Understanding Nasrallah’s speech: How will Hezbollah avenge Shukr?

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah spoke for the second time in seven days on August 6, commemorating one week since the assassination of the group’s military commander Fuad Shukr by Israel on July 30. Uncharacteristically calm, Nasrallah devoted much of his speech to covering the Lebanese group’s weaknesses exposed by the assassination and promising to avenge the fallen commander. Like his speech on August 1, this address by Nasrallah also contained hints regarding the form of Hezbollah’s anticipated revenge attack.

Shukr’s killing has put Hezbollah in a bind. The group has been hesitant to provoke Israel since Lebanon’s economy collapsed almost five years ago—recognizing that every altercation could spiral into an undesired conflagration and not wanting to be blamed by the Lebanese for compounding their economic miseries with a war from which the country may not recover. After Hamas spearheaded the October 7, 2023 attack against Israel, however, Hezbollah joined in the next day to support its Gaza-based allies—both expecting a short conflict and feeling secure that their intervention would not spark a war since the Israelis were too preoccupied with operations in the Gaza Strip and restrained by American opposition to the conflict’s expansion into Lebanon. The group split the difference with a war of attrition, as Nasrallah noted in his latest speech that “we have been balancing between the support front [for Gaza] and the conditions in our country.” But as that conflict dragged on, a fatal mistake was inevitable.

That came on July 27, when an errant Hezbollah missile struck a soccer field in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, killing twelve Israeli children. Notwithstanding the group’s ongoing and desperate denials of responsibility, Israel had to exact a painful price on the group by killing Shukr in Hezbollah’s stronghold in the capital, Beirut. This wasn’t the first time the Israelis had assassinated such a high-ranking Hezbollah commander. In 2008, in a joint operation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Israel assassinated Imad Mughniyeh, then Hezbollah’s commander-in-chief and most storied military commander in Damascus, Syria. Eight years later, in 2016, the Israelis eliminated his successor Mustafa Badreddine in Syria.

Either of those assassinations should have also warranted serious responses from Hezbollah. However, both occurred outside of Lebanon, during periods of quiet with Israel and during sensitive periods for the group. Mughniyeh was assassinated amidst a political crisis in Lebanon that began in December 2006—mere months after Hezbollah’s war with Israel that summer—and only ended in May 2008. Meanwhile, Badreddine was killed while Hezbollah was fully engaged in Syria’s civil war, perhaps the most existential battle in the group’s history, and could ill afford to open a second front with a foe as powerful as Israel. Yet Israeli silence in both instances allowed Hezbollah to quietly absorb the blows—even blaming Sunni Islamist militants in the case of Badreddine—and focus on more pressing matters.  

Shukr’s assassination is fundamentally different. The location alone—Beirut—violated a serious red line for the group. Coupled with his stature and the fact that the Israelis claimed the attack amidst an ongoing confrontation, the strike denied Hezbollah an off-ramp. The group must now respond, but a routine retaliation, akin to the ones it has been conducting for killings of lower-level commanders in south Lebanon, will not suffice given Shukr’s stature and the location of his killing. To avoid looking weak and permitting Israel to set the redlines of the conflict, Hezbollah must mount a more severe response—but this risks an escalation the group would prefer to avoid right now. Hence the group’s dilemma.

Enter Nasrallah. True to form over the past five years, the talkative secretary-general sought to cover his group’s exposed vulnerability with propaganda. Highlighting Hezbollah’s very real destructive power—the group has amassed 200,000 projectiles of different levels of sophistication, after all—he inevitably veered into exaggeration by claiming it could wipe out most of northern Israel’s vital infrastructure “in one hour, half an hour.” He also stressed just how much Hezbollah had established an equilibrium of pain with the Israelis. “Airlines stop arriving in Beirut and Tel Aviv, foreigners flee Lebanon and the entity alike, the villagers of the south and the colonizers of northern Palestine are both displaced, their homes are destroyed like our homes, their factories burn like ours, and their people fear just like ours,” Nasrallah said.

