MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Tomorrow, Israel and Lebanon - sworn enemies - will hold their first official talks since 1983. They'll discuss a possible ceasefire in Israel's latest round of fighting with Hezbollah. That's the Iran-backed Lebanese group founded during a previous Israeli invasion. Israel and Hezbollah have fought several wars. NPR's Lauren Frayer reports on how the group has managed to keep rearming after every war and put up a fight against its more powerful neighbor. She begins on the Lebanon-Syria border.
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LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Rugged green hills dotted with limestone boulders, olive and fir trees. But there are well-trodden dirt paths here from Syria into Lebanon. Here's a pickup truck coming across one of them.
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ALI ABU JAFAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FRAYER: In Lebanon's capital, a man named Ali Abu Jafar tells me some of the trucks I saw on that border entering Lebanon from Syria may be carrying weapons. And he says he knows this...
And what is your profession?
ABU JAFAR: (Through interpreter) Smuggling.
FRAYER: ...Because he's a smuggler who works there himself. When the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad fell in 2024, Hezbollah's own leader, Naim Qassem, lamented his group's main supply route across Syria was cut off. But Abu Jafar says the opposite happened.
ABU JAFAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FRAYER: He says 90% of the collapsed Syrian regime's arms flowed into Lebanon. A year and a half later, weapons are still coming across, he says, from Iran and other sources.
ABU JAFAR: (Non-English language spoken).
FRAYER: He rattles off the names of Russian-made guns and antitank weapons, which Hezbollah uses against Israeli troops inside Lebanon. Israeli airstrikes have targeted these smuggling routes, but with mixed results.
ADAM CHAMSEDDINE: It's not as it used to be before, for sure, but it hasn't been completely dismantled.
FRAYER: Adam Chamseddine is a senior policy adviser at the Alternative Policy Institute, a Beirut-based think tank. He says Hezbollah has also been manufacturing more weapons domestically in secret underground facilities.
CHAMSEDDINE: Yeah, we're talking about facilities that cannot be penetrated by explosives because they're so deep. We're talking about caves, huge underground natural facilities. What the Israelis were able to do in the last war is to dismantle the entrances and the exits of some of the facilities.
FRAYER: But the bulk of their underground structures were intact and are now back in operation, he says. Some make single-use rocket launchers from concrete and wood, which are cheaper and less likely to be detected by Israeli drones. So Hezbollah is adapting. But it may also have started this renewed war with more weapons than previously thought. I heard this from four different experts and from Hezbollah itself.
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JIHAD: (Non-English language spoken).
FRAYER: In a rare interview, NPR spoke by phone to a 62-year-old Hezbollah field commander who gave only his nom de guerre, Jihad, out of fear Israel would track and kill him, as it has many of his fellow commanders. For the same reason, an NPR staffer is voicing his words.
JIHAD: (Through interpreter) Let's just say I'm an expert in those things that fly.
FRAYER: He means deadly rockets, which Hezbollah continues to fire across the border into Israel by the thousands. Jihad says that when Lebanon's army tried to confiscate Hezbollah's weapons in accordance with a 2024 ceasefire, the group gave them decoys.
JIHAD: (Through interpreter) They didn't confiscate anything. We gave them empty boxes or a few old items to go blow up.
FRAYER: Jihad says that after Israel killed Hezbollah's longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in 2024, his successor, Naim Qassem, strengthened ties with Iran and implemented a new compartmentalized command structure.
JIHAD: (Through interpreter) One person specializes in shooting. Another watches the road. Another might even specialize in wrapping sandwiches for the fighters. You execute your own specific tasks, with no understanding of what we as a whole are doing.
FRAYER: Individuals don't necessarily know who else is a member. There are also tens of thousands of fighters in Hezbollah's reserves who get called up in times of war, like now. And since Israel blew up thousands of pagers used by the group in a brazen 2024 intelligence plot that took years to plan and killed dozens of people, Jihad says they no longer communicate by phone. NPR spoke to him on another person's device.
NICHOLAS NOE: It goes back to actually the old ways of communicating, which are by humans, by couriers.
FRAYER: Nicholas Noe is an expert on U.S. policy in Lebanon, and he says Jihad's description of how he communicates and other details in his account are in line with what he too has learned about Hezbollah's tactics.
NOE: I think that that's probably the case. A commander won't have a phone. They won't have a radio. They will use guys on bikes to send messages.
FRAYER: And so when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in late February, the order for Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, to retaliate may have come by handwritten note, dictated from Tehran and passed down to fighters in the field, several analysts told me. These are some of the ways Hezbollah manages to keep fighting a powerful adversary, Israel. Another way is morale. The group also runs hospitals and welfare programs, endearing some Lebanese to its cause.
UNIDENTIFIED HEZBOLLAH SUPPORTERS: (Non-English language spoken).
FRAYER: Hezbollah supporters filled several Beirut blocks this past weekend. Not everyone agrees with them. Some Lebanese have expressed anger at Hezbollah for dragging them into yet another war. But at this rally, some say a recent barrage of attacks on central Beirut, killing more than 350 people in a single day, was a turning point for them.
TALA ABOU ZELOUF: Israel has completely gone insane. I don't know what they want (inaudible).
FRAYER: Tala Abou Zelouf is a Sunni Muslim who wouldn't typically be part of Hezbollah's Shiite Muslim base. She hasn't voted for their politicians. Hezbollah has 14 lawmakers in Lebanon's parliament. But she does support the group's military wing in its fight against Israel, she says.
ZELOUF: Because he's defending his land. He's trying to give us a better future.
FRAYER: In addition to all of its battlefield tactics, popular support from people like this may continue to bolster Hezbollah in Lebanon, no matter what happens at a negotiating table in Washington. Lauren Frayer, NPR News, Beirut.
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