War of awareness: From Israel’s Fauda to Hezbollah FPV video | Hezbollah

The movie it only takes three minutes. The Israeli flag flies over a site in the village of al-Bayada, in southern Lebanon. One drone approaches the antenna while the other looks above. The flag falls after impact. The final image shows a digitally torn Israeli flag with the words: “Al-Bayada does not welcome you.”

The subtitle of the video reads: “Flag lowering ceremony”. This is Hezbollah’s latest video, which shows more than one mountain in southern Lebanon.

Journalists and observers who covered southern Lebanon in the late 1990s may remember Hezbollah’s television channel before Israel withdrew. Al-Manar TV operates as a channel beyond television; it served as an ideological campaign in the spotlight.

Repeated images of Israeli soldiers screaming after being attacked by a roadside bomb, retreating, abandoned sites, and lowered flags, made the Arab world realize that Israel was already withdrawing before any official decision was made.

Back then, this image pushed forward a new reality, which was instrumental in strengthening the Hezbollah group and increasing internal pressure on the Israeli government to withdraw its power from Lebanon. Then the cancellation happened in May 2000, and for many, it seemed like a natural consequence of everything that was going on.

This strategy was not abandoned, but it became unnecessary for a long time due to the presence and rhetoric of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

For two decades, Nasrallah was the face of the media war. A man whose son was killed in battle. A leader who says things and then makes them happen. What he had could not be taught or repeated; it was the credibility accumulated over many years of real achievement, which gave him the rare ability to reshape his audience’s understanding of events. When something goes wrong, they can change it. When an obstacle came up, he could put it into a long story that made sense. He was the framework that held everything together.

The war in Syria has severely damaged Hezbollah’s image. Seeing his fighters in the towns of Qalamoun, Aleppo, Homs, and other Syrian cities, in what most of the Arab world saw as a sectarian war, was difficult to accept.

But Nasrallah was there to take the ground, clarify, and prevent the issue from collapsing. He framed it as a war of resistance against Israel, rather than an ally in the fight against terrorism. Without him, the organization would have faced a very bad image, not only among his critics but also among his supporters. The picture could not exist without him.

Then 2024 arrived.

Fuad Shukr, one of Hezbollah’s top commanders, was killed in Beirut at the end of July. In less than two months, the pager operation disrupted the Hezbollah movement, hundreds of weapons were detonated at the same time, penetrating the intelligence so it felt impossible. Then the criminals kept coming. Great leaders, one after another. And on September 27, Nasrallah himself was killed in an Israeli strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

His successor, Naim Qassem, was the deputy leader for 30 years. His organizational skills helped the party to reform and rebuild, but he is not a speaker. What Nasrallah had was not a transferable skill. It grew out of decades of struggle, discovery, and giving. Qassem’s voice lacks the most important part of the story he was previously familiar with.

So the press of Hezbollah, which always relied on the words of the leader to make everything, found itself, for the first time in decades, without a place, without a voice that can unite things, and give information to the supporters that are coming.

As far as Israel is concerned, its communication strategy is not an accidental leap.

For many years, Israel built two railways at the same time.

The first one was functional. Equipped with military communications equipment, controlled access to the media, and rapid communications, all are designed to inform the Israeli army of any news on public cell phones and newsrooms before it happens.

An investigation carried out by the Swiss television station SRF released in October revealed how the Israeli army quietly produced 3D animations several weeks before major operations, ready to use the moment the strikes began, to justify hitting hospitals, residential areas, and civilian infrastructure. Many advertisers run them, and many did not even ask questions about the accuracy of what they were showing.

The second method was more traditional and faster. Fauda, ​​a Netflix thriller written by an undercover Israeli military expert, has spent several seasons building audiences around the world, portraying Palestinian and Hezbollah fighters as brutal and inefficient, rational, always successful.

Tehran, on Apple TV +, did the same thing in Iran: the Mossad as experts, the Islamic Republic as an independent group moving from one failure to another.

There was no fake news, and that was their strength. They entered dining rooms in countries with no idea or knowledge of the conflict and quietly set the tables before the next battle.

When Israel invaded Iran in June 2025, a LEGO cartoon video with a quote from Tehran started circulating online. The Iranians responded with another LEGO video that left no real impression, but it was just the beginning.

By the time the United States and Israel launched their campaign in February, targeting Iran’s nuclear program and its leadership, Tehran had assembled a radio response that shocked many.

Explosive Mediaa Tehran-based group producing short English-language films, began releasing Lego-style films at a news-like pace. One showed US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next to a satellite, looking at the Epstein Files, before Trump pressed a button and a rocket flew into Iran. The camera cuts to an Iranian girls’ school that was attacked by Israeli and US forces.

In another video, arrows are flying towards their targets, each dedicated to a victim of American power, Native Americans, prisoners of Abu Ghraib, passengers of Iran Air Flight 655, before giant statues of Trump and Netanyahu fall.

The New Yorker called the videos “inevitable portraits” of war. Research firm Cyabra tracked 145 million views in the first weeks of the debate alone.

Iranian diplomats expanded the entire X campaign, posting it in English and other languages. The trend spread to Hezbollah-affiliated accounts in Lebanon, a layered, moving narrative machine that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv could challenge. The US had quietly closed its Office of Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference at the State Department in April 2025. Its absence was felt.

But Hezbollah is doing what Lego videos are not.

The FPV drone footage they produced is unlike anything else in the world. They are not manufactured, rebuilt, or refined after manufacturing. The camera descends from the sky, finds its target, and in the last moments before it sometimes captures the face. The soldier looks up. No time to rush, no time to think.

In WhatsApp groups, boys who watch these videos on their phones started calling it something else. Not a plane crash. The encounter between Israel and Ezrael, the Arabic name for the angel of death. The drone doesn’t miss, it’s silent, brutal, and for those who see Israeli attacks every day on Lebanese soil, revenge.

That character, its intimacy, the sense of inevitability, comes across as sarcastic. Lego movies target a global audience. FPV drone footage targets both Hezbollah supporters and soldiers on the other side of the fence, as well as anyone who chooses to deploy them.

Fauda spent years telling people around the world that Israel’s enemies were weak and weak. FPV cameras came as a solution. Tehran spent years telling the same people that Iran’s defense was possible and laughable. Lego videos answer this.

The last time Hezbollah had such a hold on its image, it ended in the withdrawal of Israel.

Everything is different now. The Losers of 2024 – Nasrallah, the first and the last – is not a valuable piece of filmmaking that will change. But the image has started to spread again. And for those who remember what it did in 1999, that’s no small feat.

Wars are not always completely settled where they are fought; sometimes they are fixed on the screen where they are viewed.