Analysis

Intimidations, threats, assassinations: How Hezbollah suppresses dissent inside Lebanon

As tensions escalate, a recent poll finds that trust in the Iran-backed group is below 10% among non-Shiites. Dissidents who dare express criticism can pay a heavy price

Gianluca Pacchiani
By Gianluca Pacchiani 3 August 2024, 5:53 am Edit

Gianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel

Hezbollah fighters chant slogans as they attend the funeral procession of senior Hezbollah commander Wissam Tawil, during his funeral procession in the village of Khirbet Selm, south Lebanon, Jan. 9, 2024 (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Hezbollah fighters chant slogans as they attend the funeral procession of senior Hezbollah commander Wissam Tawil, during his funeral procession in the village of Khirbet Selm, south Lebanon, Jan. 9, 2024 (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

At Thursday’s funeral ceremony for Hezbollah’s top military commander Fuad Shukr, assassinated by Israel on Tuesday evening in response to Saturday’s bloody Majdal Shams attack, the terror group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened that the confrontation with the Jewish State had “entered a new phase” and promised a further escalation in the following days.

“Israelis are happy now,” Nasrallah said, “but they will cry later. They have crossed a red line” and must now expect “rage and revenge on all the fronts supporting Gaza,” in reference to the Iran-backed “axis of resistance” spanning the Middle East.

Hezbollah, which entered a military confrontation with Israel on October 8 in support of Hamas, is now “beyond the support phase,” Nasrallah added, declaring an “open battle on all fronts.”

He appeared to be utterly insouciant to how an all-out war would impact Lebanon, plagued by years of economic crisis and political instability. He would be in the minority.

“There is a great deal of concern in Lebanon about Hezbollah dragging the whole country into another disastrous war,” said David Schenker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, in a phone interview with The Times of Israel.

However, those who dare to raise their voice in opposition to the Shiite group’s belligerence find themselves silenced in often violent ways.

Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s most senior military commander (left), who was killed in an Israeli strike on Beirut on July 30, 2024, is seen with Hassan Nasrallah (right) in an undated photo. (Hezbollah media office)

‘In Lebanon, having an opinion is a crime,’ says dissident

On June 18, Lebanese journalist Rami Naim, a vocal Hezbollah opponent, was assaulted in broad daylight by about 20 men in a Starbucks in Verdun, an upscale Beirut neighborhood. Naim published a video of the aggression on X, where one of the assailants can be seen pointing a gun at his back.

In a video he posted on Instagram, Naim said that one of the mobsters told him, “We will kill anyone who talks about Hezbollah.”

“My great crime is having a stance against Hezbollah. In Lebanon, having an opinion is a crime,” he added. The terror group, contacted by the Lebanese daily L’Orient Today, denied any role in the aggression, however, the modus operandi suggested that the Shiite terror group was behind it.

“Hezbollah has clear red lines. And once a player in the opposition crosses them, they are ‘paid a visit,’” said Col. (Ret.) Sarit Zehavi, founder of the Alma Center, an Israeli research institute focused on the security challenges in the north.

“It doesn’t matter if they are Druze, Christians or Muslims, including Shiites. They [Hezbollah] threaten anybody who is against them, and sometimes murder them. And this has also happened during the ongoing war. Many have had to leave the country,” Zehavi told The Times of Israel.

“As a result, we don’t see this opposition having the capability to stand up against Hezbollah,” she said.

Rare resistance

In recent months, a few isolated episodes have been reported of effective resistance against the terror group’s hijacking of Lebanon’s territory. In March, residents of the Christian frontier village of Rmaych chased out Hezbollah operatives who intended to exploit its location a few hundred yards from the border with Israel to fire rockets. The local church rang its bell as a rallying cry for residents.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Father Najib al-Ami, a 73-year-old priest from Rmaych, said that militants from the terror group entered the village twice, set up Katyusha rocket batteries, and fired them into Israel. After an Israeli jet bombed a house in Rmaych seized by Hezbollah last December, al-Amil sent the terror group a message saying it was not welcome.

Rmaych’s ability to deflect Hezbollah is not unprecedented. In a similar episode in 2021, residents of the Druze village of Chouya halted a Hezbollah crew that had entered it with rocket launchers and detained its members until the Lebanese army arrived.

The ‘intimidation factor’

Since it opened war against Israel on October 8, however, Hezbollah has become bolder in repressing any popular criticism, by intimidating its opponents with violence or through character assassination.

“In the past, Lebanese citizens from all parties took to the streets to protest against the government,” said Zehavi. For instance, in October 2019, hundreds of thousands rallied to demand the scrapping of a proposed tax on calls via WhatsApp, and to protest the country’s endemic corruption and deteriorating economic situation.

But since Hezbollah opened a war front against Israel on October 8, Lebanese citizens have not dared to take to the streets to demand an end to the clashes on the southern border, which have caused the displacement of 80,000 people — who, unlike in Israel, do not receive government-sponsored accommodation — and gravely affected the tourism sector and exacerbated the economic crisis.

