Two years after the dramatic elimination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, new details are emerging from the closed-door deliberations of the IDF Intelligence Directorate and the Israeli Air Force.
Two of the key figures who led the operation — Maj. G., who headed the Intelligence Directorate’s Lebanon target section at the time of the assassination, and Maj. (res.) R., operations officer in the Air Force’s targeted assassination cell — recount the behind-the-scenes drama, from a decade of painstaking intelligence surveillance and the Hezbollah leader’s deeply entrenched assumptions to the tense hours in which the decision was made to drop 83 tons of bombs on the bunker where he was staying.
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Two years passed since the dramatic elimination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah
(Photo: Bilal Hussein, AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
“I commanded the Intelligence Directorate team, which included everyone involved in this — Unit 8200, Unit 9900 and others,” Maj. G. says. “In the two years before the strike, this team studied the man to understand his lifestyle and what he was doing at all times. The investigation went down to the most intimate and precise details of his daily routine: when he went to sleep, what he liked to eat, who he usually traveled with. Once you have that amount of knowledge, there is nothing more powerful.”
At the outset, it turns out, Nasrallah enjoyed a false sense of security based on a fundamentally mistaken assumption.
“We knew where he was even before Oct. 7,” Maj. (res.) R. says. “This was not a small compound. Eighty-three tons of bombs were dropped there, primarily because of the challenging underground layout. It was professional, precise work.”
According to R., “On Oct. 8, Nasrallah felt comfortable because he understood that Israel’s attention was focused on Gaza. He operated relatively routinely. He was careful to move covertly, but not as though he were in a full-scale war.”
G. adds: “On the one hand, Nasrallah created the impression that he was constantly operating in secrecy. On the other hand, he was deeply involved and made public appearances. He was involved in everything, from situation assessments to decisions on budgets and force buildup. He decided whether to invest in the Radwan Force or in missiles. He was very involved.”
The dramatic turning point was the pager attack, which plunged the organization into unprecedented chaos.
(Photo: FADEL ITANI, Middle East Images via AFP)
“From the pager operation onward, the organization understood that it had control over nothing,” R. says. “It shook their confidence in everything, from communications devices to people. They had to relearn everything they had been doing up to that point.”
Despite the severe blow, Nasrallah did not flee.
“He had difficulty grasping the scale of the events and obtaining a complete picture of the situation,” G. explains. “We expected him to move to a new location, but he remained at the site we knew. We assess that this happened because he misjudged what was happening on the ground. The location was comfortable and familiar to him, and he failed to properly analyze the sequence of events. He did not understand that he needed to leave.
“He froze, perhaps because of a mistaken assumption. He did not think Israel would go all the way. I think he categorized the pager attack and the assassinations of senior figures as an exchange of blows. He did not see that we were escalating it into a war. As a team, our mission was to push the assassination up through the senior ranks so they would approve it before he moved, before he realized what was happening.”
‘No blind spots’
The degree of intelligence control in those days was comprehensive.
“We had no blind spots when it came to him. We knew where he was every minute,” G. says.
When new intelligence emerged that could have prompted Nasrallah to flee, the team approached decision-makers and pressed hard for the strike to be carried out.
G. recalls the critical hours at the Kirya, the IDF’s Tel Aviv headquarters: “The main thing we felt was that we were in the best possible situation. Both in terms of the nature of the collateral damage and the target location, it was optimal. Any change could have worked against us because we did not know where his next location would be.
“We were very aggressive with the senior offices. We made sure it reached the prime minister so that the right decision could be made.”
He adds: “During those hours, I was constantly on top of the team, checking every piece of intelligence that came in and making sure nothing had changed. There was tremendous excitement. When I took the position and we told people we were going to assassinate Nasrallah, they told me we were dreaming.
“In terms of my confidence in the operation’s chances of success, I felt very certain. I wasn’t worried about a mistake. I was worried the decision-makers might change their minds, that someone would want to postpone it.”
‘Collateral damage: 30’
When it came to collateral damage, decision-makers demanded maximum precision even during the planning approval stages.
“I’ll say candidly that the question of collateral damage was always part of the plan-approval process, even though Nasrallah was such a senior figure,” G. says. “For an intelligence assessment of collateral damage, you are required to provide substantiated information on how many people are in every room, in every home in the building.
'Any leader who sets out to destroy Israel — we will come after him.' Maj. G.
(Photo: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
“We provided the answer, and in the end the damage was far lower than we had estimated. In practice, the collateral damage from the entire strike was 30 uninvolved civilians. If you compare the collateral damage with the number of Hezbollah operatives killed alongside Nasrallah, it comes out to one-to-one. There was nothing disproportionate about it. It is important to note that one of the things that helped was that once we began striking Beirut, many families left.”
According to R., the assassination of the Hezbollah leader marked the decisive turning point in the campaign on the Lebanese front.
“The organization — and this is already well known and clear — is not the same without Nasrallah,” he says. “Hezbollah is not even close to the capabilities it had on Oct. 8. Its force-building capabilities no longer exist and its ability to exert influence has been dramatically damaged. It is an ostracized organization.”
He adds: “Any leader who sets out to destroy the State of Israel — we will come after him. Naim Qassem, Nasrallah’s successor, understood that nothing is safe. You can see it in him. You can see it in Khamenei’s son as well. His turn will come too.”
For G., it is important that credit be shared.
“Behind every final target approval I signed stood an entire team that sat with me in the room during the most critical hours: active-duty and reserve intelligence researchers who made up the operation’s intelligence team throughout.
“They included Lt. L., the head of my cell; N., a researcher in the cell; Z., a reserve researcher who began as the target officer; and reserve researchers R., Y., Y. and T., who studied Nasrallah’s underground facilities, along with other senior commanders who had regularly reported for reserve duty in the unit even before the war.
“From Oct. 7 onward, they left everything behind and were with me around the clock, working continuous shifts. They possess years of accumulated knowledge and were central to carrying out the operation. Without them, without the partnership and friendship that bind us to this day, it simply would not have happened.”