New Delhi:

Hours before Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an airstrike in Lebanon’s Beirut, an Iranian mole informed Israeli authorities of his location, French newspaper Le Parisien has reported.

Citing a security source in Lebanon, the report said the mole had informed Israeli authorities that Nasrallah would be at Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs to attend a meeting with several top members of the organisation.

Around 1.30 pm IST yesterday (11 am Lebanon time), Israel Defence Forces said in a post on X, “Hassan Nasrallah will no longer be able to terrorize the world.” Later in the day, Hezbollah confirmed the news. “Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah… has joined his great, immortal martyr comrades whom he led for about 30 years,” it said in a statement.

How Israel Boosted Spies In Fight Against Hezbollah

According to a report in The New York Times, Israel’s recent successes against Hezbollah are a direct result of the country’s decision to devote far more intelligence resources to target Hezbollah after the 2006 war with the Iran-backed group. The Israeli army and the intelligence agencies, the report said, failed to score a decisive victory in that 34-day conflict. The war ended with a UN-brokered cease-fire and allowed Hezbollah, despite losses, to regroup and prepare for the next war.

In the years that followed, Israel deployed a lot of resources to collect information about Hezbollah’s leadership and strategy. Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, built cutting-edge cyber tools to better intercept Hezbollah’s cellphones and other communications, the NYT report said. New teams were created within combat ranks to ensure that valuable information was quickly passed on to soldiers and the air force, it added.

The Pager Bombs And Nasrallah’s Admission

In a recent televised speech, Nasrallah had said Hezbollah suffered an “unprecedented blow” after Israel detonated explosive-laden pagers and hand-held radios. The attacks killed 37 people and wounded nearly 3,000 people in two days. Nasrallah had then warned Israel of “tough retribution and just punishment, where it expects it and where it does not”.

A Lebanese investigation found that the pagers had been booby-trapped, AFP reported.

Hezbollah members had started communicating via pagers and walkie-talkies after Israel penetrated cellphones. But that did not protect them.

The Mossad, the NYT report said, appears to have created a shell company in Budapest and made the pagers under license from a company in Taiwan. Before the pagers arrived in Lebanon, Israeli operatives installed explosives inside them. The operation was scaled to produce thousands of pagers, requiring sophisticated manufacturing, it said.

Top Hezbollah Leaders Targeted

According to the NYT report, Israel’s investment in greater intelligence gathering first paid off in 2008 when Mossad worked with the CIA to kill top Hezbollah operative, Imad Mugniyah, in Syria. In 2020, Qassim Suleimani, who headed Iran’s Quds Force, flew to Syria’s Damascus and drove in a convoy to Beirut to meet Nasrallah. Israel did not try to kill Nasrallah then for fear of starting a war. It passed on the information to the US and Suleimani was killed in a drone strike at Baghdad airport, the report said.

The October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israeli cities set off the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. As Israel’s counterstrike set off a war in Gaza, Hezbollah started targeting Israel.

Over the past couple of months, Tel Aviv went all-out against Hezbollah. A strike on July 30 killed Fuad Shukr, one of the group’s top military commanders. About three weeks later, a strike killed Ibrahim Aqil, head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, and 15 other commanders. Days later, another strike killed Ibrahim Mohammed Kobeissi, who commanded several Hezbollah units, including a guided missiles unit. The next day, Mohammed Srur, the head of Hezbollah’s drone unit, was killed in a strike.

Chip Usher, a former CIA analyst who has worked with Israeli intelligence, has told NYT, “The secrets of their success come down to a couple of factors. They have a fairly defined target deck. That makes it easier for them to bring a tremendous amount of focus to what they do. They’re in a shadow war with Hezbollah and Iran. And they’re extraordinarily patient.”

Washington, United States:

US President Joe Biden on Saturday called the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah “a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis and Lebanese civilians.”

In a statement a day after an Israeli air strike killed Nasrallah, Biden reiterated US support for “Israel’s right to defend itself against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups.”

Biden added that he had directed the defense secretary to “further enhance the defense posture of US military forces in the Middle East region to deter aggression and reduce the risk of a broader regional war.”

Biden’s statement came as the State Department ordered the family members of its diplomats in Beirut to leave, while authorizing the departure of some staff “due to the volatile and unpredictable security situation in Beirut.”

The agency also urged US citizens to leave “while commercial options still remain available.”

Military officials in Israel announced on Saturday morning that Nasrallah, who headed the armed movement for more than three decades, died in a bombardment targeting the group’s headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut Friday night.

Hezbollah officially confirmed the death hours later.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

People watch the speech of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on a TV screen as they sit in a cafe in the southern suburbs of Beirut, on September 19, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

The Israeli military announced on Saturday (September 28, 2024) that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a strike on Beirut.

“Hassan Nasrallah is dead,” military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani announced on X. Military spokesman Captain David Avraham also confirmed to AFP that the Hezbollah chief had been “eliminated” following strikes on Friday (September 27, 2024) on the Lebanese capital Beirut.

Also read: Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon LIVE updates

While a source close to Lebanon’s Hezbollah group said on Saturday (September 28, 2024) that contact had been lost since last evening with chief Hassan Nasrallah, after Israel said it had “eliminated” him in a strike on the group’s southern Beirut bastion.

“Contact with Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has been lost since Friday evening,” said the source, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. He did not confirm whether Nasrallah had been killed.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah recently his speech condemned the Israeli pager attacks that killed not just Hezbollah members but also unarmed Lebanese citizens. “There is no doubt that we have been subjected to a major security and military blow that is unprecedented in the history of the resistance and unprecedented in the history of Lebanon,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said.