Hizballah Nation

By Christopher Allbritton/Beirut, Nicholas Blanford/Tyre

Nervously eyeing the skies for Israeli warplanes, Hussein Naboulsi, a spokesman for Hizballah, took quick strides as he accompanied foreign journalists through the bombed-out neighborhoods of Beirut's southern suburbs. "Listen to me!" he shouted. "We have to move very fast!" He paused amid the devastation to point out the pulverized office blocks in the Harat Hreik district where Hizballah's headquarters had stood only a week earlier. "Now I have no place to work," said Naboulsi, the son of a prominent Shi'ite Muslim cleric.

But the primary work Hizballah does these days is not in office buildings but on the battlefield, and despite an Israeli onslaught that has targeted the group's top brass and top guns, the organization has proved more resilient than many expected. Across southern Lebanon, Hizballah fighters have manned batteries firing as many as 350 rockets a day at Israeli cities and towns, from an arsenal estimated at 13,000 projectiles. At least 100 of the more than 900 missiles fired at Israel have hit Haifa, the nation's third-largest city, while one radar-guided antiship missile (the C-802), a gift to Hizballah from its Iranian sponsors, struck an Israeli gunboat off the coast of Lebanon. Other Hizballah militants, operating in bands of as many as 50 fighters, have battled Israeli troops at close range, knocking out tanks and even crossing into the Israeli town of Metulla.

After several days of fighting, the familiar assumption that Israel could militarily crush any enemy in the region seemed less certain. Could Hizballah survive the onslaught and remain a potent force in the region? Operating from caves or fortified bunkers are some 600 active-duty Hizballah members joined by many more of the several thousand reserves from around the country ready to fight. A military source in Lebanon told TIME that the fighters are apparently communicating via encrypted short-burst-transmission sets to overcome Israeli jamming and eavesdropping capabilities, enabling Hizballah to maintain an effective chain of command. In the Dahiya, the Shi'ite suburbs of Beirut, Hizballah gunmen wearing vests jammed with ammunition patrol the streets. When not engaged in conflict, they assist some of the 500,000 refugees in Lebanon displaced by the fighting and Israel's bombs.

Having triggered the conflict by capturing two soldiers inside Israel, Hizballah is functioning not just as a state within a state but almost as the state itself. Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah initially held a press conference to outline his terms for a prisoner swap: the soldiers would be returned for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But Israel answered by bombing the runways at Beirut's international airport. Hizballah then began raining rockets on northern Israel. Although Nasrallah went into hiding along with other Hizballah leaders, he continues to issue statements, telling al-Jazeera TV, for example, that he was not harmed by what Israeli officials described as a 23-ton bomb attack on a suspected Hizballah leadership meeting. Such is the bravado of the Islamic fundamentalist leader, who is hailed throughout the Arab world for fighting Israel while other Arab leaders sit on their hands. He gets credit not only for standing up to Israel right now but also for leading a guerrilla war that was widely seen as driving Israeli forces out of Lebanon in 2000 after a 22-year occupation. Becoming resistance heroes helped Hizballah overcome a dodgy past: it is believed to have launched violent attacks during the 1980s ranging from the kidnapping of Americans in Beirut to the bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Despite its record of violence, Hizballah enjoys broad appeal among Lebanese. It has morphed into a political party--winning 14 seats in Lebanon's 128-member Parliament in May 2005--and operates an effective social-welfare organization. Hizballah runs hospitals and schools throughout downtrodden Shi'ite districts. In the kidnapping gambit, however, Hizballah's normally cautious leaders may have overreached. Some Lebanese political insiders speculate that either the group misjudged the probable Israeli response or Iran or Syria ordered Hizballah to deliberately provoke Israel. "They are a tool in the hands of the Syrian regime and for Iran's regional ambitions," says Walid Jumblatt, veteran leader of Lebanon's Druze community. Iran created Hizballah in 1982 in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon that year. A Lebanese official told TIME that Iran recently doubled its cash infusions to Hizballah, to about $300 million a year.

Lebanon's various factions have united against Israel's onslaught, and Hizballah can still count on broad support. But many citizens are angry at Hizballah for taking it upon itself to initiate a new conflict with Israel. Some politicians say privately that when the dust settles from the fighting, Hizballah should be held to account and disarmed. That's assuming Hizballah continues to survive Israel's blitz in some recognizable form. As Naboulsi, the spokesman, made his way through the rubble of Harat Hreik, a security man with a walkie-talkie suddenly shouted, "Evacuate! Evacuate!" Naboulsi started running down the street: the Israelis, he said, were coming back.