The American magazine "Foreign Affairs" has reported that the Lebanese party Hezbollah does not enjoy widespread popularity throughout Lebanon. Data indicates that approximately 85 percent of the Shiite population trusts Hezbollah, but only around 30 percent of the total Lebanese population has expressed a high level of trust in the party. Trust in Hezbollah is only about 9 percent among Sunnis and Druze in Lebanon, while the trust level among Christians barely reaches 6 percent. According to the survey, only one-third of the Lebanese people agree with Hezbollah's participation in regional politics.
Considering the influence that Hezbollah has managed to gather over the past three decades, neither the Lebanese government nor the armed forces in the country have the capacity to confront Hezbollah, meaning the party could drag Lebanon into a war with Israel on its own. A significant percentage of Lebanese still prefer to focus on internal reforms rather than engage in external wars, as shown by a poll conducted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy late last year. So far, Hezbollah has made the cessation of the war in Gaza a condition for stopping the escalation along the Lebanese-Israeli border, and the longer the conflict continues, the more concerns rise about Iran, Hezbollah's main supporter, becoming directly involved.
