The current state of play, regarding whether Hezbollah can rearm itself in this ceasefire period and how well and rapidly it can do so, is highly dynamic.
On one hand, the speed and scope of rearming Hezbollah have been radically reduced, while on the other hand, the terror organization is far from running out of options for smuggling in new weapons, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
With Iran potentially imminently receiving several billion dollars as part of its ceasefire deal with the United States – and due to it eventually receiving up to $300 billion, top Israeli officials are extremely worried that Hezbollah could make a comeback even after the battering it has taken over the last almost three years.
The challenges posing a re-arming Hezbollah
First, there are new challenges Hezbollah must face if it wants to rearm.
Before December 8, 2024, the Assad regime allowed Hezbollah-Iran free rein to pass through its territory to smuggle weapons to the Lebanese terror group. Until then, the Post understands, Hezbollah and Iranian operatives could show up anywhere in Syria with a simple slip of paper authorizing them to get through any area to accomplish their smuggling goals. This included large trucks carrying oversized long-range precision missiles and other strategic weapons.
Following the fall of the Assad regime, the new Sunni regime of President Ahmad al-Sharaa decided to chase and hunt down Hezbollah-Iranian Shi’ites daring to attempt smuggling weapons through Syria; thus, the Lebanese terror group lost once open highways and many smuggling routes.
The Post has also learned that Hezbollah has lost much of its large industrial-scale manufacturing capability for weapons both in Syria and in Lebanon.
However, despite Hezbollah being less able to threaten Israel with strategic smuggled weapons, the Post understands that the organization is succeeding at smuggling lower-grade weapons via Syria and through other means – especially since the ceasefires have kicked in.
For example, Hezbollah smugglers can still sneak across portions of the porous Lebanese-Syrian border. This is true for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon since none of the borders are hermetically sealed.
Moreover, the Post understands that there are long-standing historical cross-border smuggling networks in those areas, which carry on no matter who is ruling.
All of this is true even though Israel has directly hit Hezbollah’s special smuggling Unit 4400. The remaining smugglers may be less efficient and talented, but there are still smugglers.
Could the same deal with Lebanon have been sealed on March 16?
Another issue concerns questions about whether Israel could have struck the same deal with Lebanon – that it ended up agreeing to in late June – already as far back as March.
On March 16, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun publicly appealed to Israel to begin negotiations over a ceasefire in which he would place a path toward normalization and peace on the table.
Israeli political officials summarily rejected the offer as “too little too late,” saying they would continue to demolish Hezbollah until it was forced to disarm.
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that Hezbollah is down to 8% of its pre-2023 war 150,000-rocket arsenal, the Post understands that nailing down the exact volume of rockets is complicated, and even that statistic would leave them with well over 10,000 rockets, not to mention a new First-Person-View (FPV) drone fleet.
Cumulatively, this still-large supply of weapons, along with Hezbollah’s remaining forces (Netanyahu has said 9,000 Hezbollah fighters were killed, though pre-war estimates were that it had 30,000 to 50,000 fighters), leaves the Lebanese terror organization as a significant, if weakened, threat.
If Hezbollah is not beaten and is not agreeing to disarm, even in July, what was the point of delaying cutting a deal with the Lebanese government for around three months when it could have been sealed in mid-March?
There is a debate on this issue, but at least those in the Israeli political and defense establishment who believe continuing the war was worth it defend their position as follows:
The view would be that Aoun was ready for a deal but under very different conditions, and even if Hezbollah is far from beaten, the Hezbollah of March of this year still posed a much greater threat than what is left of Hezbollah today. Israelis also viewed Aoun’s March offer as framed around a full withdrawal as an opening condition.
In contrast, the late June deal flips the burden onto the Lebanese Armed Forces, starting with partial IDF withdrawals from only two locations in favor of LAF presence, in order to check that Hezbollah is kept out, before the IDF undertakes additional withdrawals, the Post has learned.
Officials view this change in emphasis as making the late June Lebanon deal into the antithesis of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Iran, in which the Islamic Republic did not commit to very much upfront – at most, possibly informally, to nuclear concessions at the tail end of the deal.
Also, the Post understands that part of the purpose of continuing the war was to further separate (or return the separation between) Iran and Lebanese fronts.
It is unclear whether this separation has been achieved in light of Iran succeeding at least twice in pressuring US President Donald Trump into pushing Israel to restrain itself in the face of Hezbollah attacks, but there is some optimism that the signing of the Lebanon deal under new circumstances may achieve the separation.
Israeli officials feel positive about the military campaign and consider Israel’s position vs Hezbollah strengthened both after the 2024 war and after March of this year.
Still, the Post understands that officials believe that the next step must be an extended campaign to prevent Hezbollah from rearming – and that there is heavy skepticism about how successful this process could be.
Why should Israeli officials trust the LAF to enforce keeping Hezbollah and its weapons out of areas where it commits to do so, when history has consistently shown the Lebanese military to be ineffective?
In fact, the Post has learned that the LAF warns Hezbollah before they inspect many areas so the terror group can move its weapons elsewhere.
There are concerns that the Lebanese army will give fake answers about progress and that the Americans may accept these poor excuses.
Many Israeli officials do not want to discuss what could happen if Trump wants Israel to withdraw from additional sections of Lebanon sooner than conditions on the ground would justify – in order to advance other goals, such as keeping his Iran deal on track.
But even if such a scenario plays out at some point, Israel’s 2026 invasion and clearing out of Hezbollah weapons from increased sections of southern Lebanon since March, added to the clearing job it did in the fall of 2024, will have heavily delayed, by a period of years, any future potential capability of Hezbollah’s to invade northern Israel All of this comes after the lessons of October 7 have shown that had Hezbollah’s Radwan special forces invaded northern Israel when Hamas invaded the South, they could have caused as much as 10 times more harm, in the view of some officials.
France, Trump, and the lessons of Hezbollah's drone threat
One additional factor – which no Israeli officials are mentioning now, though some alluded to it in mid-March when rejecting the Lebanese offer for negotiations toward normalization – could also have depended on which third-party country was moderating.
At the time, France was co-sponsoring the talks.
Israel lost trust in France in the fall of 2025 when Paris led a group of countries in recognizing a Palestinian state. France also attempted to get Israel to end the 2024 war against Hezbollah before the IDF’s beeper operations and other 2024 successes.
In contrast, the most recent talks were sponsored by Trump, whom Israel currently views as its closest global ally.
Regarding FPV, while Israeli officials mourn the many soldiers who were wounded – and the smaller number who were killed – by these drones when the war extended beyond March, most still do not view them as a strategic threat.
A strange theme repeatedly echoed by Israeli political and defense officials is that they were taken by surprise regarding the FPV drone threat since Hezbollah did not use these fiber-cable-based drones – which are impervious to GPS jamming – during the war in the fall of 2024.
The Post has pressed numerous such Israeli officials on this point since the FPV drones appeared in Ukraine a couple of years ago, which in the current globalized state of information should have led Israel to realize that eventually, the same threat would pop up from Hezbollah.
No Israeli official has really given a strong answer to this last question, though some have said that they expected it would take Hezbollah longer to adopt such a new type of weapon.
In any event, officials say that while Hezbollah still lacks the capacity to mass-produce such drones, if the IDF does not block future production, they could emerge as a strategic threat if their volume increases to thousands.