Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was likely expecting a relatively quiet week. In fact, he wasn’t planning on speaking until October 7, the anniversary of the murderous rampage launched against southern Israel by his group’s Gaza-based allies. On August 25, Hezbollah claimed to have successfully avenged Israel’s assassination of Fuad Shukr almost a month prior, and in the intervening weeks, its propaganda organs were busy churning out fantastical tales of massive numbers of casualties inflicted upon the Israelis. With the Shukr file thus closed, Hezbollah expected to resume its post-October 8, 2023, routine and that the tempo of fighting with Israel would remain within this war of attrition’s established rules of engagement.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon at approximately 4:45 pm, thousands of beepers possessed by Hezbollah operatives began exploding—leaving a dozen dead and thousands more wounded, hundreds of them critically. Nasrallah was suddenly scheduled to speak on Thursday. But before that, another round of explosions, this time targeting walkie-talkies, killed another 25 of the group’s members and wounded another 450.

When a subdued Nasrallah finally took to the air on Thursday evening, he was confronted with an uphill task of damage control. Not only had the Israelis inflicted physical damage upon the organization and disrupted its communications, but they had demonstrated the extent of their intelligence’s penetration of Hezbollah, sowed fear among its members and supporters, and publicly humiliated the group.

Given the scale and very public nature of the telecommunications attack, Nasrallah couldn’t credibly deny the Israeli accomplishment. The first component of his speech centered on reframing the attack to suit Hezbollah’s narratives. Focusing on Israel’s alleged intentions, Nasrallah thus tried to bury Israel’s success in a narrative of ‘Israeli bloodlust.’ No longer was this a precise attack on Hezbollah’s members by detonating their communications devices and no one else’s. Instead, he claimed it was a further demonstration of Israel’s ‘murderous’ and ‘criminal’ nature. 

“The Israeli enemy,” Nasrallah said, had “intended to kill, over the course of two days—in one minute on Tuesday and one minute on Wednesday—wanted to kill no fewer than five thousand human beings, without regard for any limit.” Israel’s operation was a “huge terrorist attack, genocide, a massacre,” he said.

Nasrallah then reframed this precise Israeli attack on Hezbollah into an indiscriminate attack on all Lebanese people. Israel was not only hitting “Hezbollah’s men and fighters,” he said; it was also “targeting this entire [civilian] environment in which they are located.” Nasrallah stressed that many of the devices detonated in civilian areas without addressing why his group’s members were so enmeshed among civilians during a time of war and aware of being in Israel’s crosshairs. He then tried to frame Israel as a collective threat—not just to all Lebanese, but all humanity—by stressing that the Israeli method of attack was “a civilian device used by large swathes of the public, not just here but around the world.” Nasrallah intended to create a linkage of fate and a sense of solidarity between the Lebanese public and Hezbollah.

Nasrallah then admitted that Hezbollah had suffered a “historically unprecedented” blow, conceding, for the second speech in a row, Israel’s conventional military superiority—this time, in technological warfare. But then he immediately began to downplay both Israel’s success and its edge.

Israel’s technological prowess, he said, owed not to its efforts alone but to being “supported by the American, the West, NATO, and all the powers that possess the most advanced technology and technological abilities.” In contrast, even though Hezbollah relied on “effort, jihad, sacrifices, time, attrition, and gradual accumulation of victory,” it had nonetheless “emerged victorious until now.” Moreover, despite Israel’s alleged intent to commit mass murder, both divine providence and Lebanese solidarity had “largely blunted” the attack’s impact to where “many of the injuries were superficial.” And in any case, he later stressed, high-ranking Hezbollah members weren’t carrying the new pagers, so only low-level operatives had been killed or harmed.

Then, in the second component of his speech, Nasrallah sought to restore Hezbollah’s battered reputation. The organization, he assured his viewers, was in control of the situation and had formed an internal “specialized, technical, and security” investigation committee to determine “what happened, how it happened” and stated Hezbollah would reach these determinations “shortly.”  In any case, what happened, Nasrallah claimed not altogether inaccurately, was part of “the nature of war throughout history […] one day we score a hit against our enemy, and one day they score a hit against us.” He also stressed that Hezbollah had not suffered any confusion or disarray during the dual attacks “for even a single second at all.”

