Israel has turned its fire on Hezbollah, the enemy across its northern border in Lebanon that it has been fighting for 40 years

Why is Hezbollah important?
A radical Islamist Shia political party and militant group based in Lebanon, Hezbollah has been designated a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US and other Western nations. But the Iran-backed group functions more like a state within the Lebanese state than a traditional terrorist outfit. It has 13 lawmakers in the Lebanese parliament (out of 128), it runs an extensive network of social services – including clinics, schools and youth programmes – and it has a lucrative smuggling and money-laundering operation. With a highly trained military wing, Hezbollah has been called the world's most heavily armed non-state actor. It claims to have 100,000 fighters (though independent estimates put it between 20,000 and 50,000), as well as a massive arsenal of small arms, drones and, according to the CIA, upwards of 150,000 rockets and missiles. It's a well-trained, technologically savvy, battle-hardened organisation.

When did it emerge?
During the Lebanese civil war, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1982, in response to attacks from the exiled Palestine Liberation Organization. Southern Lebanon's largely Shia population, traditionally the poorest of the country's three big sectarian groups, was caught in the crossfire and took up arms against Israel. Seeing a chance to spread its Shia Islamic revolution, Iran's rulers provided funding and training to several Lebanese Shia groups, which united under the name Hezbollah – or "Party of God" – and fought a brutally effective guerilla campaign, pioneering suicide bombing as a weapon (it is blamed for the attack on a US Marine barracks in 1983 that killed 241). When Israel finally withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah won much credit from the Lebanese, and across the Arab world. Hassan Nasrallah, its leader since 1992, hailed it as "the first Arab victory in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict".

What does Hezbollah want?
Its founding 1985 manifesto declared that its aims were to drive the Israelis out of Lebanon and to eliminate the State of Israel – still a fundamental ambition today. It also aimed to oppose US "imperialism", to spread the Iranian revolution, and to create an Islamist state in Lebanon – which has a substantial Christian population. Hezbollah has since softened the latter goal, unveiling a new document in 2009 that said the group supports "true democracy". It still serves the interests of Iran, which the US says provides up to $700 million a year in funding. But it has autonomy and its own specific aims; it should not be seen as a mere proxy.

How many wars has it fought in?
In 2006, Hezbollah sparked a new war with Israel with a cross-border raid, in which it killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others. The month-long conflict, in which some 1,100 Lebanese and about 160 Israelis were killed, ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire. Israel's campaign was also immensely destructive of Lebanese civilian infrastructure: it attacked Beirut airport and industry. Hezbollah's next major conflict began in 2012, when it sent thousands of fighters to help Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad – a member of the Shia offshoot Alawite sect – crush a largely Sunni uprising. The group's fighters battled alongside Russian forces, experienced brutal urban combat, and emerged a formidable military force – but at a considerable cost to their image as freedom fighters in the Arab world.

What is its relationship to Hamas?
Hezbollah is a long-term ally of the Palestinian terrorist group, which is also backed by Iran. But relations have not always been warm. Hamas, a Sunni organisation, backed the Sunni rebels in Syria's civil war; after a rift, it reconciled with Hezbollah in 2019, when it became clear that Assad would remain in power. Some Hamas officials have suggested that Hezbollah helped train and equip its fighters for the 7 October massacre in Israel last year; Nasrallah denies the claim, saying the slaughter was a "100% Palestinian" operation. However, Hezbollah expressed full-throated solidarity with Hamas following the atrocity. "Our hearts are with you," a top official said at a Beirut rally on 8 October. "Our history, our guns and our rockets are with you." And since the event, there has been a rise in clashes along the Israel-Lebanon border.

What has happened since 7 October?
Before it, Hezbollah's attacks had been sporadic. Since then, the group has launched more than 8,000 rockets at northern Israel and military positions on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and attacked military targets with drones and anti-tank missiles. About 60,000 people have been evacuated from northern Israel. In July, 12 Israeli children and teenagers from the Druze sect were killed in Majdal Shams, a town in the Golan Heights. Israel has responded with a series of targeted attacks on Hezbollah personnel, which escalated sharply last week.

