Israel tried several times to eliminate Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah but only succeeded when it fundamentally changed its approach to confronting the group and also restructured its intelligence gathering, the Financial Times writes, citing interlocutors among intelligence officials.
Israel has expanded its intelligence gathering on Hezbollah over the past two decades, looking beyond its military wing to the group’s political activities and its growing ties to Iran and Syria, a former senior intelligence officer told the newspaper. Miri Eisin.
According to her, assistance to the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in the civil war, it revealed to Israel the structure of Hezbollah and allowed it to obtain a clear “intelligence picture”: who was promoted, who was corrupt, who had just returned from a trip with a mysterious purpose. At the same time, while Hezbollah was actively recruiting new fighters for a major war, Israel was able to infiltrate spies and find potential deserters.
Furthermore, due to the war in Syria, an enormous amount of information useful to Israeli intelligence has been made available to the public. In particular, they turned out to be obituaries periodically published by Hezbollah in the form of “martyr posters” with information about the origin of the deceased fighter, the place of his death, as well as his circle of acquaintances who published this message on social networks. be useful. Even more revealing were the funerals, during which, albeit briefly, the group’s top commanders emerged from the shadows.
Over time, Israel’s focus on Hezbollah grew, with intelligence relying on technological advantages such as spy satellites, sophisticated drones, and cyberattacks that turn phones into listening devices. As the Financial Times discovered, Israel had so much data that it created a special team of specialists who created algorithms to study terabytes of images to detect the slightest changes and look for improvised explosive devices on the side of the roads, a vent above tunnels or the The sudden appearance of concrete reinforcement is a sign of the availability of a bunker.
After Israel identified another Hezbollah fighter, information about his movements was entered into the database. Information also flowed from sources such as his wife’s phone, a car’s odometer, a drone flying overhead, hacked surveillance cameras and even from the control panel of a modern television that allows it to record his voice. Any deviation from the usual patterns of behavior became an alarm for Israeli intelligence and made it possible, for example, to identify mid-level commanders of anti-tank units, RBC clarifies.
“Israel had many opportunities, much intelligence waiting to be used. “We could have used these capabilities much earlier during this war, but we didn’t.” – said the former official.
The Financial Times writes that in recent years, Israeli intelligence has periodically discovered the whereabouts of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who lived mainly in bunkers.
According to the newspaper’s sources, in October 2023, when Israel was attacked by Hamas and fired upon by Hezbollah, Israeli planes took off with orders to bomb Nasrallah’s location, but were returned to base after the White House demanded it be cancelled. the operation.
As a result, he was eliminated on September 28 on the southern outskirts of Beirut, while at his clandestine headquarters. According to Le Parisien, an Iranian mole informed Israel about Nasrallah’s imminent arrival here.
