#2226 Re: Libanon
Posted: 29/09/2024 17:52
In its 2006 war with Hizbollah, Israel tried to kill Hassan Nasrallah three times.
On Friday night, the Israeli military fixed those mistakes. It tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed, according to Israeli media.
“We will reach everyone, everywhere,” bragged the pilot of the F-15i warplane that the Israeli army said dropped the lethal payload, destroying at least four residential buildings.
But the confident swagger of the Israeli military and security establishment, which has in the past few weeks delivered a steady drumbeat of devastating blows to one of its biggest regional rivals, belies an uncomfortable truth: in nearly four decades of battling Hizbollah, only recently has Israel truly turned the tide.
In its 2006 war with Hizbollah, Israel tried to kill Hassan Nasrallah three times.
One air strike missed — the leader of Hizbollah had earlier left the spot. The others failed to penetrate the concrete reinforcements of his underground bunker, according to two people familiar with the attempted assassinations.
On Friday night, the Israeli military fixed those mistakes. It tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed, according to Israeli media.
“We will reach everyone, everywhere,” bragged the pilot of the F-15i warplane that the Israeli army said dropped the lethal payload, destroying at least four residential buildings.
But the confident swagger of the Israeli military and security establishment, which has in the past few weeks delivered a steady drumbeat of devastating blows to one of its biggest regional rivals, belies an uncomfortable truth: in nearly four decades of battling Hizbollah, only recently has Israel truly turned the tide.
These officials described a large-scale reorientation of Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts on Hizbollah after the surprising failure of its far more powerful military to deliver a knockout blow against the militant group in 2006, or even to eliminate its senior leadership, including Nasrallah.
For the next two decades, Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, and its military intelligence directorate, called Aman, mined vast amounts of data to map out the fast-growing militia in Israel’s “northern arena”.
Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer, said that required a fundamental shift in how Israel viewed Hizbollah, a Lebanese guerrilla movement that had sapped Israel’s will and endurance in the quagmire of its 18 year-long occupation of south Lebanon. For Israel that ended in 2000 in an ignominious retreat, accompanied by a significant loss of intelligence gathering.
Instead, Eisin said, Israeli intelligence widened its aperture to view the entirety of Hizbollah, looking beyond just its military wing to its political ambitions and growing connections with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Nasrallah’s relationship with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad
But the confident swagger of the Israeli military and security establishment, which has in the past few weeks delivered a steady drumbeat of devastating blows to one of its biggest regional rivals, belies an uncomfortable truth: in nearly four decades of battling Hizbollah, only recently has Israel truly turned the tide.
What changed, said current and former officials, is the depth and quality of the intelligence that Israel was able to lean on in the past two months, starting with the July 30 assassination of Fuad Shukr, one of Nasrallah’s right-hand men, as he visited a friend not far from Friday’s bombing site.
These officials described a large-scale reorientation of Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts on Hizbollah after the surprising failure of its far more powerful military to deliver a knockout blow against the militant group in 2006, or even to eliminate its senior leadership, including Nasrallah.
For the next two decades, Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, and its military intelligence directorate, called Aman, mined vast amounts of data to map out the fast-growing militia in Israel’s “northern arena”.
Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer, said that required a fundamental shift in how Israel viewed Hizbollah, a Lebanese guerrilla movement that had sapped Israel’s will and endurance in the quagmire of its 18 year-long occupation of south Lebanon. For Israel that ended in 2000 in an ignominious retreat, accompanied by a significant loss of intelligence gathering.
Instead, Eisin said, Israeli intelligence widened its aperture to view the entirety of Hizbollah, looking beyond just its military wing to its political ambitions and growing connections with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Nasrallah’s relationship with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.
“You have to define, in that sense, exactly what you’re looking for,” she said. “That’s the biggest challenge, and if done well, it allows you to look at this in all its complexity, to look at the whole picture.”
Israeli intelligence had for nearly a decade referred to Hizbollah as a “terror army”, rather than as a terrorist group “like Osama bin Laden in a cave”, she said. It was a conceptual shift that forced Israel to study Hizbollah as closely and broadly as it had the Syrian army, for instance.
As Hizbollah grew in strength, including in 2012 deploying to Syria to help Assad quell an armed uprising against his dictatorship, it gave Israel the opportunity to take its measure. What emerged was a dense “intelligence picture” — who was in charge of Hizbollah’s operations, who was getting promoted, who was corrupt, and who had just returned from an unexplained trip.
While Hizbollah’s fighters were battle hardened in Syria’s bloody war, the militant group’s forces had grown to keep pace with the drawn-out conflict. That recruitment also left them more vulnerable to Israeli spies placing agents or looking for would-be defectors.
“Syria was the beginning of the expansion of Hizbollah,” said Randa Slim, a programme director at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “That weakened their internal control mechanisms and opened the door for infiltration on a big level.”..
https://x.com/SaladinAlDronni/status/18 ... vsPFg&s=19
Da se zahvale uvazenom doktrou asadu na dubokoj penetraciji. Daraja i Kusajr su docekali svoju pravdu.
