The footage lasts just three minutes. An Israeli flag flies over a position in the village of al-Bayada, in occupied southern Lebanon. One drone approaches the flagpole while another observes from above. The flag falls after the impact. The final frame displays a digitally rendered, torn Israeli flag with the words: “Al-Bayada does not welcome you.”

The video’s caption reads: “Flag lowering ceremony”. This is the latest video released by Hezbollah, which reflects a broader context beyond a single hillside in southern Lebanon.

Journalists and observers who covered southern Lebanon in the late 1990s may recall Hezbollah’s media strategy before the Israeli withdrawal. Al-Manar TV functioned as more than a television channel; it operated as a psychological campaign in plain view.

Repeated footage of Israeli soldiers screaming after being attacked with a roadside bomb, retreating, positions abandoned, and flags lowered, created the perception in the Arab world that Israel was already departing before any official decision to do so had been taken.

Back then, the image pushed forward a new reality, one that played a vital role in mobilising support for Hezbollah and adding pressure on the Israeli government internally to withdraw its forces from Lebanon. Then the withdrawal occurred in May 2000, and to many, it felt like a natural result of all that was happening.

This approach was never abandoned, but it became unnecessary for a long period due to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s commanding presence and speeches.

For two decades, Nasrallah was the face of the media war. A man whose son was killed in battle. A leader who said things and then made them happen. What he had could not be taught or replicated; it was credibility accumulated over years of real achievement, giving him the rare ability to reshape how his audience understood events. When something went wrong, he could reframe it. When a setback came, he could place it inside a longer story that made sense. He was the frame that held everything together.

The war in Syria badly damaged Hezbollah’s image. Seeing its fighters in Qalamoun, Aleppo, Homs, and other Syrian cities, in what much of the Arab world saw as a sectarian war, was hard to absorb.

But Nasrallah was there to absorb it for his base, give it logic, and keep the narrative from collapsing. He framed it as a war to preserve resistance against Israel, rather than one to defend an ally combating a revolution. Without him, the organisation could have faced an even worse image, not only among his critics but also among his supporters. The image itself could not survive without him.

Then came 2024.

Fuad Shukr, one of Hezbollah’s most senior commanders, was killed in Beirut at the end of July. Less than two months later, the pager operation tore through Hezbollah’s ranks, hundreds of devices detonating at once, an intelligence penetration so complete it felt almost unreal. Then the assassinations kept coming. Senior commanders, one after another. And on September 27, Nasrallah himself was killed in an Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut.

His successor, Naim Qassem, was the deputy leader for 30 years. His organisational capabilities helped the party restructure and rebuild, but he is not a communicator. What Nasrallah had was not a transferable skill. It grew from decades of confrontation, presence, and delivery. Qassem’s words lack the crucial layer of strategic narrative his predecessor mastered.

So Hezbollah’s media machinery, which always depended on the leader’s voice to shape everything, found itself, for the first time in decades, without a centre, without the voice capable of putting things together, and giving a hint to supporters of what’s to come.

As for Israel, its communications strategy wasn’t something it wandered into by accident.

For years, Israel had been building it on two tracks simultaneously.

The first was operational. A well-resourced apparatus of military spokespersons, carefully managed press access, and rapid-fire media briefings, all designed to get the Israeli military’s version of any story to people’s mobile phones and newsrooms before any alternative could take hold.

An investigation by Swiss public television SRF released in October revealed how the Israeli military had been quietly producing slick 3D animation videos weeks before major operations, ready to deploy the moment the strikes began, justifying hits on hospitals, residential blocks, and civilian infrastructure. Many broadcasters ran them, and many did not even ask questions about the accuracy of what they were showing.

The second track was cultural and ran deeper. Fauda, the Netflix thriller written by veterans of Israeli undercover units, spent several seasons building audiences worldwide, painting Palestinian and Hezbollah fighters as brutal and ultimately incompetent, always outthought, always outmanoeuvred.

Tehran, on Apple TV+, did the same job on Iran: Mossad as professionals, the Islamic Republic as a paranoid bureaucracy lurching from one failure to the next.

Neither series was crude propaganda, and that was their leverage. They entered living rooms in countries with no prior opinion or knowledge of the conflict and quietly arranged the furniture before the next war arrived.

When Israel attacked Iran in June 2025, a LEGO animation video with the soundtrack from Tehran started circulating online. The Iranian responded with another LEGO video that didn’t leave a real impact, but it was just the beginning.

By the time the United States and Israel launched their campaign in February, aimed openly at Iran’s nuclear programme and its leadership, Tehran had assembled a media response that caught many observers off guard.

Explosive Media, a Tehran-based group producing animated short videos in English, began releasing Lego-style animated films at a pace matching the news cycle. One showed US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu beside the devil, looking at Epstein Files, before Trump presses a button and a rocket flies towards Iran. The camera then cuts to the rubble of an Iranian girls’ school that was attacked by Israel and the US military.

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

The New Yorker called the videos “inescapable artefacts” of the war. The research firm Cyabra tracked 145 million views in the first weeks of the conflict alone.

Iranian embassies amplified the campaign across X, posting in English and other languages. The format spread to Hezbollah-affiliated accounts in Lebanon, a layered, fast-moving narrative machine that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv could counter. The US had quietly shut down its Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office at the State Department in April 2025. The absence was felt.

But Hezbollah is doing something the Lego videos are not.

The FPV drone videos it has released are unlike anything in this conflict. They are not animated, reconstructed, or cleaned up in post-production. The camera drops from the sky, finds its target, and in the final moments before impact sometimes catches a face. A soldier looking up. No time to run, no time to think.

In WhatsApp groups, young men watching these clips on their phones started calling it something else. Not a drone strike. An encounter between Israel and Ezrael, the Arabic name for the angel of death. The drone does not miss, it’s silent, brutal, and for those seeing daily Israeli attacks on Lebanese soil, avenging.

That quality, the intimacy of it, the sense of inevitability, lands differently than satire. The Lego videos are aimed at a global audience. The FPV drone videos are aimed at both the Hezbollah supporters and the soldiers on the other side of the fence, and at whoever decides to send them.

Fauda spent years telling global audiences that Israel’s enemies were bumbling and weak. The FPV footage came as a response. Tehran spent years telling those same audiences that Iran’s security state was penetrable and almost comic. The Lego videos respond to that.

The last time Hezbollah had this kind of grip on its image, it ended in an Israeli withdrawal.

Everything is different now. The losses of 2024 – Nasrallah, first and last – are not something high-value video production can undo. But the image is back in circulation. And for those who remember what it did in 1999, that is not a small thing.

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