Then, the genuine spin started. Israel decided to go this far, Nasrallah claimed, because of its failure in the real battle, “the Lebanese support front that opened on October 8 and continues until today.” With this verbal sleight of hand, he redirected his audience’s attention from the blow suffered by the organization to Hezbollah’s accomplishments—real and fictional—against Israel over the past year. Nasrallah reiterated the organization’s achievements on the battlefield but did so by relying on a long-worn method often used by him and Hezbollah’s propaganda organs. He employed partial quotes, misquotes, or only the most pessimistic quotes from Hebrew media to present an image to his followers that the Israelis themselves were conceding total failure and defeat:

When the former deputy [IDF] Chief of Staff describes the situation in the north […] as a historic defeat […] when others say Hezbollah has doubtlessly scored strategic victories in the north, they [i.e. the Israelis] speak of strategic accomplishments, a historic defeat [for Israel], that they have lost the north, of the security zone inside the Entity and Occupied Palestine on the northern border for the first time in 75 years, of the size of the displacement, the economic loses in manufacturing, agriculture, and tourism in the north, the war of attrition, the attrition of the army…their inability to withdraw forces from the north despite moving forces from Gaza and the West Bank, because they face a real threat and front in the north…the outcry of the residents of the north…this [front] has been one of the most important pressure points on the Enemy’s Entity during this battle.

After seeking to frame the Israeli telecom operation as stemming from failure, Nasrallah explained that it had also resulted in failure. All of Israel’s efforts over the past 11 months, he said—including the latest attacks—were meant to silence Hezbollah’s guns. That would not happen, Nasrallah stated:

We say to Netanyahu, Galant […] to the enemy’s government, army, and society, that the Lebanon front will not stop before the end of the aggression on Gaza […] we say this after these two major blows […] no matter the sacrifices, repercussions, possibilities, or horizon to which the region will head, the Resistance in Lebanon will not stop supporting the oppressed people of Gaza and the West Bank in that holy land.

In the final component of his speech, Nasrallah had to demonstrate that Hezbollah continues to possess the upper hand in the ongoing battle with Israel—and overall. Therefore, he addressed the Israeli cabinet’s recent decision to include the safe return of Israel’s northern residents to their homes as a goal of the war. “We always say it’s important to identify and foil the goal, and to defeat the enemy,” he said—lowering the bar for victory so much that, whatever the outcome on the battlefield, Hezbollah can claim to have won. To drive home his point, Nasrallah then issued a challenge to Israel:

To Netanyahu, Galant, and the Enemy’s army and entity—you will be unable to return the residents of the north to the north […] do what you will want, you will fail. I place this grand challenge between us. I reiterate what we’ve said since October 8—the only way is to stop the aggression and war on Gaza and, of course, the West Bank. This is the only way. No other solution—military escalation, killing, assassinations, or full war—will ever succeed in restoring the northern border. In fact, God willing, what you are doing will result in the opposite—more displacement from the north and distancing the chance of their safe return.

In a further attempt to demonstrate Hezbollah’s strength, Nasrallah concluded this portion of his speech by saying he welcomed the threats of IDF Northern Command’s commander to establish a security zone inside Lebanon.

“We hope they enter Lebanese lands […] because on the front, they are in fortified positions […] we consider this an historic opportunity, we wish for it,” he said, because it would make Israeli soldiers and assets easy targets and would give the group its desired opportunity to bombard northern Israel. In fact, Nasrallah claimed rather implausibly, though with his typical rhetorical flair, that the very Hezbollah members wounded in the two device attacks would be the ones to turn a new south Lebanon security zone into “mud, a trap, an ambush, an abyss, and hell for your army.” He ended the speech by cryptically vowing retaliation for the twin attacks.

That night, Israel conducted one of the heaviest aerial bombardments of south Lebanon since October 8. The next day, on September 20, Hezbollah’s Al-Ahed newspaper posted the transcript of Nasrallah’s speech—with all its threats—at 8:46 am. Within hours, the Israelis would carry out an airstrike on Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold, claiming to have killed Ibrahim Aqil—one of Hezbollah’s oldest veterans, member of its Jihad Council, and seniormost commanders—in addition to several other senior Radwan Force commanders who were meeting in an underground parking lot. Israel, it seemed, had accepted Nasrallah’s challenge.

David Daoud is Senior Fellow at at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies where he focuses on Israel, Hezbollah, and Lebanon affairs.

Tags: hezbollah, IDF, Israel, Israel Hezbollah, lebanon, Nasrallah