It has been revealed that ‘a single phone call’ received by Fouad Shukr, the commander-in-chief of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, just before he was assassinated in the capital Beirut on the 30th of last month determined his fate.
On the 18th (local time), the American daily newspaper Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing an internal Hezbollah source, reported that on the day of his death, Shukr received a phone call telling him to “take refuge in the 7th floor of his apartment,” and that this was believed to be the result of the Israeli military hacking into Hezbollah’s internal communications network.
The official told the WSJ that Shukr, who was on the second floor of the apartment at the time, received a call telling him to evacuate to the seventh floor, and that Israeli forces then bombed the fourth to sixth floors, which was the decisive cause of his death. He added that the call to lure him to the seventh floor, an easy target in Beirut, where there are no tall buildings, appeared to be the work of Israeli forces that had penetrated Hezbollah’s internal communications network.
Shukr helped form what is now Hezbollah by recruiting Shiite guerrilla fighters with Iranian support in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In 1983, he was wanted by the U.S. State Department for bombing a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American soldiers.
In 1985, he was officially appointed commander-in-chief of Hezbollah, and was accused of planning the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 from Athens, Greece to the United States that year. The Shiite militants who seized control of the plane demanded that the United States release 700 Shiite fighters held in Israel, and only after that demand was met did they release the passengers.
Hezbollah denies any involvement with the TWA hijacking, but Shukr went into hiding shortly after the incident and has lived in hiding for nearly 40 years, interacting only with his inner circle and attending the funeral of his nephew, who was killed in combat with Israel earlier this year, for just a few minutes.
The residents of the apartment where Shukr lived also called him a “ghost,” saying they had heard his name but never actually seen him. Because there was no media exposure, the Lebanese media that first reported the news of Shukr’s murder used a picture of an odd man as his portrait.
On the 30th of last month, the Israeli military admitted that they had killed Shukr in a targeted airstrike in Beirut, introducing him as the “right-hand man” of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Earlier, on the 27th of last month, Hezbollah had attacked a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights with a rocket, killing 12 minors, and the Israeli military retaliated three days later.
Hezbollah expressed support for Hamas after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel in October last year, sparking a war in the Gaza Strip, and has been exchanging sporadic artillery fire with Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, which borders Israel.
According to a Hezbollah official who spoke to the Journal that day, Nasrallah ordered his men to discard their smartphones for security reasons in February as tensions with Israel rose during the Gaza war, and he began using encrypted language on internal communications.
Shukr is said to have ordered senior Hezbollah commanders to disperse, considering the possibility that Israel might launch an assassination operation in the wake of the Golan Heights soccer stadium attack. However, Shukr himself was killed by a wiretapped phone call he inadvertently received.
Shukr’s body fell into a nearby building, and it is unclear exactly which floor he ended up on, but Hezbollah officials told the Journal that day that he likely believed a hacked call telling him to take refuge on the seventh floor and acted on it.
(Seoul = News 1)
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2024-08-20 15:14:31