2024-09-29 12:26:25
On Friday at 18:20 local time, Israeli bombs fell on the Haret Hreik district in Beirut, where the main offices and headquarters of Hezbollah are located. The raid – extraordinary even by Israeli standards – destroyed several blocks and an underground bunker. Among the dead is the longtime face of the Hezbollah terrorist movement, its leader Hassan Nasrallah.
In this position, Nasrallah lasted almost an incredible thirty-two years: in 1992, he replaced Abbas Mousavi. Even then, the Israelis “got” him, they hit him with a rocket from a helicopter while he was driving in a car in the south of Lebanon.
Nasrallah was only thirty-two years old at the time, but in official photos and videos he looked unchanged. A stocky figure, glasses, a massive little ring and a round face with a thick beard. He was notorious for not speaking or appearing in public, giving speeches from an unknown location, using no personal electronics, and no one except his closest advisers and six bodyguards had access to him.
Very few people knew where he was or where he would be in a few hours. He has never left Lebanon, spending most of his time in bunkers deep underground and appearing at a public rally only once in 2013 wearing a bulletproof vest. His security consisted of approximately one hundred and thirty armed men. So how is it possible that the Israelis were able to locate and kill him?
There is still little information and we cannot expect that Israel or Hezbollah will publish any details. The first in order not to reveal his methods. The other, not to reveal his mistakes and vulnerability.
But one thing can be read now. The deputy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Abbas Nilforúšan, participated in the underground meeting. And as much as Iran is Hezbollah’s biggest ally and funder, it is probably also its weakness. It is known from the past that Israeli spies managed to infiltrate Iranian security structures.
For example, they knew where physicist Muhsín Fachrizádí, a key figure in Iran’s nuclear program, would drive in Iran in 2020. Someone shot the scientist with a remote-controlled machine gun, and the investigation led to an unhappy conclusion for Tehran: the Israelis recruited someone directly from the Revolutionary Guards. Several officers of the Iranian regime’s elite armed wing have mysteriously disappeared in recent years, and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei moved to a secure underground bunker at an undisclosed location on Saturday after news of Nasrallah’s death.
At the end of July this year, the Israelis killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the government residence in Tehran, which is under the supervision and protection of the Revolutionary Guards. Someone must have known exactly the details of Haníj’s program.
With all the technological equipment, such as drones, wiretapping and other forms of surveillance, it is unlikely that such an operation could do without the element known by the abbreviation humint. That is, human intelligence – someone who hears, sees and transmits information in the field. The comparison with Gaza is abysmal. Israeli intelligence did not expect the Hamas attack last October 7. Either she did not have information about him, or she evaluated it incorrectly. He clearly has better resources in Beirut.
Nasrallah had enough enemies in the Arab world as well. When civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, he supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and sent Hezbollah fighters to fight Syrian rebels. He significantly helped him win the war. Paradoxically, in 2015, Nasrallah feared for his life because of the Syrian jihadists of the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front. “He only eats food that is transported to Beirut by Iranian planes,” wrote the London-based Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi at the time.
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Spotlight Aktuálně.cz – Irena Kalhousová | Video: The Spotlight Team