Lebanon Risks Its Future by Allowing Hezbollah to Weaponize Public Utilities

The Lebanese state is capitulating to Hezbollah. Instead of weeding out the militia as it has repeatedly promised, the government is now standing by as the Iranian-controlled group exploits public infrastructure. An investigation by This is Beirut into Hezbollah’s efforts to build a new military communications network using state utilities shows that the militia has chosen to compromise the security of the entire nation to shield itself from accountability. Following Israel’s heavy military blows, including the destruction of Hezbollah’s independent communications networks, the Iranian-controlled group is trying to replicate Hamas’s asymmetric warfare model in the Gaza Strip. As documented in “Naza: The Real Story,” Hamas systematically transformed a dense urban environment into a giant, unified battle zone by intentionally erasing the distinction between combatants and civilians. The group turned the spaces of everyday life into heavily fortified military positions. Hamas’s doctrine relied on storing weapons in the bedrooms of civilian residences. Its terrorists moved between residential buildings completely unarmed, ensuring that advancing Israeli troops could not legally identify them as threats and fire upon them under Jerusalem’s rules of engagement aimed at minimizing civilian casualties. Hamas warped civilian structures into military arsenals. Whenever the group’s operatives entered a building, they had pre-planted weapons stockpiles at their disposal. They used these concealed caches to launch coordinated ambushes on Israeli soldiers directly out of bedroom windows, children’s nurseries, local mosques, and UN facilities. Meanwhile, Hamas forced families to remain in combat hotspots to exploit their deaths for global propaganda. Hezbollah is now executing this playbook in Lebanon. By embedding its military command, control, and communications systems into public utility grids and residential centers, the group is holding the entire Lebanese population hostage. They are deliberately turning civilian telecommunications, infrastructure, and neighborhoods into legitimate military targets, guaranteeing that any future conflict will result in catastrophic destruction across Lebanon. When a radical proxy militia chooses to merge its physical operations with a nation’s public services, it strips away the traditional protection those facilities enjoy under international law. This deliberate blurring of lines creates unprecedented moral and operational dilemmas. An opposing military is forced to weigh its self-defense against an enemy hiding beneath children’s beds. In this scenario, the scope of any counterfire must be expanded for military operations to be effective. Hezbollah’s deep infiltration of the state’s public infrastructure means that in the next, all-but-inevitable war, Israel will be forced to cause far greater destruction of civilian facilities than in previous rounds of conflict. This is the grim reality of modern urban combat when an asymmetric enemy uses human shields. A professional army cannot neutralize embedded military assets without addressing the public infrastructure in which the enemy has embedded them. The sovereign Lebanese state has only itself to blame for this impending catastrophe. For decades, Beirut has tolerated the existence of an independent, heavily armed militia that dictates war and peace. By failing to assert a monopoly on violence and police its own territory, Lebanon has essentially signed away its national sovereignty, allowing a foreign-backed proxy to dictate the terms of the country’s survival. True peace and progress in the Middle East demand an unblinking, rigorous appraisal of such severe internal institutional failures. Lebanon cannot save itself from the strategic trap set by Hezbollah by deflecting responsibility onto external adversaries. The “Naza” documentary reveals that the fog of war is deliberately deepened by terrorists who hide behind the innocent. Anyone who genuinely cares about human rights and regional stability must recognize this calculated strategy. If Lebanon refuses to dismantle the militia hollowing out its state, it must prepare to face the devastating consequences of its own complicity. The U.S. cannot treat Lebanon as a normal sovereign nation while its power grids are actively weaponized by an Iranian proxy. Washington must coordinate with international allies to impose severe, targeted economic sanctions directly against any Lebanese telecom or power utility executives complicit in Hezbollah’s exploitation of state infrastructure. The U.S. should officially treat corrupt Lebanese public entities as active nodes in Hezbollah’s support network and cut them off from the global financial system. Washington must also leverage its decisive voting power within international lending institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to completely halt all non-humanitarian development loans to Beirut. Diplomatic support and financial stabilization packages must be explicitly tied to the Lebanese state reclaiming control over its own utilities from terrorists. Washington must make it clear that international bailouts will never be used to underwrite, maintain, or modernize public networks abused by a rogue, violent, non-state actor. Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a columnist focusing on Lebanon and broader Arab affairs.