The airstrike that killed
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was the result of a years-long operation by
Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, that penetrated the terror leader’s entire
network allowing him to be tracked to his underground command center in Beirut.
The Israeli military then used
80 tons of specially designed bunker-busting bombs to blast through the heavily
fortified bunker on Friday, September 27 which killed Nasrallah.
According to a report by the
Financial Times, Nasrallah’s d£ath was exactly what Israel had been hoping for
when it attacked.
Unknown to Nasrallah, Israeli
intelligence was well aware of the movements of Hezbollah’s leadership
following years of hacking and surveillance work on the Lebanese terror group
according to the report.
After failing to kill Nasrallah
multiple times during the 2006 war, Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate
(Aman) created plans to to penetrate Hezbollah, the report says.
Israel made progress in 2012
when the militant group deployed its fighters to Syria to help ally President
Bashar al-Assad during it's civil war.
Former Israeli intelligence officials and
Lebanese politicians told the FT that the battle in Syria unearthed a trove of
information, with Hezbollah constantly publishing information on its slain
fighters that revealed their personal information.
The new data allowed Israel to compile
extensive profiles on Hezbollah’s operatives, including the top chiefs who
would attend the funerals of the slain fighters.
The Jewish state then began
hacking into the terror group’s communication devices, with spies able to track
down the exact movements of Hezbollah’s operatives, sometimes through their
wives’ cell phones. Israel’s spies also tracked Hezbollah leaders’ movements by
hacking surveillance cameras in Lebanon, and even reading their cars’
odometers.
As a result, Israel learned that whenever the
routines of the terror group deviated, an attack was imminent, Israeli
officials told the FT.“They went from being highly disciplined and purists to
someone who [when defending Assad] let in a lot more people than they should
have,” Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told
FT.
“The complacency and arrogance was accompanied
by a shift in its membership — they started to become flabby.”
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu
called the killing of Nasrallah necessary and a potential “historic turning
point” in the Middle East.
Following the death of Nasrallah, Iran’s
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was moved to a secure location.
Netanyahu was in New York for
his speech at the United Nations when he ordered the decision to drop the bomb
to take out Nasrallah. The Jewish state had been planning the attack for months
as it developed bombs outfitted with timed explosions that would dig through
the earth, allowing the next bomb to reach further down, the Wall Street
Journal reports.
While Hezbollah did not say how
Nasrallah d!ed, Lebanese medical and security sources told Reuters that the
terror leader had no direct wounds and likely died from the blunt trauma of the
blast after his body was recovered intact on Sunday.
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