’s not clear whether that might yet materialise but you can imagine the fear such a prospect would seize in the Supreme Leader and his henchmen who themselves are having to hold off growing dissent at home.

Adding to the woes of Hezbollah and its Iranian masters is the imminent arrival of Donald Trump in the White House. He is going to usher in a new era in Middle East relations with every probability of less restraint towards Iran and its terror proxies. Recognising that peace and stability is achieved not by fear but by strength, Mike Waltz, Trump’s choice for National Security Adviser, says: ‘We will not tolerate the status quo of Iran’s support for terrorism.’ (more…)