Behind the dismantling of Hezbollah: Decades of Israeli intelligence

By Mark Mazzetti, Sheera Frenkel and Ronen Bergman

 

Right up until he was assassinated, Hassan Nasrallah did not believe that Israel would kill him. 

As he hunkered inside a Hezbollah fortress 40 feet underground on September 27, his aides urged him to go to a safer location. Nasrallah brushed it off, according to intelligence collected by Israel and shared later with Western allies. What he did not realise was that Israeli spy agencies were tracking his every movement — and had been doing so for years. The death of Hezbollah’s feared leader, who for decades commanded a Lebanese militia in its fight against the Israeli state, was the culmination of a two-week offensive.  The campaign combined covert technological wizardry with brute military force, including remotely detonating explosives hidden in thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, as well as a withering aerial bombardment with the aim of destroying thousands of missiles and rockets capable of hitting Israel. It was also the result of two decades of methodical intelligence work in preparation for an all-out war that many expected would eventually come. 

 

A New York Times investigation, based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli, American, and European officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations, reveals just how extensively Israeli spies had penetrated Hezbollah. 

They recruited people to plant listening devices in Hezbollah bunkers, tracked meetings between one top commander and his four mistresses, and had near constant visibility into the movements of the militia group’s leaders. 

There were stumbles, as in late 2023 when a Hezbollah technician got suspicious about the batteries in the walkie-talkies. And there were scrambles to save their efforts, as in September, when Unit 8200 collected intelligence that Hezbollah operatives were concerned enough about the pagers that they were sending some of them to Iran for inspection. 

Worried that the operation would be exposed, top intelligence officials persuaded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to give the order to detonate them, setting in motion the campaign that culminated in the assassination of Nasrallah. 

Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah was a significant victory for a country that, one year earlier, had suffered the greatest intelligence failure in its history, when Hamas-led fighters invaded it on October 7, 2023, killed more than 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. 

The Hezbollah campaign, part of a broader war that has killed thousands of people in Lebanon and displaced more than a million, defanged one of Israel’s greatest adversaries and dealt a blow to Iran’s regional strategy of arming and funding paramilitary groups bent on Israel’s destruction. The weakening of the Iran-led axis reshaped the dynamics in West Asia, contributing to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. 

The contrast between Israel’s approaches to Hezbollah and to Hamas is also stark and devastating. 

The intense intelligence focus on Hezbollah shows that the country’s leaders believed that the Lebanese militia group posed the greatest imminent threat to Israel. 

And yet it was Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group Israeli intelligence believed had neither the interest nor the abilities to attack Israel, that launched a surprise attack and caught the nation unprepared. 

Israel was in a standoff with Nasrallah and his top commanders of Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” for decades, and Israeli intelligence assessments have concluded that it will take years, possibly more than a decade, for the group to rebuild after their deaths.