Over the weekend, Hezbollah held a long-delayed public memorial service to its former chief terrorist, Hassan Nasrallah. The terror network filled a stadium in Beirut nearly five months after the Israeli Defense Forces killed him in an airstrike, that coming after decapitating much of the rest of Hezbollah in Operation Grim Beeper. The IDF also made a surprise appearance at the event, startling Nasrallah's sycophants:

It appears that the terrorists burying Nasrallah were so surprised by the @IDF flyover & dropped the scumbags coffin.

One can only assume that the @khamenei_ir representatives were also scurrying like mice for cover.

😜😜 pic.twitter.com/de1PciBpAV

— Maurice Hirsch, Adv. 🇮🇱 עו''ד מוריס הירש (@MauriceHirsch4) February 23, 2025

In a measure of just how badly Hezbollah has been dominated in the war they insisted on joining, Nasrallah's successor (or successor to his successor, more accurately) spoke at the event .... remotely:

Tens of thousands of mourners flooded Beirut’s largest stadium, where the ceremony began, and packed the surrounding streets. A large procession trailed the late leader’s hearse to a shrine in southern Beirut, erected as his final resting place.

Mourners threw scarves at the hearse which pallbearers touched on Nasrallah’s turban, placed on top of the Hezbollah-draped coffin, and lobbed it back to mourners.

Speaking from a remote location, Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem addressed mourners and vowed to continue down Nasrallah’s path “even if we are all killed.”

Getting killed certainly describes Nasrallah's path. Under his leadership, Israel infiltrated their operations well enough to conduct Operation Grim Beeper. Qassem talks a better game than he plays, although one has to credit Hezbollah leadership with consistency for sending its rank-and-file into potential danger while holing up in a bunker to praise martyrdom at a distance. Profiles in Courage that ain't.

Qassem seems to be talking out of both sides of his mouth in another way. While insisting that what's left of Hezbollah will stay on Nasrallah's path, he's calling for a retreat in southern Lebanon:

Hezbollah has issued internal directives for its operatives who do not live south of the Litani River to vacate the area to allow the Lebanese Armed Forces to assume control over the border region as demanded by the ceasefire with Israel, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing a source close to Hezbollah.

Some Hezbollah units have been totally dismantled after the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, says the source, but others were reconstituted by bringing fighters back from Syria following the fall of deposed president Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The report cites another source who indicates that the Iran-backed terrorist group has lost some 5,000 operatives fighting against Israel since October 7, 2023.

Hezbollah has controlled the sub-Litani region of Lebanon for over 40 years. This was one of Iran's first proxy projects after the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, and neither the French, the Americans, or the UN could dislodge them. Hezbollah was the tip of the spear in the mullahs' war against Israel, and Syria was the only real line of communication to that front. Narallah's decision to go to active war against Israel after October 7 led directly to its decimation, and that led directly to the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and that led directly to the severing of lines of communication from Iran.

That's one hell of a path that Qassem cheered this weekend. Heavy on the hell, by the way.

Now Hezbollah has to retreat from its primary objective and raison d'etre -- to put military pressure on Israel's northern border. That too is an entirely self-inflicted outcome, as the Wall Street Journal makes clear:

Three months after Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire, the damage inflicted by Israel’s armed forces on the Iran-backed Shiite group is becoming clear: Its military has been severely degraded and its finances are strained to the point that it is struggling to meet its commitments to followers.

Hezbollah, designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., has long operated as a vast state-within-a-state in Lebanon, supplying jobs and social services to members. It also pays relatives of Hezbollah fighters killed as well as followers who lose homes or businesses during conflicts. 

But the spiraling bill from its latest war is making many of those payments impossible.

That has dire political consequences for Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the combined pressure of Iran and Syria forced the other Lebanese factions to kowtow to Nasrallah. Now Qassem can't even buy political support any longer in a country that blames Hezbollah and Iran for dragging them into a war that they lost -- badly:

“Hezbollah no longer has the cash to compensate its constituents,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at think tank Chatham House. Loyalty to the group “is likely to wane in the long term when Hezbollah’s constituents realize that it can no longer offer them financial, political, or security benefits.”

This is precisely why Israel began to bomb Hezbollah's bankers in the late stages of the war. Al-Qard Al-Hassan (AQAH), a financial network that laundered Hezbollah's drug ring income as well as Iranian support payments, had controlled subsidies for Shi'ite supporters in Lebanon, and more for direct Hezbollah operatives. In October, the IDF began targeting AQAH locations to destroy Hezbollah's liquidity. The IDF had very good intel on those caches and made sure to destroy as much of their cash and assets as possible. Combined with the fall of Assad and the efforts by a newly incentivized Lebanese government to cut off Iranian cash shipments, Hezbollah now has no money for its fighters, let alone the occupation of the sub-Litani under Israeli military pressure.

The entire Iranian proxy encirclement strategy is collapsing. And that's because the Iranians FA'd once too often, and now are in the FO process. Perhaps they should quit before that process plays itself out fully. 

Update: Now this is interesting ...

The Qatar-based head of Hamas's foreign relations office, Mousa Abu Marzouk, told the Times that he would not have support the attack if he had known about the destruction that was going to be brought on to Gaza. ...

He also noted that it would be "unacceptable" to say that Hamas had won, "especially considering the scale of what Israel inflicted on Gaza."

"We're talking about a party that lost control of itself and took revenge against everything," he said when referring to Israel. "That is not a victory under any circumstances."

He also said that Hamas leadership is willing to negotiate about the group's future weapons in Gaza. "We are ready to speak about every issue," he said. "Any issue that is put on the table, we need to speak about it."

One has to wonder what the Qataris have been saying to the Hamas Billionaire Boys Club in Doha. Probably nothing terribly encouraging, considering what Donald Trump has been telling the Arabs both publicly and privately about what will come soon unless the hostages are all released.