 "A supporter of Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen Pakistan holds a photograph of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as he wipes his eyes during a protest against his killing, in Islamabad. AP")
In a targeted strike on Friday, Israel killed one of its biggest enemies – Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The cleric, who led the Lebanon-based militant group for 32 years, had been an elusive figure, avoiding public appearances for decades. He has survived multiple assassination attempts.
At last, Israel managed to assassinate Nasrallah in a Hezbollah stronghold – the group’s command headquarters in southern Beirut on Friday (September 27). The killing comes days after hundreds of pagers and walkie-talkies were booby-trapped reportedly by the Israeli military and intelligence agency Mossad.
It’s been one deadly blow after another for Hezbollah, one of the most influential non-state actors in West Asia. Its top leadership has been decimated and the militant group has been rattled by Israel’s spycraft.
Hassan Nasrallah has been a target for years but how did the Israeli military finally manage to kill him? We explain.
Tracking Hassan Nasrallah
Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire for close to a year now – since Hamas attacked the Jewish nation on October 7 2023. But Israel stepped up its offensive on September 17 this year with attacks on Hezbollah pagers, followed by the detonation of walkie-talkies.
The exploding devices , which Israel has not claimed responsibility for, crippled Hezbollah’s communications. According to experts, the operation reflected how deeply Israel Defense Forces’ sophisticated Unit 8200 penetrated Hezbollah’s communications devices.
Yet Friday’s airstrike in Beirut that killed Nasrallah went back years. Israel has been tracking the Hezbollah leader’s movement for long and was reportedly aware of his whereabouts for months.
The decision to strike the Hezbollah headquarters was taken because Israeli leaders believed they only had a “short window of opportunity” before Nasrallah would “disappear” to another location, three senior Israeli defence officials told The New York Times (NYT).
Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani told journalists, “We had used the intelligence we’ve been working for years to gather, and we had real-time information, and we carried out this strike.”
Retired Colonel Miri Eisen, a senior fellow at Israel’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University, reiterated that the strike was the product of extensive work. “Israel’s capabilities when it comes to Hezbollah show the depth of the intelligence infiltration into Hezbollah lines,” she said, adding these were “not things that were invented in the last 11 months” after Hezbollah began striking the north.
However, Israeli officials started seriously exploring the option of eliminating Nasrallah in recent days.
The spy that gave away Nasrallah’s location
Hezbollah is Iran’s main proxy and it turns out it was an Iranian mole , who provided Israeli authorities with the critical information about Nasrallah’s precise location just hours before Friday’s strike.
The mole informed Israeli officials that the Hezbollah leader was at the underground headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahieh, according to the French newspaper Le Parisien. He was meeting with top members of the organisation to plan further attacks on Israel.
The publication quoted an unnamed Lebanese security source as saying that the Iranian infiltrator informed the Israelis about the arrival of Nasrallah on Friday afternoon at the headquarters in the heart of Dahieh.
Using the intel input, “the Israelis went all out; they didn’t want to miss their target,” the source said.
The precision strike with ‘US-made’ bombs
Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani told the media, “We had real-time intelligence, an opportunity, an operational opportunity that allowed us to carry out this attack.” The military called the operation “New Order”.
Hezbollah’s underground headquarters was reportedly highly secured, built under a complex of six residential buildings.
A military video showed F15 jets taking off from Hatzerim Airbase in south Israel on Friday to carry out the operation.
The head of the Israeli air force squadron that carried out the attack told Israel’s Army Radio that pilots were given the details of the target only a short time before take off. “The pilots did not know what the target was in the days the (strike) was being planned,” the officer, identified only as Lieutenant Colonel M, said. “We exposed the teams to the target only a few hours before carrying it out and they understood what they were going for.”
A video published by the IDF on Telegram showed eight planes that reportedly were used in the attack. They were fitted with 2000-pound (900 kg) bombs including the US-made BLU-109 with a JDAM kit, a precision guidance system that attaches to bombs, Trevor Ball, a former US Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, was quoted as saying by The New York Times. Senior officials told the paper that “more than 80 bombs were dropped over a period of several minutes to kill” Nasrallah.
These explosives are known as bunker busters, which penetrate underground before detonating. In Friday’s attack, a series of such timed explosives pierced through the Hezbollah bunker, which was at least 60 feet below the surface of a civilian neighbourhood.
Interestingly, the Biden administration had paused the shipment of the 2000-pound bombs to Israel in May this year amid growing concerns over their use in Gaza.
“About a hundred munitions were used, with bombers dropping them every two seconds in perfect precision,” Brig.-Gen. Amichai Levine, the newly appointed commander of Hatzerim Airbase, said about the operation.
After the strikes, a cloud of orange smoke enveloped Beirut. That was the end of Nasrallah. The air strikes left craters up to 16 feet across, AFP photographers said.
At the time of the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, where he was giving a speech even as many delegates walked out. An hour after the attack, his office released a photo of the PM giving a go-ahead for the strike on the phone.
Lebanon’s health ministry gave a preliminary toll of six dead and 91 wounded in the raid. Apart from Nasrallah, other top commanders died in the strike. On Saturday, Hezbollah fighters found Nasrallah’s body along with top Hezbollah military commander, Ali Karaki.
Nasrallah’s death comes as a big victory for Israel. Its next steps are being watched closely. Even as the Israeli military continues to pound Lebanon, it remains to be seen if it will go ahead with ground operations to tackle Hezbollah’s threat along the northern border.
With inputs from agencies