Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah underestimated Israel's willingness to assassinate him, believing that Israel wanted to avoid a full-scale war, according to a New York Times investigation published on Sunday.
Despite warnings from his aides, he remained in a Beirut bunker 40 feet underground on September 27, which is where Israeli F-15 fighter jets dropped massive explosives, ending the life of the longtime leader of Iran's Lebanese terrorist proxy along with other senior Hezbollah leaders.
His body was found the next day, buried in the rubble in the embrace of a top Iranian general based in Lebanon, both having died of suffocation, according to Israeli intelligence reports.
The Times investigation showed the extent of Israel's decades-long penetration into the radical Shi'ite movement, closely tracking the terrorist group's commanders and culminating in the targeted killing of Nasrallah, which was preceded by weeks earlier by the remote detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah.
Drawing on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials from Israel, the United States, and Europe, the Times article paints a picture of an organization deeply compromised by Israeli espionage efforts.
The Israelis had almost total access to Nasrallah through listening devices in Hezbollah bunkers, placed by double agents and were able to track the day to day movements of all of Hezbollah’s leadership.
In 2012, the Israel Defense Forces' 8200 signals intelligence unit obtained a cache of information detailing the leaders' secret hideouts and the group's stockpile of missiles and rockets.
The reporting also revealed that in late 2023, a Hezbollah technician got suspicious about the batteries in the rigged walkie-talkies, and in September, Unit 8200 received intelligence that Hezbollah operatives were sending pagers to Iran for inspection.
Fearing that the operation might be compromised, senior intelligence officials convinced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to authorize the detonation of the devices, initiating the series of events that led to Nasrallah's assassination.
A fragile ceasefire went into effect on November 27, after more than a year of hostilities in which Hezbollah terrorists launched thousands of rockets, missiles and drones at Israeli territory, mostly in the north, where nearly 70,000 residents were evacuated. Israel responded with a devastating aerial campaign and, beginning on October 1, a ground invasion of Southern Lebanon.
It was reported on Sunday that Israel might keep troops positioned in areas of Southern Lebanon past the 60-day deadline for a withdrawal because the Lebanese Army is slow to fulfil its obligation to deploy south of the Litani River and soldiers are still finding Hezbollah weapons and infrastructure.
The IDF has confiscated more than 85,000 weapons, missiles and other terrorism apparatuses belonging to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, a military spokesperson revealed on Friday.
Under the terms of the ceasefire deal reached with Beirut, Israeli forces are to withdraw gradually from the country.
Hezbollah must retreat north of the Litani River, about 20 miles north of the border, while the Lebanese Armed Forces deploy along the 75-mile frontier, along with monitors from the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
