Thinning Ranks: Who Remains in Hezbollah's Leadership After the Elimination of Commander Tabatabaei?

The assassination of Hezbollah's de facto Chief of Staff, Ali Tabatabaei, in the Dahiya quarter on Sunday has exposed a critical vacuum at the organization's highest echelons. With a significant portion of its senior military command eliminated, Hezbollah's operational leadership has been dramatically thinned, relying on a sparse core of veterans to maintain its military structure.

The once broad and complex command structure has been reduced to a handful of key figures, leaving a leadership vacuum that the remaining commanders are struggling to fill.

The Remaining Senior Figures

Only a few commanders remain from the "old guard" who guided the organization’s military efforts:

The continuous targeted eliminations have drastically reduced the operational leadership, leaving a thin command structure struggling to fill the vacuum.

The Reason for the Assassination

According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the primary reason for Tabatabaei’s elimination was his crucial role as the "brain behind the rearmament" effort aimed at restoring the organization’s full operational capability following the last war.

Tabatabaei led the entire rearmament campaign, which included:

Arab and Israeli sources told the paper that Tabatabaei had successfully implemented a mechanism to rapidly replace killed field commanders, reportedly restoring most of the over 2,500 fighters lost in the war. Israel consequently viewed him as the "head of the effort" to rebuild the military force and a high-value target aimed at disrupting the rearmament process and increasing pressure on Beirut. The elimination, codenamed "Black Friday," was executed by an F-15 fighter jet and was intended as a message to the terrorist organization to comply with international demands for disarmament.