The airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah resulted from a years-long operation by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, which infiltrated Nasrallah’s entire network and tracked him to his underground command center in Beirut.
On Friday, September 27, the Israeli military deployed 80 tons of specially designed bunker-busting bombs to penetrate the heavily fortified bunker, resulting in Nasrallah’s death.
According to a report by the Financial Times, Nasrallah’s death was precisely what Israel had hoped for with the attack. Unbeknownst to him, Israeli intelligence had been monitoring the movements of Hezbollah’s leadership through years of hacking and surveillance.
After several failed attempts to assassinate Nasrallah during the 2006 war, Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) devised plans to infiltrate Hezbollah. Progress was made in 2012 when the militant group sent fighters to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad during the civil war.
Former Israeli intelligence officials and Lebanese politicians told the FT that the conflict in Syria yielded a wealth of information, as Hezbollah frequently published details about its slain fighters, revealing personal information that Israel exploited to create extensive profiles of its operatives.
Israel began hacking into Hezbollah’s communication devices, allowing spies to track the movements of operatives, sometimes using their wives’ cell phones. They even monitored Hezbollah leaders through hacked surveillance cameras and by reading their cars’ odometers.
As a result, Israeli officials learned that deviations in Hezbollah’s routines indicated an imminent attack. “They transitioned from being highly disciplined to allowing more people than necessary into their ranks,” noted Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deemed Nasrallah’s killing necessary and a potential “historic turning point” in the Middle East. Following Nasrallah’s death, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was relocated to a secure location.
While Netanyahu was in New York delivering a speech at the United Nations, he ordered the strike against Nasrallah. Israel had been planning the attack for months, developing bombs equipped with timed explosions to penetrate deeper into the earth for maximum effect, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Hezbollah has not confirmed the cause of Nasrallah’s death, but Lebanese medical and security sources told Reuters that he likely died from suffocation and blunt trauma after his body was recovered intact on Sunday.
