Imo, I personally viewed him as the problem. Politically indecisive and incompetent when it comes to Israel. He was good for the movement's social cohesion internally and with the Lebanese social fabric.
He didn't use Hezbollah's military tools effectively. Instead allowed Israel to progressively chip away at their military capabilities until come September for the widescale attack that was intended to pressure them to withdraw from the conflict.
Because of this, Israeli's had escalation dominance over much of the conflict. And got to approach the conflict on their own terms and time table. Which is a big failure for Hezbollah and whomever was advising them.
Whoever is in charge now can see how badly mismanaged it all was, and has domestic pressure from allies in Lebanese government but also his own base that were displaced and not comfortable in all of Lebanon. The Israeli ground invasion was advancing to the next stage. The opportunity for 1701-like proposal was best case scenario and they took it. To secure their future in Lebanon and to conduct an entire audit and performance review of the organization.
Good analysis.
I would add a few points:
(1) IDF remains inside Lebanon with 20,000-60,000 troops for probably most of the next 60 days. The idea they can just move troops to Gaza immediately is not true.
(2) We already saw large scale return of Lebanese civilians to the south, including Hezbollah members. It will be practically impossible for Israel to fully remove Hezbollah from the south; Hezbollah
is part of the fabric of south Lebanon. That said, the days of Hezbollah watch posts or patrols on the border are gone.
(3) Hezbollah's heavy missile base was always in the Beqaa mountains. Even until the last days of the war we saw footage of those underground bases operating normally. Strategic infrastructure in the Beqaa was not severely degraded, though the bigger challenge will be restocking supplies, as Israel will be keen to use this opportunity to proactively prevent this.
(4) Overall, c. 4000 Lebanese people were killed. If we assume 2000 were Hezbollah members and 2000 were civilians, this is not a crippling blow to Hezbollah, even if we assume another 5,000-10,000 were injured. Despite the intensity of the war, Hezbollah casualties were relatively moderate compared to Gaza.
(5) Although the key decisions were flawed, and the new leadership had to walk back Sayed Nasrallah's promises, Hezbollah still did manage to force 60,000-100,000 Israels to flee their homes throughout the war. Only a diplomatic solution enabled them to return. Israel's ground invasion did not manage to capture Khiam or other towns captured in 2006, even after a full year of carpet bombing the south.
And I end with some happy news: 17 Hezbollah members who the leadership had lost communication with for over a month, and had declared them to be martyrs, were found to be alive and well, and they were inside a Lebanese border town that Israel claimed it 'controlled'. They never fled or ran away, even under the worst circumstances.
