Hezbollah still has the capacity to rebuild its military forces, analysts told US politicians on Tuesday, warning that the Iran-backed group’s power rests on deep political and financial networks inside Lebanon.
More than a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which largely ended with a November 2024 ceasefire, badly weakened the group.
The government has begun implementing a plan to disarm it starting in the south, one of its main traditional strongholds.
In January,Lebanon's army said it had completed the first phase of its plan to disarm Hezbollah, covering the area south of the Litani river, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the Israeli border.
“Hezbollah is not sustained by weapons alone. It survives through an economic and political ecosystem that protects cash flows, penetrates state institutions and enables military rebuilding," Hanin Ghaddar, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, told the House of Representatives foreign relations committee.
"Even in a best-case scenario where Hezbollah were to surrender all its weapons tomorrow, the group would still retain the capacity to rebuild from scratch.
“As long as its ties to Iran remain intact, and as long as its ecosystem of power endures, Hezbollah will survive, regenerate and rearm.”
Ms Ghaddar said the Iran-backed group is operating in “survival mode” after severe losses and has redirected its efforts towards protecting the financial and political systems that “generate money and immunity”.
Central to that effort is Lebanon’s expanding cash-based economy, which emerged after the country’s banking sector collapsed in 2020.
“This transformation has fundamentally altered the counter-terrorism landscape,” Ms Ghaddar said. “Cash is harder to trace, easier to launder and far more difficult to regulate than the formal banking system Hezbollah once relied on. Hezbollah and Iran have fully exploited this environment.”
David Schenker, former US assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told the committee that Hezbollah thrives amid Lebanon's financial crisis and benefits from the “state's systemic corruption”.
“Economic and political reforms are urgently required to restore confidence in the banks and curtail the cash economy,” Mr Schenker added.
According to the US Treasury, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' foreign operations arm, the Quds Force, has transferred more than $1 billion to Hezbollah since January 2025.
“Regime change in Iran would change everything in Lebanon,” Mr Schenker said. He said that without the ideological, financial and military support of Tehran, Hezbollah would be cut down to size.
“Without this regime, Hezbollah wouldn't disappear, but it would wither on the vine," he said.
Lebanon’s army chief, Gen Rodolphe Haykal, is in Washington seeking support for the Lebanese Armed Forces’ plans for the second phase of the 2024 ceasefire with Israel.
US officials want the Lebanese Armed Forces to begin disarming Hezbollah north of the Litani River, but Mr Schenker said the military still has not established full control of the country's south.
“They are present, but they are not in control,” he said, urging Washington to make aid delivery depend on clear benchmarks and timelines.
“Lebanon has a tendency to kick the can down the road, defer difficult decisions … they did so with disarmament in the south. I fear they will do so in the north.
"And every day, Hezbollah continues to its attempts to rearm. It's necessary to have some sort of timeline of benchmarks with this.”
