Hezbollah’s effort to rebuild a precision missile arsenal has become one of the most consequential strategic trends on Israel’s northern flank. Across 2024 and into early 2025 a pattern emerged: Iran transferred technology, components, and engineering support through Syrian facilities and covert supply chains, while Israel mounted an interdiction campaign of strikes and special operations to prevent the materialisation of a Lebanon-based production capacity for precision guided surface to surface weapons.
The operational changes are technical as much as organizational. Instead of relying only on massed unguided rockets, the objective has been to field rockets and short to medium range missiles with guidance kits or native precision production lines that reduce circular error probable by orders of magnitude. Tehran’s approach mixes three elements: export of finished guided weapons where feasible, transfer of guidance and seeker technology to proxy networks, and the construction of dispersed or underground production and assembly nodes in Syria and Lebanon that can receive components and complete final integration. These measures are consistent with Iran’s broader effort over the last decade to make its partners more lethal and deniable on the battlefield.
Evidence of the supply chain and the consequences of its growth are now in the public record. Israeli forces publicly described a September 2024 commando raid on an underground complex in Masyaf, which Israeli officials said contained advanced assembly lines and equipment intended to produce precision-guided missiles for regional proxies including Hezbollah. In late November 2024 Israel also released footage and statements describing strikes on a long subterranean production and storage complex in the Beqaa Valley that it characterised as central to Hezbollah’s precision missile project. Taken together these disclosures show both the scale of Iranian-enabled production efforts and the extent to which Israel views them as an existential threat that justifies unconventional operations and preemptive strikes.
The military logic is straightforward. Precision converts rockets from area weapons into targetable systems able to threaten infrastructure, command nodes, airbases, and critical logistics with much greater effect per round. That shifts the deterrence calculus in Lebanon and complicates Israel’s defensive planning because precision munitions can be used to hit high-value military and economic targets with fewer warning signatures. Iran’s aim in supporting such capabilities is to raise the cost of intervention against its regional posture by expanding the credible bite of its proxies.
Israel’s countermeasures have three components. First, kinetic disruption through airstrikes and special forces operations aimed at production complexes, storage sites, and smuggling nodes. Second, an intelligence campaign to identify procurement networks and interdiction points along the Syria-Lebanon corridor. Third, public attribution and diplomatic signalling intended to deter open Iranian involvement while maintaining the option to act unilaterally. The January 2025 disclosures about the Masyaf operation and the November strikes in the Beqaa Valley illustrate all three elements in practice. Those actions have degraded some facilities but they have not eliminated the underlying incentives nor the broader network that supplies dual use parts and technical expertise.
There are two strategic risks embedded in the tug of war over precision munitions. The first is escalation. As Hezbollah’s ability to strike higher value targets increases, Israel’s tolerance for even limited attacks from Lebanon falls. That dynamic raises the probability of miscalculation and broader rounds of violence that entangle Syria, Iranian elements inside Iraq, and other regional actors. The second is diffusion. Pressure on large, visible production hubs drives suppliers to fragment activities into smaller, harder to detect cells, to rely more on clandestine shipping of subcomponents, and to innovate around sanctions and export-control regimes. Those responses raise the long term cost of detecting and denying the capability.
Political and institutional constraints compound the security problem. Lebanon’s central state remains weak, UN mediation and peacekeeping face limits of mandate and access, and neighbouring states have competing incentives that complicate collective action. The UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon repeatedly warned of the fragility of the post-hostility arrangements and stressed the need to implement measures that would prevent rearmament from reigniting wider conflict. Without credible, enforceable mechanisms that bring weapons under state control or that interdict supply chains, the technical fixes of strike-and-destroy operations will deliver only temporary respite.
Policy responses must therefore combine immediate interdiction with patient institution building. Short term Western and regional priorities should include tighter monitoring and disruption of dual-use procurement channels, stepped up maritime and cross-border interdiction where legal authority exists, and expanded intelligence-sharing with partners that are constrained by common legal frameworks. Medium term efforts must focus on strengthening the Lebanese state security apparatus, realising the commitments under existing understandings to keep heavy weapons away from populated areas, and building a credible political compact that reduces local incentives to host or tolerate proxy arsenals. Without that combination, the contest over precision missiles will continue as a strategic running sore that periodically produces major crises.
The military competition over precision munitions is not a single campaign to be won with a single strike. It is a protracted contest over production, procurement, and political will. If Iran and its proxies can reestablish dispersed, hardened production or efficient component transfer pipelines, Hezbollah will renew its asymmetric deterrent in ways that alter the security environment across the Levant. If regional and international actors can lock down supply lines while offering Lebanon credible security and reconstruction incentives, the impulse to rebuild such arsenals may be contained. The direction the Levant takes will depend less on one factory or one raid and more on whether policy makers choose integrated, long horizon strategies or episodic kinetic fixes.