(Reuters) – After the assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah faces a major challenge to speed up infiltration in its ranks that allow arch-enemies of Israel to destroy weapons sites, destroy communications and kill veteran leaders, who are everywhere. has been a closely guarded secret for years.
Nasrallah’s killing at the command headquarters on Friday came nearly a week after Israel’s deadly blasts from hundreds of booby-trapped fences and radios. It was the culmination of a rapid succession of attacks that removed half of Hezbollah’s leadership council and destroyed the top military command.
In the days before and hours after Nasrallah’s killing, Reuters spoke to more than a dozen sources in Lebanon, Israel, Iran and Syria who provided details of the damage Israel inflicted on the powerful Shiite paramilitary group, including supply lines and command structures. All request anonymity to speak about sensitive matters.
One source familiar with Israeli thinking told Reuters, less than 24 hours before the attack, that Israel had spent 20 years focusing its intelligence efforts on Hezbollah and could press Nasrallah at will, including at his headquarters.
The man called the intelligence “brilliant,” without elaborating.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and close ministers authorized the attack on Wednesday, two Israeli officials told Reuters. The attack came while Netanyahu was in New York to address the UN General Assembly.
Nasrallah has avoided public appearances since the previous 2006 war. He has long been under surveillance, his movements are restricted and the circle of people he sees is very small, according to sources familiar with Nasrallah’s security arrangements. The killings suggested the group had been infiltrated by informants for Israel, the source said.
Hezbollah leaders have been more cautious than usual since the Sept. 17 fence explosion, fearing Israel will try to kill them, a security source familiar with the group’s thinking told Reuters a week ago, not attending the commander’s funeral. and pre-recorded the broadcast of the speech a few days before.
Hezbollah’s media office did not respond to a request for comment on this story. US President Joe Biden on Saturday called Nasrallah’s killing a “measure of justice” for his many victims, and said the United States supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran-backed groups.
Israel said it carried out the attack on Nasrallah by placing a bomb in his underground headquarters under a residential building south of Beirut.
“This is a huge blow and an intelligence failure for Hezbollah,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a veteran Hezbollah expert at the Swedish Defense University. “He knew he was meeting. He was meeting with another commander. And he was just looking for him.”
Including Nasrallah, the Israeli military says it has killed eight of Hezbollah’s nine most senior military commanders this year, mostly in the past week. This commander leads units ranging from the rocket division to Radwan’s elite forces.
About 1,500 Hezbollah fighters were disabled by fences and walkie talkies that exploded on September 17 and 18.
On Saturday, Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani told reporters in a briefing that the military had “real” knowledge that Nasrallah and other leaders were gathering. Shoshani did not say how they knew, but said the leaders were meeting to plan an attack on Israel.
Brigadier General Amichai Levin, commander of Israel’s Hatzerim Air Base, told reporters that dozens of munitions struck the target within seconds.
“The operation was complex and planned for a long time,” Levin said.
DECIDED
Hezbollah has shown the ability to change commanders quickly, and Nasrallah’s cousin Hashem Safieddine, as well as a cleric who wears a black turban denoting descent from Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, has long been tipped as a successor.
“You kill one, they get a new one,” a European diplomat said of the group’s approach.
The group, called the Party of God, will fight: according to US and Israeli estimates it had about 40,000 fighters before the current escalation, along with a large stockpile of weapons and an extensive network of tunnels near the Israeli border.
Founded in Teheran in 1982, the Shiite paramilitary outfit is the most feared member of the Axis of Resistance of anti-Israel allied irregular forces, and an important regional player.
But it has weakened materially and psychologically in the last 10 days.
Thanks to decades of withdrawal from Iran, before the current conflict, Hezbollah is one of the most heavily armed non-conventional armies in the world, with an arsenal of 150,000 rockets, missiles and drones, according to US estimates.
That is ten times the size of the arsenal in 2006, during the last war with Israel, according to Israeli estimates.
In the past year, even more weapons have flowed into Lebanon from Iran, along with large amounts of financial aid, sources familiar with Hezbollah’s thinking said.
There are few public estimates detailing how much of this arsenal has been destroyed by Israeli attacks over the past week, which have reached Hezbollah strongholds in the Bekka Valley, far from Lebanon’s border with Israel.
One Western diplomat in the Middle East told Reuters before Friday’s attack that Hezbollah had lost 20%-25% of its missile capacity in the active conflict, including in hundreds of Israeli strikes this week. The diplomat did not provide evidence or details of the assessment.
Israeli security officials said a “respectable part” of Hezbollah’s missile stockpile had been destroyed, without giving further details.
In recent days, Israel has struck more than 1,000 Hezbollah targets. The security official, when asked about the long list of military targets, said Israel has matched Hezbollah’s two decades of preparations to prevent rocket launches in the first place – complementing the Iron Dome air defense system that often destroys missiles fired. in the Jewish state.
Israeli officials say that Hezbollah has only been able to launch two hundred missiles a day for the past week as evidence that its capabilities have diminished.
CONNECTION OF IRAN
Before the attack on Nasrallah, three Iranian sources told Reuters Iran is planning to send additional missiles to Hezbollah to prepare for a prolonged war.
The weapons to be supplied include short- to medium-range ballistic missiles including Iran’s Zelzals and an improved precision version called the Fateh 110, the first Iranian source said.
Reuters was unable to reach the source after Nasrallah’s assassination.
While Iran is willing to provide military support, two Iranian sources said it does not want to be directly involved in a confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel. The rapid escalation in hostilities over the past week follows a year of fighting linked to the Gaza war.
The deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Abbas Nilforoushan, was killed in an Israeli attack in Beirut on Friday, Iranian media reported on Friday, citing state TV reports.
Hezbollah may need certain warheads and missiles along with drones and missile parts to replenish those destroyed by Israel’s attack on Lebanon last week, a senior Syrian military intelligence source added.
Iranian supplies in the past have reached Hezbollah by air and sea. On Saturday, Lebanon’s transport ministry told Iranian planes not to enter its airspace after Israel warned air traffic control at Beirut airport that it would use “forces” if the plane lands, a source in the ministry told Reuters.
The source said it was unclear what was on the plane.
The land corridor is now the best route for missiles, parts and drones, through Iraq and Syria, with the help of allied armed groups in those countries, Iranian security officials told Reuters this week.
Syrian military sources, however, said Israeli drone surveillance and attacks targeting truck convoys had compromised the route. This year, Israel stepped up attacks on weapons depots and supply routes in Syria to humiliate Hezbollah ahead of the war, Reuters reported in June.
In August, an Israeli drone struck weapons hidden in a commercial trailer in Syria, the source said. This week, the Israeli military said warplanes bombed unspecified infrastructure used to deliver weapons to Hezbollah on the Syria-Lebanon border.
Joseph Votel, a former army general who led US forces in the Middle East, said Israel and its allies could intercept missiles sent by Iran over land to Hezbollah today.
“It’s probably a risk we’re going to take, frankly,” he said. (This story has been refiled to remove foreign words in paragraph 9)
