More than two years after his death was reported as a car accident, the Israel Defense Forces said Friday that Elias al-Hasrouni, a senior official in the Lebanese political party Lebanese Forces, was assassinated by Hezbollah’s Unit 121.
IDF Arabic-language spokesperson Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee said al-Hasrouni, a vocal critic of Hezbollah, was ambushed near his home in southern Lebanon, abducted and killed by operatives from the Iranian-backed terror group.
According to Adraee, al-Hasrouni was poisoned and suffered broken ribs during the attack. To disguise the murder as a traffic accident, Hezbollah operatives returned his body to his vehicle, which was found crashed into a tree in a roadside ditch.
“Unit 121, also known as Hezbollah’s surveillance and special operations unit, is responsible for assassinations of journalists, military officers, politicians and other figures who oppose Hezbollah’s control and activities in Lebanon,” Adraee said. “It serves as the organization’s internal terror arm, used to track and eliminate dissent.”
He also noted that the same unit was behind the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. The unit’s commander, Salim Ayyash, was convicted in 2020 by the United Nations-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon for leading the cell that carried out the bombing that killed Hariri.
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Al-Hariri in France in 2001, assassinated by Hezbollah's special unit
(Photo: Reuters)
“Despite the severe blow Hezbollah has taken in the war, it continues to sow destruction in Lebanon and rebuild its strength, in part through operations by Unit 121,” Adraee said. “Lebanese citizens who seek stability and prosperity know they must reject this collapsing Iranian proxy that has dragged them into needless wars, spies on them and eliminates its opponents.”
In the days following al-Hasrouni’s death in August 2023, Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar reported that residents of the Christian village of Ain Ebel, where al-Hasrouni lived, had been exposed to claims circulating on social media that he had not died in an accident but was abducted and his body dumped near his car.
At the time, a security source told Al-Akhbar that the case had been transferred to the intelligence division and that surveillance footage showed two vehicles trailing al-Hasrouni before he was abducted by unidentified assailants.
In an interview published in April 2024, Lebanese MP Ghayath Yazbeck of the Lebanese Forces party directly accused Hezbollah of killing al-Hasrouni.