Yes I watched the war. Yes Hezbollah suffered. Airstrikes were ruthless but did u miss the screaming crying Israeli soldiers. Littered merkavas and knocked out modern warships. Psychologically Israel was raped for the 1st time
Well, that's a generalization.
Hezbollah has done excellently for the circumstances under which it has struggled.
However, Hezbollah had prepared itself MUCH better than the decadent and safe feeling (their state as a whole isn't really in danger anymore) Israelis.
Hezbollah excels as light infantry.
The Soviet supported Arab armies were quite useless against the "child-murdering Zionists". Jews were just the better soldiers.
They (Jews) had - back in the day fighting spirit and ONE lost war = end of Israel, so they fought tough and bravely.
Don't get me wrong, the US / British equipped Jordanians who were trained by the British fought well.
Same applies for some Egyptian and Syrian units.
But Arab armies are weak because of political intrugies and jealously between "officers".
Lions led by donkeys you could say.
Israelis were lions led by lions back then.
On paper, Arabs had - at least until 1967 the upper hand in quality (mostly) and from the sheer sizes extremely in quantity, they were just weaker just the Jews.
Back to Hezbollah.
Hezbollah = learned from their mistakes in the 80s and 90s.
In the mid to late 90s they had a equal K/D ratio like IDF AND SLA, sometimes even better.
Before that, they had 3-5+ deaths for every Israeli soldier.
Israel in 2006 had EX PILOTS leading tank coys.
The Israelis were arrogant and lazy and that conflict happened to the worst period for them.
The tank losses weren't that high, especially you look WHICH tanks were hit, which were destroyed or damaged beyond repair.
IDF used tanks:
Standard (!) Merkava Mk II (reserve units)
Merkava Mk IID (Still a crime to the own tankists)
Merkava Mk IIIBaz (All Merkava MK III should have been upgraded to Dor-Dalet standard which was - more or less a prototype/test run for Mk IV but because the Jews had back then so many Mk III it would have been useful.).
Merkava Mk IV
Funny thing - the first tank which got (really) destroyed was a Merkava MK IV, by a extremly strong IED on a choke point, when the intial-phase of this conflict was and the Jews didn't understood what happens.
52 tanks were hit by enemy fire (encompassing anything from ATGMs, RPGs, IEDs, etc)
21 of those tanks hit received enough damage to be pulled out of combat (19 resulting from an ATGM hit and 2 from IEDs)
5 of those tanks were deemed irrecoverable losses
(2 Merkavas MkII, 1 Merkava MkIII, 2 Merkavas MkIV).
One of the destroyed MkII and one of the destroyed MkIV were hit by IEDs, the rest were lost due to ATGM fire.
23 Israeli tankers died during the War (18 by ATGM fire, 5 by IEDs)
1 Helicopter shot down, 3 more lost in accidents.
Only INS Hanit (Sa'ar 5 Class Corvette) was damaged, not destroyed - by a C-802 (which is export version of YJ-83).
IDF losses 121
Hezbollah (as good prepared defender) minimum 250 other sources 500 and Israeli sources say ~ 700.