Hezbollah said to estimate up to 4,000 fighters killed in war it initiated
Tally cited by sources close to terror group – which began attacking Israel day after Hamas’s invasion – roughly matches IDF info, points to far lower proportion of civilian deaths than in Gaza
Hezbollah believes the number of its fighters killed by Israel in the last year could be as high as 4,000, sources said this week, as the terror group sought to begin the process of burying its dead and regrouping following an agreed-to halt in hostilities.
Three sources familiar with the operations of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terror group that avowedly seeks Israel’s destruction, told Reuters the group thinks several thousand were killed in the 14 months since Israel began retaliating for the terror group’s relentless cross-border fire since October 8, 2023, the vast majority of them during the last two months of intensified fighting. The sources cited previously unreported internal estimates.
Hezbollah, unprovoked, began firing into Israel the day after Palestinian terror group Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught in southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, and its relentless attacks have forced the displacement of some 60,000 residents of northern Israel.
The sources’ estimate far outstrips tallies published by the group, but hews close to Israel’s announced figure and could provide a window into the extent to which Israel was able to damage the powerful Iranian proxy, which saw its leadership largely decapitated and its rocket arsenal significantly depleted, according to authorities.
The figure could also point to a relatively low toll for noncombatants killed in the fighting, in stark contrast to the high civilian toll claimed in Gaza.
According to figures published by the Lebanese health ministry Tuesday, 3,823 people were killed in Israeli actions since October 8, 2023, a figure that did not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
According to one source, the Iran-backed group may have lost up to 4,000 people — well over 10 times the number killed in its monthlong 2006 war with Israel.
The IDF has estimated that Israeli forces killed some 3,000 Hezbollah operatives. Around 100 members of other terror groups have also been reported killed in Lebanon.
From October 2023 until September 2024, Hezbollah named 521 members who were killed by Israel amid the fighting, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria where Hezbollah maintains a supply route of weapons from patron Iran.
Once Israel launched an intensified campaign against Hezbollah in late September, the group stopped providing consistent updates.
The group’s since-slain leader Hassan Nasrallah had boasted of having 100,000 fighters at his disposal, but the actual number is thought to have been between 25,000 and 50,000.
According to Israeli military officials, the group’s formidable rocket array has been reduced to 20% of its former size and its drone corps is down to 30% of its prewar presence.
Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel since October 2023 have resulted in the deaths of 45 civilians. In addition, 76 IDF soldiers and reservists have died in cross-border skirmishes, attacks on Israel, and in the ensuing ground operation launched in southern Lebanon in late September.
Israel significantly intensified its retaliatory strikes in September after roughly a year of near-daily Hezbollah cross-border rocket and drone attacks, which the Lebanese terror group began hours after allied Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel.
The Israeli airstrikes killed almost all of Hezbollah’s military and political leaders and preceded a ground invasion that dismantled much of the terror group’s infrastructure throughout southern Lebanon.
The offensive was launched with the aim of securing the return home of 60,000 people evacuated from homes in the north of Israel due to the Hezbollah attacks and concerns it would carry out an invasion similar to the Hamas onslaught from the Gaza Strip on southern Israel. In that attack, 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken as hostages to Gaza.
According to Lebanese health authorities, the death toll in the fighting includes 717 women and 243 minors, the vast majority of whom are assumed to have been civilians.
In Gaza, where health authorities are controlled by Hamas, officials say more than 42,000 people have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
Israel says it has killed some 18,000 combatants in battle and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
Israel has come under heavy international pressure due to the high alleged Gaza civilian death toll, but insists it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities.
It stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Though Israel has similarly accused Hezbollah of using border villages to store weapons and stage attacks on Israel, many Lebanese were able to flee the fighting to areas further north. In Gaza, the cramped conditions have kept civilians close to the fighting even though Israel has set up humanitarian safe zones. Israel has also accused Hamas of embedding fighters and weapons within, or very close to, the safe zones.
Hezbollah is “extremely weak” at this moment, both militarily and politically, a senior US official said.
A Western diplomat echoed that assessment, saying Israel had the upper hand and had almost dictated the terms of its withdrawal.
With a ceasefire taking hold on Wednesday, Hezbollah’s agenda includes working to reestablish its organizational structure fully, probing security breaches that helped Israel land so many painful blows, and reviewing the last year including its mistakes in underestimating Israel’s technological capabilities, three other sources familiar with the group’s thinking said.
The group emerges from the fighting shaken from top to bottom, its leadership still reeling from the killing of its leader Nasrallah and its supporters made homeless en masse by the bombing of Hezbollah sites in Beirut’s southern suburbs and the destruction of entire villages in the south where Hezbollah had dug in to attack across the border and fight against invading Israeli ground forces.
Over 1.4 million people — nearly a quarter of Lebanon’s population — fled their homes since Hezbollah initiated hostilities against Israel on October 8, 2023, according to recent figures published by the UN quoting Lebanese government data.
The World Bank, in a preliminary estimate, put the cost of damage and losses to Lebanon at $8.5 billion, a bill that cannot be footed by the government, which is still suffering the consequences of a catastrophic financial collapse five years ago. Direct losses in Israel due to thousands of rocket and drone attacks were put at around $1 billion.
Gulf states Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia helped pay Lebanon’s $5 billion reconstruction bill in 2006, the last time Hezbollah and Israel went to war. But there has been no sign that these Sunni-led Arab states are ready to do so again.
Iran, which established Hezbollah in 1982, has promised to help with reconstruction. The costs are immense: The World Bank estimates $2.8 billion in damage to housing alone in Lebanon, with 99,000 homes partially or fully destroyed.
Hezbollah did not immediately respond to a detailed request to comment on this story. Iran’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
