While a non-state organization giving a militarily hard time to a much larger and better armed (but hubristic) state is nothing new, there are a couple of remarkable aspects to this tale:
-- Most geurilla organizations are able build up their tactics and organization over some time and evolve to new threats. For example, as clever and resourceful the S. Vietnamese and Iraqi resistance have been, they had time to develop their tactics and took a lot of losses in the process. Hezbollah appears to have tuned their tactics to the IDF from the start and suffered relatively few "learning experiences".
While they had some experience from the last occupation and missile attacks since then, they seem to have been perfectly prepared for what happened, given their resources. How often do you see that in military history?
-- The apparently sophisticated signal intelligence is the sort of thing you normally see in state actors. While I could imagine the right combination of well-motivated geeks with the proper access to resources and cheap electronics sorting this out, normally a state --particularly the one sucking the tit of the Roman wolf -- is going to have the superior technology, period. That may not get them all they expect, but they do have it. That relation appears to have been shaken up.
-- A sophisticated, multiply redundant bunker system is a state toy. The Vietnamese had something sort of similar, but the Hezbollah version sounds more like a Maginot line that worked. Never mind the resources to build them -- where'd they get the organization to use them effectively the first time out, when that kind of thing has always amounted to, well, a Maginot line, or at best a Fuehrerbunker? You can ship the building supplies from Syria, but where'd they get advisors from?
So there seems to have a non-state actor that has many of the supposed advantages of a state actor, but uses them effectively.
I bet their phone is ringing off the hook.
-- Andy