Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with US-made bunker-busting bombs on Friday came as the result of a critical intelligence breach amid decades of infiltration of Iranian and Lebanese militant command structures, it is claimed. Nasrallah died in a brutal assault that saw Israeli F-15I fighter jets drop dozens of munitions on the Hezbollah HQ in Beirut – a rapid succession of strikes dubbed ‘Operation New Order’ that eliminated half of Hezbollah’s leadership council and decimated its top military command.
Expert analysts said the F-15s delivered 2000lb Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) that are designed to penetrate deep into their targets before exploding, allowing Israel’s air force to eliminate Nasrallah (pictured) even as he hid in an underground bunker some 60 feet beneath Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburb. That attack came barely a week after the deadly detonation of thousands of booby-trapped Hezbollah pagers and hundreds of radios which killed dozens of people and left thousands injured. One security source told Reuters less than 24 hours before the momentous strike that Israel has spent 20 years focusing intelligence efforts on Hezbollah so it could hit Nasrallah when it wanted, adding that the quality of the information Israeli military chiefs had received was ‘brilliant’. Meanwhile, another source told French press that Nasrallah’s arrival at Hezbollah HQ was leaked to the IDF by an Iranian mole, suggesting the Lebanese militant chief was compromised by his own backers.
The setup and the ‘betrayal’. Security-conscious Nasrallah had long avoided public appearances for fear of assassination, remaining largely hidden from view since Israel and Hezbollah fought a month-long war in 2006. His movements were heavily restricted and only known to a select few members of his trusted military commanders, while the circle of people he saw in person was very small, according to a source familiar with Nasrallah’s security arrangements. Since the September 17 pager blasts that injured thousands of his fighters, the Hezbollah chief had become even more vigilant. Nasrallah chose to skip the funeral of one of his trusted commanders and began releasing pre-recorded speeches rather than going live on air.
But no amount of security precautions would have prevented Israel’s air force from wiping their adversary out in his own backyard after IDF chiefs received ‘real-time intelligence that Nasrallah was gathering with many senior terrorists’, Israeli military spokesman Nadav Shoshani said. Several security sources in Lebanon declared Nasrallah’s assassination meant Israel must have successfully penetrated the upper echelons of Hezbollah’s command structure with covert operatives and informants that were able to leak details of his movements to the IDF. Military historian and analyst Michel Goya posited that the pager and radio attack was an instrumental step in the hunt for Nasrallah. By crippling the group’s means of secure communication, several members of Hezbollah’s leadership were ‘forced to meet in person’ in the group’s headquarters, he said – something that security concerns would typically never permit.
But once the senior members were confirmed to be in the same location, someone had to alert the Israeli military so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could authorise the strike. ‘This is a massive blow and intelligence failure for Hezbollah,’ Magnus Ranstorp, a veteran Hezbollah expert at the Swedish Defence University. They knew that he was meeting. He was meeting with other commanders. And they just went for him.’ A Lebanese security source informed Le Parisien that an Iranian mole was responsible for leaking the information to Israel. Though this is yet to be corroborated, it would constitute a devastating intelligence breach for Hezbollah and its backers in the Islamic Republic. Both Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) now face the enormous challenge of plugging the infiltration in its ranks that allowed its arch-enemy to destroy weapons sites, booby-trap its communications and assassinate the veteran leader. ‘Israel clearly infiltrated Hezbollah at highly sensitive and consequential levels, killing senior command networks with airstrikes, paralysing its communication and coordination capacity, and grinding the organisation down, denying it time to recover and regroup thus far,’ RUSI’s Senior Research Fellow for Middle East Security, Dr Burcu Ozcelik said. ‘This has been the culmination of years of complex, synchronised intelligence-gathering in the Israeli security establishment since before 2006.’
Inside Israel’s monumental strike. A picture emerged on social media last week that showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding a telephone to his ear, flanked by a pair of military officials. It is said that image depicts the moment that Netanyahu gave IDF officials the green light to launch the fateful strike on Hezbollah HQ. The attack unfolded while Netanyahu was in New York to speak at the UN General Assembly, with two Israeli intelligence officials confirming to Reuters that the Prime Minister authorised the attack on the sidelines of the assembly. Upon Netanyahu’s order, a flight of F-15I fighter jets from the 69th Squadron of the IAF took off from the Hatzerim Airbase in southern Israel, completing the cross-country flight in a matter of minutes before soaring over the Lebanese border and bearing down on Beirut. Images and videos of their take-off released by the IAF enabled military aviation experts to determine the kinds of munitions that were able to successfully target Nasrallah in his underground HQ.