How might Hezbollah respond?
Although Nasrallah's rhetoric has been bellicose, so far his response has been limited. In theory, a full attack on Israel would be devastating. Hezbollah has long-range precision-guided missiles which, if launched from its extensive network of defences and tunnels, could overwhelm Israeli defences, hitting Tel Aviv and other cities. But there are good reasons for showing restraint. Firstly, Iran may be urging caution, because it doesn't want to expend the deterrent posed by its armed ally on Israel's border. Lebanon has also been in a dire economic crisis since 2019, with over 40% of the population in poverty. This has helped reduce support for Hezbollah. And the public remembers the devastating effects of the 2006 war; soon after, Nasrallah was asked whether, with hindsight, he would have ordered the raid that sparked it. "No, absolutely not," he said.

Hezbollah's 'state within a state'
Hezbollah effectively controls most of Lebanon's Shia-majority areas, in southern Beirut, southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley. It has many of the features of a nation state: a leader, a ruling council, a parliamentary assembly, an army, a welfare state. It also has its own TV and radio stations, and even its own boy scout movement, the Mahdi Scouts, in which boys can learn to swim, build campfires and tie knots – but are also indoctrinated from an early age. New recruits to its military wing, referred to as the Islamic Resistance, must absorb the principles of the Iranian Islamic revolution. "The religious lessons are first," explained an experienced military trainer. "Religion first, before you even see a gun."

Hezbollah takes part in Lebanon's complex democratic system – in which government roles are shared between its main Sunni, Shia and Christian groups – up to a point. Hezbollah and its coalition partners usually have at least a "blocking third" in parliament. However, it is much more militarily powerful than the Lebanese state, and it doesn't hesitate to kill those that get in its way: officials examining its financial dealings, for instance. A UN inquiry found Hezbollah responsible for the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri in 2005.

"One of the characteristics of the left-wing mind," said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail, "is the desire to impose Utopian fantasy on human reality." Witness the government's naive plan to enshrine working from home as a statutory right in its forthcoming Employment Rights Bill.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds claimed last week that encouraging flexible working would boost productivity, fuel economic growth and make staff more loyal to their employers. That's a nice idea, but there's no evidence to back it up. The UK already tops the WFH league in Europe, with 44% of us working remotely at least part of the time in 2023, and this hasn't done much for our productivity. Many companies have come to the view that WFH is bad for business. Amazon has just announced the end of its hybrid work policy, and told staff to return to the office five days a week from January.

It's strange that supporting WFH is now seen as a "left-wing" cause, said Martha Gill in The Observer. For the data suggests that remote working benefits employers most of all, and harms the interests of lower-paid employees. Companies save on office costs, can extend the working day, and don't have to worry about paying people enough to live within commuting distance. Junior staff, meanwhile, lose out on "mentoring, skills and career progression". Studies show that female staff in particular miss out on opportunities, and that any time they save WFH tends to be spent on household chores. What's progressive about any of that?

There's no one-size-fits-all answer to this issue, said Roger Bootle in The Telegraph. Many employees like remote working because it saves them time, money and stress; others prefer to be in the office. In some sectors, WFH has no impact on productivity; in others it does. There's a balance to be struck, and businesses should be left to find what works best for them. It's not the role of government to dictate working conditions, other than to prevent abuse.

Ministers should tread carefully in this area, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Our large-scale adoption of WFH is a relatively recent phenomenon – before Covid, just 4.7% of employed Britons worked mainly from home – and the long-term consequences of this shift are still unclear. "Almost all studies indicate that some degree of home-working satisfies those who do it and even most of their employers." But questions remain about the long-term impact of WFH on teamwork, creativity, social ties and the future of urban centres. It's a "bold and exciting innovation. It is also a major change in social behaviour. It should be left to settle down before Whitehall marches in to manage it."

As a child, the comedian David Mitchell would watch the "Pink Panther" films with his grandfather and pick them apart to identify what, precisely, made Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau so funny, says Ben Dowell in The Times.

Comedy is an art that is not well enough appreciated, he says. It's not that people don't enjoy it. "I think in many ways, comedies are the happiest times people have watching television. But, equally, when a comedy goes for something a bit emotional instead of a joke, that's the bit that always gets the praise."

For instance, in "Blackadder Goes Forth", set in the First World War, it's the scene in which the characters go over the top that's celebrated. It is frustrating, he says, that these moments are such a "ready route to praise", because they are far easier to write than good jokes, and their impact is entirely reliant on the comedy that surrounds them. "The implication is, never mind the silly jokes. [But] jokes are the highest art form, in my view. They are humanity's brilliance taken to its most amazing point."