Nasrallah assassination reveals depth of Israel’s infiltration of Hezbollah

Following the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah faces the enormous challenge of containing the infiltration that allowed its arch-enemy Israel to destroy weapons facilities, booby trap its communications and assassinate its leader, whose whereabouts were a closely guarded secret for years.

Nasrallah’s assassination at a command headquarters on Friday came just a week after Israel’s deadly detonation of hundreds of booby-trapped pagers and radios. It was the culmination of a rapid succession of attacks that killed half of Hezbollah’s leadership council and decimated its top military command.

In the days before and hours after Nasrallah’s assassination, Reuters spoke to more than a dozen sources in Lebanon, Israel, Iran and Syria who provided details of the damage Israel had done to the powerful Shiite paramilitary group, including its supply lines and command structure. All requested anonymity to speak about sensitive topics.

A source familiar with Israeli thinking told Reuters less than 24 hours before the attack that Israel had spent 20 years focusing intelligence efforts on Hezbollah and could target Nasrallah whenever it wanted, including at headquarters.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his close circle of ministers authorized the attack on Wednesday, two Israeli officials told Reuters. The attack occurred while Netanyahu was in New York to address the UN General Assembly.

Nasrallah had avoided public appearances since a previous war in 2006. He had long been vigilant, his movements were restricted and the circle of people he saw was very small, according to one source. The assassination suggests his group had been infiltrated by Israeli informants, the source said.

The leader had been even more cautious than usual since the September 17 pager explosions for fear that Israel would try to kill him, another security source told Reuters a week ago, citing his absence from the funeral of a commander. and his pre-recording of a speech broadcast a few days earlier.

Hezbollah’s media office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Israel says it carried out the attack on Nasrallah by dropping bombs on the underground headquarters beneath a residential building in south Beirut.

“This is a huge blow and an intelligence failure for Hezbollah,” Magnus Ranstorp, a veteran Hezbollah expert at the Swedish Defense University.

“They knew he was getting together. He was meeting with other commanders. And they just went after him.”

Including Nasrallah, the Israeli military says it has killed eight of Hezbollah’s nine most senior military commanders this year, most notably in the past week. These commanders led units ranging from the rocket division to the elite Radwan force.

Around 1,500 Hezbollah fighters were maimed by pager and walkie talkie explosions on September 17 and 18.

On Saturday, Israel’s military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, told journalists at a briefing that the military had “real-time” knowledge that Nasrallah and other leaders were meeting. Shoshani did not say how they knew, but said the leaders were meeting to plan attacks on Israel.

Brigadier General Amichai Levin, commander of Israel’s Hatzerim Air Base, said dozens of munitions hit the target within seconds.

“The operation was complex and had been planned for a long time,” according to Levin.

Hezbollah weakened

Hezbollah has demonstrated an ability to replace commanders quickly, and Nasrallah’s cousin Hashem Safieddine, also a cleric who wears the black turban denoting descent from the Prophet Muhammad, has long been touted as his successor.

“You kill one, they get a new one,” a European diplomat said of the group’s approach.

The group, whose name means Party of God, will continue to fight: according to US and Israeli estimates, it had around 40,000 fighters before the current escalation, as well as large stockpiles of weapons and an extensive network of tunnels near the border with Israel. .

Founded in Tehran in 1982, the Shiite paramilitary group is a leading member of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, made up of allied anti-Israel irregular forces, and an important regional actor in its own right.

But he has been weakened materially and psychologically over the past 10 days.

Thanks to decades of support from Iran, before the current conflict Hezbollah was among the best-armed unconventional armies in the world, with an arsenal of 150,000 rockets, missiles and drones, according to US estimates.

That’s ten times the arsenal the group had in 2006, during its last war with Israel, according to Israeli estimates.

Last year, even more weapons arrived in Lebanon from Iran, along with significant amounts of financial aid, said a source familiar with Hezbollah’s thinking.

A Western diplomat in the Middle East told Reuters before Friday’s attack that Hezbollah had lost between 20% and 25% of its missile capabilities in the ongoing conflict, including hundreds of Israeli strikes this week. The diplomat did not provide evidence or details of his assessment.

An Israeli security official said “a very respectable portion” of Hezbollah’s missile stocks had been destroyed, without elaborating.

In recent days, Israel has struck more than a thousand Hezbollah targets.

Israeli officials say the fact that Hezbollah was able to launch just a few hundred missiles a day last week is evidence that its capabilities have been diminished.

This content was originally published in Nasrallah’s assassination reveals the depth of Israel’s infiltration of Hezbollah on the CNN Brasil website.

Source: CNN Brasil