Extracts: A hundred munitions – including, it is believed, US-made 2,000lb bombs [not!] – were used by the Israeli air force in Friday evening’s overwhelming air raid that killed the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an underground complex hidden in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahieh
Nasrallah, who was careful to the point of paranoia about his security arrangements and only rarely appeared in public, would have given little notice of his plan to undertake the fateful trip to the meeting
But the intelligence penetration of Hezbollah was so deep that Israel knew Nasrallah and other surviving members of Hezbollah’s already decimated leadership would be meeting at the supposedly secret location – and that an order to bomb them could be given
Deep intelligence penetration enabled Israel to kill Hassan Nasrallah
Israel’s success in killing Nasrallah and other leaders can only have come following an intelligence penetration of Hezbollah that stands in sharp contrast to the misjudgment of Hamas’s intentions before 07 October 2023
Matthew Savill, a military analyst at Rusi, said Israel probably,
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“spent years building up and sustaining a comprehensive intelligence picture” of Hezbollah, involving “an element of human sources involved, to keep it current”
That, Savill argued,
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“brings into even starker relief the failure to identify and prevent Hamas’s operation last year, lending credibility to the theory they concentrated on Lebanon and Iran at the expense of Gaza”