Lebanese demonstrators wave national flags as they take part in a rally in the capital Beirut’s downtown district on October 20, 2019. (Patrick Baz/AFP)

“People are afraid to speak up publicly. You see a lot of activity on social media, but it’s not enough,” said Zehavi.

“It’s hard to coalesce an opposition to Hezbollah, because of the intimidation factor,” concurred Schenker. “Hezbollah intimidates and ultimately murders its political opponents.”

Schenker said there are those from all religious groups — Sunni, Shiite, Christian, Druze — who don’t want to be dragged into another disastrous war by Hezbollah.

“The last conflict with Israel in 2006 cost billions of dollars to the Lebanese economy and impacted the whole country,” said Schenker, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute.

“It’s harder to argue against the war now because Hezbollah portrays its attacks as a defense of the Palestinians, and still, there are a lot of people who accuse Hezbollah of being a tool of Iran in Lebanon. But it’s a dangerous thing to do,” he added.

Scant support for Hezbollah

An Arab Barometer survey conducted between February and April and published three weeks ago revealed relatively scant support for the Iranian proxy among the Lebanese population. Only 30 percent of respondents said they have “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of trust in Hezbollah, whereas 55% said they have “no trust at all.”

Results vary widely between sects. Among the Shiite population, 85% said they deeply trust Hezbollah, but a mere nine percent of Sunnis and Druze, and only six percent of Christians, said they do.

Since the last Arab Barometer Lebanon survey in 2022, trust in Hezbollah has risen among Shiites by seven points, but has remained unchanged among the other three religious groups.

Shiite support for the Iran-backed group is not entirely ideological, Schenker noted, as many members of the minority have become increasingly reliant on Hezbollah’s financial institutions or banking, social welfare, and employment in the deteriorating financial crisis.

Even among Shiites, many have a negative view of the terror group’s loyalty to the Tehran regime in lieu of the Lebanese state.

For years, Shiite dissent was embodied by Lokman Slim, an outspoken activist who had managed to assemble a group of Shiite intellectuals, businessmen and academics opposed to the Party of God. He was assassinated in South Lebanon in February 2021. Many, including his own family, accused Hezbollah of the murder, a claim that the group denied.

Body of Lokman Slim, a longtime Shiite political activist and researcher, who has been found dead in his car, lies on the ground as Lebanese security forces inspect the scene in Addoussieh village, in the southern province of Nabatiyeh, Lebanon, February 4, 2021. (AP/Mohammed Zaatari)

Hi-tech surveillance of virtual opposition

Today, besides a few brave candidates in local elections, political opposition to Hezbollah has mostly moved online, Schenker said, as opponents open social media groups where they can express criticism of the Iran-backed militia more safely.

Hezbollah, however, has managed to turn the virtual world into another battlefield against its critics.

In November, various Lebanese journalists were targeted by Hezbollah’s “social media army” on various platforms, and accused of collaborating with Israel, after they criticized the terror group for provoking an IDF attack in southern Lebanon that killed a woman and three girls, according to a report by the Alma center.

The journalists were targeted by trolls who shared their photos with blood smears and a Star of David, with the comment “assisting the slaughter of children.” They received hate messages and death threats.

To track its critics, Hezbollah is said to maintain a sophisticated electronic unit named SIMIA, which employs about a hundred operatives and runs an army of bots with thousands of fake accounts with which it floods the internet with favorable content.

According to a February report by the Alma Center, the unit is responsible for online offensives against Hezbollah’s rivals and possesses “broad capabilities, such as locating and labeling articles, comments, posts, and social media profiles that are deemed critical of the group or its leaders.”

Furthermore, the electronic army “uses social media to launch smear campaigns against the organization’s critics and opponents,” the report adds. Thereby, Hezbollah manages to restrict voices that oppose or criticize it and its leader Nasrallah.

An image grab taken from Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV on August 1, 2024, shows Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah giving a televised address from an undisclosed location in Lebanon, broadcast at top commander Fuad Shukr’s funeral ceremony. Shukr’s picture is on the screen behind him. (Al-Manar/AFP)

For example, “if a photo or the words Hezbollah or Nasrallah appear in an article that represents them adversely, the electronic army flags it and takes action to remove it, even by means of a cyberattack,” the Alma Center wrote.

The report also found that for the past decade, Hezbollah’s electronic army has run training camps in Beirut for foreign social media trolls, who come from throughout the Middle East to learn how to spread disinformation and instill fear and division in the region.

Pundits note that the existence of the “electronic army” is further evidence of how Hezbollah has accumulated enormous resources to carry out its destructive mission against Israel on behalf of Iran, hijacking the whole country in the process.

“The state is no longer sovereign in Lebanon,” Schenker said. “Everybody knows Hezbollah is now the decider.”

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