Shimon Sherman
JNS, June 5, 2025
“When combined with the destruction of over 70% of their missile arsenal, by IDF estimates, during Israel’s aerial campaign in the fall of 2024, a very diminished picture of Hezbollah emerges.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi landed at Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport on Tuesday morning in the most high-profile visit by an Iranian official to Lebanon since the November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
The country Araghchi visited in his last diplomatic mission in October 2024 was vastly different than the one he saw on Tuesday.
In October, Lebanon was in the slipping grip of Hezbollah, at that time, still reeling from the Israeli pager bombing operation and the assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
This week, Araghchi saw a country amid a complex transition as the new government under the leadership of President Joseph Aoun seeks to consolidate power and set the new administration on a firm footing.
The unlikely rise of the new Lebanese government can serve as a historic bookend for over 40 years of rising Shia power in Lebanon.
Following extensive investment by Iran, Hezbollah was turned over the decades into a terrorist juggernaut that hung over Israel like a sword of Damocles.
Hezbollah possessed a massive modern missile arsenal, a huge infantry fighting force, a complex tunnel network carved into hard rock, and an international narcotics and smuggling empire. …SOURCE