He also stressed the need for Hezbollah to have entered the conflict to prevent an Israeli victory over Gaza. If that occurred, Nasrallah claimed, the Israelis would be so emboldened that “there will be no Palestine, there will be no Palestinian people, there will be no Palestinian refugees—meaning they will be naturalized—and there will be no holy sites [in Jerusalem],” he claimed, stressing that both “Al-Aqsa Mosque will be in grave danger” of being brought down “by one bomb”—as would the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Then he vacillated between talking points from this conflict. Nasrallah’s oft-repeated claim is that the Israeli army, which defeated several Arab armies in mere days, had become too weak to defeat Hamas over months, overlooking the differences in Israeli objectives and the added complexity of defeating a guerilla organization embedded in civilian areas. Namely, that Israel was “standing on a leg and a half” in anticipation of Hezbollah’s retaliation—and that “this Israeli anticipation for a week is part of the punishment, response, and battle, because the battle is psychological, one of morale and nerves and brains, [not just] weapons and blood.”

Here, Nasrallah was harking back to the last time the Israelis had flagrantly violated a Hezbollah redline by killing one of their fighters, Ali Kamel Mohsen, in Damascus in July 2020. “If you kill our fighters in Syria, we will kill you from Lebanon,” Nasrallah had thundered in August 2019. But when Mohsen was killed, with the COVID-19 pandemic further burdening Lebanon’s battered economy—which had practically imploded in October 2019—Hezbollah failed to act on its threats, quickly covering up their inaction by claiming that Israel’s fear of a response was, in and of itself, the punishment for Mohsen’s death.

But propaganda alone will not suffice now. Hezbollah will have to respond, and their responsibility must be obvious. Nasrallah promised—in his August 1 speech as with his last—that “our response is coming, God willing…precious blood [has been shed], and the resistance cannot, no matter the consequences, remain idle….our response will be strong, impactful, and effective,” without elaborating more.

It is quite possible the Israelis have crossed one of Hezbollah’s irreversible redlines, and the group, either alongside the rest of the Iran-backed Resistance Axis or separately, has decided to go to war or to undertake a retaliatory response that bears a high chance of leading to war—“no matter the consequences” for Lebanon. Nasrallah certainly hinted at that in his speech, both by detailing the alleged threat posed to the region by an Israeli victory in Gaza and by stressing, “No one can ask, in Lebanon or outside, that we deal with the aggression that happened last Tuesday [i.e., Shukr’s assassination] as if it was an ordinary aggression as part of the battle ongoing for ten months.”

But it’s likelier that Hezbollah is planning a more limited response. It’s not that the group does not desire a full war with Israel, one it hopes will bring about the Jewish state’s destruction, but it seeks to wage that war under optimal conditions that maximize its chances of success: when its arsenal is stronger and larger, Lebanon’s domestic conditions have improved, its regional partners are similarly positioned, and—preferably—when Iran can provide them with a nuclear umbrella. Indeed, Nasrallah indicated these conditions had not ripened by noting, “the objective of the current battle is not destroying Israel, but denying it victory and the ability to destroy the Palestinian resistance.” This was echoed the same day by Ibrahim al-Amine, Nasrallah insider and editor-in-chief of the secular left-leaning pro-Hezbollah daily Al-Akhbar. Al-Amine wrote that, whatever the nature of the retaliation against Israel, its effect on the central goal of the ongoing battle—“stopping the aggression against Gaza”—will remain the core consideration.

Therefore, Hezbollah and the Resistance Axis will not likely undertake any action that would complicate achieving a ceasefire in Gaza, the surest and quickest way to halt the Israeli campaign there.

Hezbollah could be planning a one-time, intense, individual retaliation. This would be the riskiest option for the group. It would carefully have to thread the needle between a retaliatory attack sufficiently painful to settle the score for Shukr while remaining below the threshold, which could lead to a spiral of escalation. Alternatively, the group could plan to participate in a one-time retaliatory strike alongside Iran and the remainder of the Resistance Axis. This would be more advantageous for Hezbollah, allowing the group to strike Israel with more intensity in that one instance but leaving it less exposed to individual consequences by blending its attack into the rest of the Resistance Axis retaliation.

Hezbollah could also be planning to overall permanently escalate the intensity, frequency, and depth of its attacks against Israel—but keep them limited below the threshold that would justify war. This could occur only on the Lebanon front or across all “support fronts” opened by the Resistance Axis.

David Daoud is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow him on X: @DavidADaoud.

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Image: Supporters listen to a speech of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah via a video, during a commemorative ceremony marking the first week since the killing of Hezbollah’s top commander Fuad Shukr, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon August 6, 2024. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis