Israel killed Hezbollah leader Nasrallah with 80 tons of bunker-buster bombs after spies spent years penetrating his entire network
The devastating airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was the result of a years-long operation by Israeli intelligence 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 hideout on Friday and kill the slippery Nasrallah — who has survived multiple previous attempts to assassinate him.
Nasrallah’s death was exactly what Israel had been hoping for when it launched a bombing campaign that day, the Financial Times reports.Unbeknownst 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 — which is one of the largest and best armed militias in the world.After failing to kill Nasrallah multiple times during the 2006 war, Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) devoted itself to penetrating Hezbollah.
The Jewish state got its big break in 2012 when the militant group deployed its fighters to Syria to help ally President Bashar al-Assad quell an uprising.Former Israeli intelligence officials and Lebanese politicians told the FT that the battle in Syria unearthed a trove of information from the otherwise secretive terror group, with Hezbollah constantly publishing information on its slain fighters that revealed their personal information.“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 the outlet.
“The complacency and arrogance was accompanied by a shift in its membership — they started to become flabby.”The new data allowed Israel to compile extensive profiles on Hezbollah’s operatives, including the top chiefs who would attend the funerals of the...