How a handshake led to Hezbollah chief’s assassination

The IDF has managed to infiltrate Hezbollah by all intelligence means, which has led to the almost complete decapitation of the terrorist group.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Israel succeeded in assassinating Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah Friday because someone shook his hand in greeting, Saudi Arabian station Al Hadath reported Sunday.

Quoting anonymous sources, the station said, “A person met with Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, shook his hand, and then smeared his hand with a substance that allowed Israel to track him.”

The only identifier posited for that person was that he was from Iran.

Whether true or not, it points to the undeniable fact that Israel’s intelligence that led to this strategic blow to the country’s most immediate and formidable military foe has recently revealed itself to be extraordinary.

According to a Sunday report in the Financial Times (FT), over the last 18 years, Israel has managed to thoroughly infiltrate Hezbollah by any and all means, both human and electronic.

Citing former Israeli intelligence officials and Lebanese politicians, the paper said that the breakthrough came in 2012, when Hezbollah leaped to aid Syrian leader Bashar al Assad put down an internal rebellion.

They started publicly revealing information on their men that used to be top secret, said Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, becoming “complacen[t]” and “flabby.”

Israel took the free information and then expanded their files on the senior members by old-fashioned methods such as having them followed, and newer means, like hacking their phones and breaking into Lebanese surveillance cameras.

Israeli officials told FT that the IDF figured out that whenever the terrorists’ practices strayed from their ordinary routines, that meant they were expecting to attack Israel.

This is what occurred on Friday, when military intelligence learned that Nasrallah was on his way to his fortified bunker, buried 60 feet under a civilian apartment building in Beirut that he used as his human shield – and the order was given to blast it with 80 tons of bombs.

Nasrallah’s assassination perhaps put an exclamation point on the fact that due to its intelligence successes, over the last several weeks, Israel has almost completely decapitated the terrorist organization, seriously damaging its entire command structure.

Twenty other senior terrorists were killed along with the Hezbollah chief in his bunker, while dozens of the highest-ranking commanders of Hezbollah’s most important units and sectors along Israel’s border have been eliminated by precision IAF airstrikes.

This is besides some 3,000 mid-level Hezbollah fighters being injured and over two dozen killed by their exploding pagers and walkie talkies in an attack for which Israel has not claimed formal responsibility.

Through years of painstaking aerial surveillance and work on the ground, the IDF has also built up a huge pool of worthy Hezbollah targets to hit.

This has been on display throughout the last 11 months of war, as the air force and artillery have responded to the nearly 10,000 aerial attacks Hezbollah has launched since the Israel-Hamas war began, by striking terrorist military targets across Lebanon that have resulted in about 500 more terrorist deaths.