Sunday marks two years since the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's longtime secretary-general. Two years on, it is time to address a legacy Hezbollah finds far less comfortable to discuss – the Nakba of the Shiites in South Lebanon, and the responsibility of the organization that vowed to protect them.
For more than three decades, Nasrallah tied Hezbollah's weapons to the defense of Lebanon, and especially of the south. After the 2006 war, when the question of disarming the organization resurfaced, he asked who would defend Lebanon if Israel attacked. Could the Lebanese army do it? Would UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) protect it? He presented the weapons of "the resistance" as part of a force meant to "defend Lebanon," and justified his men's continued presence in the south as their right to "defend our land."
That was one of the great promises of the Nasrallah era, that the weapons were meant to protect. But Nasrallah is now gone, and it is precisely the community on whose land the "resistance" project was built that has been left to pay an enormous share of the toll, in destroyed villages, demolished homes, uprooted families and a south struggling to rebuild. The question now is no longer only who the weapons were supposed to protect them from, but also who protected the Shiites from the price of Hezbollah's own decisions.
On October 8, 2023, Hezbollah decided to open a front against Israel in the name of solidarity with Gaza. That was not a decision made by the Lebanese government or its army. Among those who paid the price were the residents of southern Lebanon. In the campaign that resumed in March 2026, masses of Shiites again found themselves displaced from their homes, once more as a result of a military decision they had no part in making.
Israel is responsible for its strikes and for the destruction it caused in Lebanon. But that responsibility does not absolve Hezbollah from answering why it repeatedly turned Shiite villages into a front in wars that extend beyond Lebanon's borders.
"Zero and nothing"
Sheikh Mohammad al-Hajj Hassan (a Lebanese Shiite cleric who heads the "Free Shiite Current," already defined the community's situation in 2024 as a "real Nakba." Asked what Hezbollah's weapons had given him "as a Shiite and as a Lebanese," he replied, "The result is zero, and nothing."
A Shiite activist from the south wrote bluntly on X, that for years Hezbollah faced a choice between investing in its people, in agriculture and in infrastructure, or investing in tunnels and wars. "They chose to dig beneath the ground instead of building above it."
These are not the voices of people unfamiliar with the south. They are voices from within Shiite society itself, seeking to reckon with the price the community paid in the name of its own defense. This does not mean that all Shiites oppose Hezbollah; the organization still commands significant support. But that support does not grant it ownership over the community, nor does it absolve it of responsibility for its fate.
Two years after Nasrallah, it is time to stop talking about the Shiites and about Hezbollah as though they were one and the same body. The Shiites did not bring the catastrophe of South Lebanon upon themselves. Hezbollah made the decisions, and they were the ones required to pay the price.
