Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to flee Lebanon days before he was killed in an Israeli attack in Beirut. Three Iranian sources told Reuters this.
Immediately after the pagers exploded en masse in Lebanon on September 17, Khamenei sent a message to Nasrallah through an envoy, urging him to go to Iran. In his message, Khamenei cited intelligence reports that Israel had agents in Hezbollah and was planning to kill the group’s leader, a senior Iranian official told Reuters.
This envoy was a major general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Abbas Nilforushanthat he was in the same bunker as Nasrallah at the time of the attack and died with him, one of the officials clarified.
Following the death of the Hezbollah leader, Khamenei is deeply concerned about the infiltration of Israeli agents into the highest government circles in Tehran, three Iranian sources told Reuters.
Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli attack in Beirut in late September. Le Parisien newspaper, citing a source in the Lebanese security services, wrote that an Iranian “mole” informed the Israeli side about Nasrallah’s arrival at Hezbollah headquarters.
Former president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (he led the country from 2005 to 2013) also claimed that Tehran had created a unit to counter Israel, whose head turned out to be an agent of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.
Shortly before Nasrallah’s death, massive explosions of pagers and other communication devices occurred throughout Lebanon. Dozens of Hezbollah members were killed and wounded as a result, and the group blamed Israel.
According to the Financial Times, Israeli intelligence spent years collecting terabytes of information to uncover Hezbollah’s fighters, hierarchy and locations. The sources of information were the wives’ phones, TV remote controls and hacked surveillance cameras, RBC recalls.