The F-15s appeared to deploy devastating 2000lb US-made ‘bunker buster’ munitions – the GBU-31(V)3/B JDAM – which are designed to penetrate deep into hardened targets before detonating their high explosives for maximum effect. The precision-guided bombs find their target with pinpoint accuracy, while the sheer weight of the weapon, reinforced with a thick steel casing, sees it smash through layers of earth and concrete. Once inside, the delayed fuse triggers the explosion, leaving its helpless targets with no escape. Brigadier General Amichai Levin, commander of Israel’s Hatzerim Airbase, said that all the bombs hit the target in a matter of seconds, and shocking videos and images from the blast site served as a testament to the fearsome power of the JDAMS. The munitions destroyed three of four buildings that were located above the Hezbollah HQ in Dahiyeh and left enormous craters in the reddish-brown earth. ‘Dozens of munitions hit the target within seconds with very high precision, and this is part of what is required to hit underground sites at this depth,’ Levin declared.
Twisted metal rods were seen poking out of the remnants of reinforced concrete structures as rescuers pulled out bodies from the rubble with winches, such was the depth of the craters. Nasrallah’s body was reportedly recovered intact this weekend, suggesting that he may have died from the sheer force of the blasts, or suffocated after being trapped underground. The Israeli Lieutenant Colonel who commands the 69th Squadron, known only as ‘Mem’, gave few details other than to declare the strike on Nasrallah proceeded ‘smoothly’. ‘We went to strike in the heart of Beirut, in the Dahiyeh. We knew who we wanted to target,’ he said. But IDF chief Herzi Halevi told the Jerusalem Post that the strike had been a long time in the making, suggesting the air force was waiting for final confirmation of Nasrallah’s whereabouts before the attack. This strike had been planned for a long time and was executed at the right time, with precision,’ Halevi said.
What next? In the wake of Israel’s brutal attacks and the loss of its leader, Hezbollah is certain to fight on. The group, whose name means ‘Party of God’, had somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 fighters ahead of the current escalation according to US and Israeli estimates, along with large weapons stockpiles and an extensive tunnel network near Israel’s border. Thanks to decades of backing from Iran, prior to the current conflict Hezbollah was among the world’s most well-armed non-conventional armies, with an estimated arsenal of 150,000 rockets, missiles and drones. That is ten times the size of the armoury the group had in 2006, during its last war with Israel, according to Israeli estimates. Over the past year, even more weapons have flowed into Lebanon from Iran, along with significant amounts of financial aid, a source familiar with Hezbollah’s thinking told Reuters. Hezbollah has also shown an ability to replace lost commanders quickly. Nasrallah’s cousin, Hashem Safieddine, has long been tipped as the slain leader’s successor. ‘You kill one, they get a new one,’ said a European diplomat of the group’s approach.
In the meantime, Hezbollah’s acting leader Naim Kassem vowed to keep battling Israel and said the Lebanese militant group was prepared for a long fight ‘Israel was not able to affect our (military) capabilities,’ he declared in a televised statement today. But since October 7, the group has been materially and psychologically weakened to an extent never before seen. Including Nasrallah, Israel’s military says it has killed eight of Hezbollah’s nine most senior military commanders this year, mostly in the past week. These commanders led units ranging from the rocket division to the elite Radwan force. Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ deputy commander Abbas Nilforoushan was also killed in the Israeli strikes on Beirut on Friday, Iranian media reported on Saturday, citing a state TV report. Israeli air strikes have hit more than a thousand Hezbollah targets in the past couple of weeks, Israeli officials have claimed, and roughly 1,500 Hezbollah fighters were maimed by the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies on September 17-18.
An Israeli security official told Reuters this weekend that ‘a very respectable portion’ of Hezbollah’s missile stocks had been destroyed, while other officials have said the fact that Hezbollah has only been able to launch a couple of hundred missiles a day in the past week suggests its capabilities have been diminished. RUSI’s Dr Burcu Ozcelik told MailOnline that the Lebanese group and their Iranian backers now find themselves at a critical juncture. ‘Hezbollah will not vanish overnight as a significant actor inside Lebanon and the region despite the pummelling it has endured… but Hezbollah’s status as Iran’s most strategically significant asset and main deterrent against Israel has been severely degraded now. ‘How Iran chooses to respond will be highly consequential as the conflict evolves.’
Hezbollah’s belief that it would survive by relying on its weapons arsenal, manpower and support from Iran may be misguided, particularly given that Iran has not yet sprung to its defence. ‘Hezbollah has been the most powerful military and political faction in Lebanon, but its role remained consistently contentious. Consensus on its legitimate role in the country was never achieved,’ Ozcelik said. ‘Over the past few months, Hezbollah may have thought that an equilibrium would be preserved and a rollercoaster of intensity and de-escalation would prevail. But the deep entanglement between Lebanon and Hezbollah is now being tested and interrogated by those who have long opposed the group.’
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