New Delhi:
Hours before Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an airstrike in Lebanon’s Beirut, an Iranian mole informed Israeli authorities of his location, French newspaper Le Parisien has reported.
Citing a security source in Lebanon, the report said the mole had informed Israeli authorities that Nasrallah would be at Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs to attend a meeting with several top members of the organisation.
Around 1.30 pm IST yesterday (11 am Lebanon time), Israel Defence Forces said in a post on X, “Hassan Nasrallah will no longer be able to terrorize the world.” Later in the day, Hezbollah confirmed the news. “Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah… has joined his great, immortal martyr comrades whom he led for about 30 years,” it said in a statement.
How Israel Boosted Spies In Fight Against Hezbollah
According to a report in The New York Times, Israel’s recent successes against Hezbollah are a direct result of the country’s decision to devote far more intelligence resources to target Hezbollah after the 2006 war with the Iran-backed group. The Israeli army and the intelligence agencies, the report said, failed to score a decisive victory in that 34-day conflict. The war ended with a UN-brokered cease-fire and allowed Hezbollah, despite losses, to regroup and prepare for the next war.
In the years that followed, Israel deployed a lot of resources to collect information about Hezbollah’s leadership and strategy. Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, built cutting-edge cyber tools to better intercept Hezbollah’s cellphones and other communications, the NYT report said. New teams were created within combat ranks to ensure that valuable information was quickly passed on to soldiers and the air force, it added.
The Pager Bombs And Nasrallah’s Admission
In a recent televised speech, Nasrallah had said Hezbollah suffered an “unprecedented blow” after Israel detonated explosive-laden pagers and hand-held radios. The attacks killed 37 people and wounded nearly 3,000 people in two days. Nasrallah had then warned Israel of “tough retribution and just punishment, where it expects it and where it does not”.
A Lebanese investigation found that the pagers had been booby-trapped, AFP reported.
Hezbollah members had started communicating via pagers and walkie-talkies after Israel penetrated cellphones. But that did not protect them.
The Mossad, the NYT report said, appears to have created a shell company in Budapest and made the pagers under license from a company in Taiwan. Before the pagers arrived in Lebanon, Israeli operatives installed explosives inside them. The operation was scaled to produce thousands of pagers, requiring sophisticated manufacturing, it said.
Top Hezbollah Leaders Targeted
According to the NYT report, Israel’s investment in greater intelligence gathering first paid off in 2008 when Mossad worked with the CIA to kill top Hezbollah operative, Imad Mugniyah, in Syria. In 2020, Qassim Suleimani, who headed Iran’s Quds Force, flew to Syria’s Damascus and drove in a convoy to Beirut to meet Nasrallah. Israel did not try to kill Nasrallah then for fear of starting a war. It passed on the information to the US and Suleimani was killed in a drone strike at Baghdad airport, the report said.
The October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israeli cities set off the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. As Israel’s counterstrike set off a war in Gaza, Hezbollah started targeting Israel.
Over the past couple of months, Tel Aviv went all-out against Hezbollah. A strike on July 30 killed Fuad Shukr, one of the group’s top military commanders. About three weeks later, a strike killed Ibrahim Aqil, head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, and 15 other commanders. Days later, another strike killed Ibrahim Mohammed Kobeissi, who commanded several Hezbollah units, including a guided missiles unit. The next day, Mohammed Srur, the head of Hezbollah’s drone unit, was killed in a strike.
Chip Usher, a former CIA analyst who has worked with Israeli intelligence, has told NYT, “The secrets of their success come down to a couple of factors. They have a fairly defined target deck. That makes it easier for them to bring a tremendous amount of focus to what they do. They’re in a shadow war with Hezbollah and Iran. And they’re extraordinarily patient.”