On Friday night, the Israeli military fixed those mistakes. It tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed, according to Israeli media.
“We will reach everyone, everywhere,” bragged the pilot of the F-15i warplane that the Israeli army said dropped the lethal payload, destroying at least four residential buildings.
But the confident swagger of the Israeli military and security establishment, which has in the past few weeks delivered a steady drumbeat of devastating blows to one of its biggest regional rivals, belies an uncomfortable truth: in nearly four decades of battling Hizbollah, only recently has Israel truly turned the tide.
In its 2006 war with Hizbollah, Israel tried to kill Hassan Nasrallah three times.
One air strike missed — the leader of Hizbollah had earlier left the spot. The others failed to penetrate the concrete reinforcements of his underground bunker, according to two people familiar with the attempted assassinations.
On Friday night, the Israeli military fixed those mistakes. It tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed, according to Israeli media.
“We will reach everyone, everywhere,” bragged the pilot of the F-15i warplane that the Israeli army said dropped the lethal payload, destroying at least four residential buildings.
But the confident swagger of the Israeli military and security establishment, which has in the past few weeks delivered a steady drumbeat of devastating blows to one of its biggest regional rivals, belies an uncomfortable truth: in nearly four decades of battling Hizbollah, only recently has Israel truly turned the tide.
These officials described a large-scale reorientation of Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts on Hizbollah after the surprising failure of its far more powerful military to deliver a knockout blow against the militant group in 2006, or even to eliminate its senior leadership, including Nasrallah.
For the next two decades, Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, and its military intelligence directorate, called Aman, mined vast amounts of data to map out the fast-growing militia in Israel’s “northern arena”.
Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer, said that required a fundamental shift in how Israel viewed Hizbollah, a Lebanese guerrilla movement that had sapped Israel’s will and endurance in the quagmire of its 18 year-long occupation of south Lebanon. For Israel that ended in 2000 in an ignominious retreat, accompanied by a significant loss of intelligence gathering.
Instead, Eisin said, Israeli intelligence widened its aperture to view the entirety of Hizbollah, looking beyond just its military wing to its political ambitions and growing connections with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Nasrallah’s relationship with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad
But the confident swagger of the Israeli military and security establishment, which has in the past few weeks delivered a steady drumbeat of devastating blows to one of its biggest regional rivals, belies an uncomfortable truth: in nearly four decades of battling Hizbollah, only recently has Israel truly turned the tide.
What changed, said current and former officials, is the depth and quality of the intelligence that Israel was able to lean on in the past two months, starting with the July 30 assassination of Fuad Shukr, one of Nasrallah’s right-hand men, as he visited a friend not far from Friday’s bombing site.
These officials described a large-scale reorientation of Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts on Hizbollah after the surprising failure of its far more powerful military to deliver a knockout blow against the militant group in 2006, or even to eliminate its senior leadership, including Nasrallah.
For the next two decades, Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, and its military intelligence directorate, called Aman, mined vast amounts of data to map out the fast-growing militia in Israel’s “northern arena”.
Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer, said that required a fundamental shift in how Israel viewed Hizbollah, a Lebanese guerrilla movement that had sapped Israel’s will and endurance in the quagmire of its 18 year-long occupation of south Lebanon. For Israel that ended in 2000 in an ignominious retreat, accompanied by a significant loss of intelligence gathering.
Instead, Eisin said, Israeli intelligence widened its aperture to view the entirety of Hizbollah, looking beyond just its military wing to its political ambitions and growing connections with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Nasrallah’s relationship with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.
“You have to define, in that sense, exactly what you’re looking for,” she said. “That’s the biggest challenge, and if done well, it allows you to look at this in all its complexity, to look at the whole picture.”
Israeli intelligence had for nearly a decade referred to Hizbollah as a “terror army”, rather than as a terrorist group “like Osama bin Laden in a cave”, she said. It was a conceptual shift that forced Israel to study Hizbollah as closely and broadly as it had the Syrian army, for instance.
As Hizbollah grew in strength, including in 2012 deploying to Syria to help Assad quell an armed uprising against his dictatorship, it gave Israel the opportunity to take its measure. What emerged was a dense “intelligence picture” — who was in charge of Hizbollah’s operations, who was getting promoted, who was corrupt, and who had just returned from an unexplained trip.
While Hizbollah’s fighters were battle hardened in Syria’s bloody war, the militant group’s forces had grown to keep pace with the drawn-out conflict. That recruitment also left them more vulnerable to Israeli spies placing agents or looking for would-be defectors.
“Syria was the beginning of the expansion of Hizbollah,” said Randa Slim, a programme director at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “That weakened their internal control mechanisms and opened the door for infiltration on a big level.”..
https://x.com/SaladinAlDronni/status/18 ... vsPFg&s=19
Da se zahvale uvazenom doktrou asadu na dubokoj penetraciji. Daraja i Kusajr su docekali svoju pravdu.
