Well, Hezbollah is not defending anything, all they do is shoot rockets and lately fly drones. That's because they don't really have the capability to do anything else, they're a militia up against a fully modernised army and they are forced to fight in an asymmetric manner and so on. One does not simply "defend" territory with irregulars.

I understand that they are in a difficult position for a force that wants to place itself as the legitimate resistance to an invading army, in fact that's the same situation that Hamas finds itself in but with a more obvious occupation (it's not clear to most people that parts of Lebanon are under Israeli occupation, or at least contested).

But what's the end result of fighting? Death and ruin. Nothing else. For Hamas, they had their little "triumph" in October 7 23 and then they lost half of Gaza and the other half is a wasteland. How is that "defending" anything, either the territory or the people? The same thing is happening in Southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah are just as incapable of doing anything to stop the IDF advance as Hamas were in Gaza. They can't defend a thing.

If we are to have any sympathy for the cause, if not the tactics or the ideology, of terrorist resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, we have to also understand that their struggle is hopeless. Violence is clearly not the way for them to win, because the force they are fighting has all the violence. Non-violence is also not an answer because the force they fight has all the violence. They're screwed, quite bad, and there's no way out.

I think it's clear they don't fight to defend anything, just because there's nothing they can do and they might as well go down fighting, or they'll go insane. Or more insane.