Exclusive: Inside Hezbollah's decision to attack Israel and Berri's 'break' with the party
Hezbollah’s surprise strike on Israel on Monday did more than reignite a front that had largely lain dormant since the 2024 war. It has set off a sweeping Israeli retaliation, shaken Lebanese public opinion, and thrust the Lebanese state into one of its most consequential confrontations with the group in years.
Hezbollah launched rocket and drone strikes on northern Israel to avenge Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a joint US-Israeli operation on Tehran, and “in defence of Lebanon”.
It was the first time the group claimed responsibility for an attack on Israel since the ceasefire that ended the last war in November 2024.
Israel responded with a broad air campaign on Beirut’s southern suburbs as well as southern and eastern Lebanon. So far, at least 40 people have been killed and 246 wounded, while roads out of the targeted areas have been choked with fleeing families - scenes that recalled the mass displacement of late 2024.
But the deeper shock for the Lebanese came from inside Lebanon.
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In an emergency session that same day, the cabinet went far beyond its customary language of distancing and restraint. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam announced a total ban on Hezbollah’s military and security activities and demanded that the group hand over its weapons. The decisions of war and peace, he said, rest solely with the state.
The government also ordered the army and security agencies to take all necessary measures to prevent rocket or drone launches from Lebanese territory and to arrest violators.
Notably, the government's decision was backed by Nabih Berri, the influential parliament speaker.
Leader of the Amal movement, Lebanon's other major Shia party, Berri has been a longstanding ally to Hezbollah and the move appeared to be a dramatic rupture between the two.
But according to people familiar with his position and Hezbollah’s internal discussions, the story inside the Shia political camp was more complicated.
Challenging the ceasefire terms
According to two sources close to Berri, the speaker and Hezbollah had been in close contact in the hours before the strike, amid a shared conviction that a fresh Israeli assault was increasingly likely.
Berri’s view, the sources said, was that if war was coming anyway, Lebanon should not be the party to hand Israel the public pretext for launching it.
Hezbollah, however, is said to have argued internally that Khamenei’s killing made a response all the more necessary, and that an Israeli escalation was now seen as inevitable whether it acted or remained silent.
The assessment was not entirely disconnected from the party’s public messaging since the ceasefire. Hezbollah's secretary-general, Naim Qassem, said the group would coordinate with the Lebanese army to implement the deal even as he criticised concessions in the negotiations with Israel.
In later speeches, he warned that “missiles would fall” on Israel if it resumed a broad war on Lebanon.
One person close to Hezbollah told MEE: “After the blows it absorbed in the September war, the leadership believed it had to wait for a regional rupture big enough to alter the post-war balance.”
“The attack on Iran was that rupture," the source added.
“Staying out of the war would have made Hezbollah look passive, and it would have missed the chance to challenge the conditions imposed after the ceasefire.”
On Sunday, news reports said Israel was preparing to call up about 100,000 reservists under Operation Roaring Lion against Iran, reinforcing a perception in Lebanon that the conflict could spread beyond a limited border flare‑up.
The next day, Israeli troops moved across the border and occupied areas of south Lebanon.
Sources said Berri, aware that a renewed Israel-Hezbollah conflict was likely, sought to prevent the group from being seen as delivering the first blow, avoiding the political fallout of giving Israel a clear self-defence narrative.
However, Hezbollah believed it had credible intelligence that a major Israeli escalation was coming regardless and decided to act.
A source close to the group said the decision to attack Israel was made 48 hours earlier, with orders sent to units in handwritten messages to evade Israeli interception.
A way out for Berri
The Hezbollah-Amal alliance is a calculated partnership that has formed the core of Lebanon’s “Shia duo” since the end of the civil war in 1990.
Berri has led Amal since 1980 and served as speaker of parliament since 1992, the highest office allocated to a Shia under Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing system.
'Staying out of the war would have made Hezbollah look passive, and it would have missed the chance to challenge the conditions imposed after the ceasefire'
- Source close to Hezbollah
His rise as speaker coincided with Hezbollah’s rise under Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in the last war. Together, the two parties came to dominate the Shia community’s political representation and much of the state’s patronage network.
Even amid tensions, Berri repeatedly acted as Hezbollah’s institutional interlocutor, including during the negotiations that produced the November 2024 ceasefire.
According to people familiar with both Berri’s circle and Hezbollah’s internal thinking, the most politically significant element of the speaker's public support of the decision to ban Hezbollah military activity was not the apparent rupture itself, but the strategic value of appearing to create one.
The narrative that Berri backed the government out of anger over Hezbollah’s move was, in this view, less a genuine break than a politically calibrated posture, one that both sides understood could serve a deeper purpose.
By allowing Berri to appear publicly distanced from Hezbollah at the moment of escalation with Israel, the Shia political camp preserved a fallback line in the event of a worst-case military outcome.
If the confrontation were to end in a devastating blow to Hezbollah, Berri could still position himself as the institutional figure capable of negotiating terms, containing the fallout, and acting as a political safeguard for the Shia community.
Sources say the objective was not to signal a strategic split, but to ensure that even in the bleakest scenario, a military defeat would not cascade into the total political collapse of the sect’s leadership.
A preemptive strike
A source close to Hezbollah said the group believed an Israeli war cabinet meeting was on the verge of taking a major decision against it that same night, based in part on assessments circulating through Lebanese channels.
In that reading, the overnight barrage was not merely retaliatory but also preemptive: a way to force an immediate shift on the ground, clear personnel and civilians from vulnerable areas and blunt the scale of casualties ahead of an anticipated Israeli response.
That calculation helps explain the party’s apparent willingness to absorb the political cost of firing at Israel after months of restraint. It also sheds light on why the government’s decision, while historic, may not have come as a complete surprise within Hezbollah.
For many Lebanese, the latest escalation revived memories of the 66-day war, the devastating final weeks of a cross-border conflict between Hezbollah and Israel that raged since the group began launching attacks in solidarity with Palestinians being killed in Gaza.
Its deadliest day, 23 September 2024, claimed 492 lives, and the two-day toll reached 569, marking one of Lebanon’s bloodiest episodes in decades.
Against this backdrop, people familiar with Hezbollah’s thinking say that while this week’s casualties were severe, they remained below the group’s feared losses from a surprise Israeli assault.
What happens next is likely to determine more than the fate of one military exchange.
The cabinet’s move marks the clearest attempt yet by the Lebanese state to assert a monopoly over military and security matters following Hezbollah’s heavy losses in the last war and against the backdrop of regional upheaval linked to the Iran conflict.
But it also ushers in a volatile new chapter.
Any attempt to turn the cabinet’s decision into action risks confrontation - not just between the state and Hezbollah, but over Lebanon’s future internal balance of power.
For now, the message from Beirut is clear: the old formula, in which Hezbollah chose when to fight while the state managed the fallout, is under direct challenge.
Whether that challenge sparks a genuine internal reordering or triggers a deeper rupture will depend on developments in the days ahead.
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