Fallen Hezbollah militiamen from the town on Jibchit, Nabatiyeh in the first two months of the ongoing war. 2 Hezbollah officials told Reuters "several thousands" of their fighters were killed in the ongoing war. Israel assesses it killed about 2,000 militants (1,800 prior to the formal ceasefire and 200 since).
This immense sacrifice achieved nothing: Hezbollah rapidly lost control over 5% of Lebanese territory (about 50 villages and towns), now under Israeli occupation.
Hezbollah has managed to kill just 17 Israeli soldiers & 4 civilians, a death rate of about 1:100.
Looking at this rate of loss & failure to prevent Israel's advance, rational individuals would have abandoned this suicidal mission. Some Hezbollah militants have indeed done so (listen here instagram.com/reels/DWUK-p2i…), yet many more are willing to continue dying.
Abbas Jaafar al-Husseini, a Leftist Lebanese writer from the Shia community, explained in a post how this rate of loss was made possible through Hezbollah's indoctrination systems:
"For 40 years, the Shia were being prepared for this massacre. For 40 years, it was planted in our minds that fighting Israel is the most obligatory of obligations, even more obligatory than submitting to God. For 40 years, everyone became fully ready to offer human and material sacrifices, while calmly repeating phrases of congratulations [for those killed fighting] and happiness [the happy martyr, as appears in Hezbollah posters… What is happening will be studied: it will be studied how a minority sect in the Levant was psychologically and intellectually made ready for extermination, with its full consent. Even if you liberate Jerusalem, we have lost Jabal Amel as we have known it for decades."
Iran invested many billions of dollars since it established Hezbollah in 1982 to turn Lebanon's Shia minority into its vanguard on Israel's border. This assistance helped empower the once-marginalized Shia community & expel the Israeli occupation in 2000. But since 2006, in line with the role Iran assigned to the militia, Hezbollah launched multiple wars against Israel & intervened in Syria to prop up Assad, bringing death and destruction on Lebanon's Shia community.