A same day that Israel remotely activated pagers in the pockets of Hezbollah members and stunned the group with its covert warfare capabilities, the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet announced that it had foiled an attempt by the Lebanon-based militant group to assassinate a senior defense official deep inside Tel Aviv. The explosive was fitted with a camera and a cellular connection and planted with the help of a local, a Hezbollah asset. Shin Bet did not name the defense official targeted, but the agency confirmed that the assassination would have been carried out remotely from Lebanon.
That failed assassination attempt contrasts with Israel’s successful killing of many senior Hezbollah leaders over the past two weeks, including the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. But even though that amounts to a severe blow to the morale of its fighters, analysts say the group retains the ability to mount a response that resembles, if not matches, Israel’s own remote tactics, combining remotely triggered bombs with local intelligence from agents on the ground.
A same day that Israel remotely activated pagers in the pockets of Hezbollah members and stunned the group with its covert warfare capabilities, the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet announced that it had foiled an attempt by the Lebanon-based militant group to assassinate a senior defense official deep inside Tel Aviv. The explosive was fitted with a camera and a cellular connection and planted with the help of a local, a Hezbollah asset. Shin Bet did not name the defense official targeted, but the agency confirmed that the assassination would have been carried out remotely from Lebanon.
That failed assassination attempt contrasts with Israel’s successful killing of many senior Hezbollah leaders over the past two weeks, including the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. But even though that amounts to a severe blow to the morale of its fighters, analysts say the group retains the ability to mount a response that resembles, if not matches, Israel’s own remote tactics, combining remotely triggered bombs with local intelligence from agents on the ground.
Last year, Former Israeli defense minister and military chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon escaped a bomb planted by Hezbollah in Tel Aviv next to a tree. In that case, two Arab Israeli citizens from the West Bank were detained for questioning. As in the thwarted Tel Aviv attack this September, last year’s attack used a Claymore-style mine—the same type planted in a separate attack carried out in March last year near Israel’s Megiddo Junction, in which a Hezbollah operative used a ladder to climb over the border. That attack was purportedly to avenge the killing of a senior commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces who was killed by the Israeli military last February.
Eran Lerman, Israel’s former deputy national security advisor, told FP that while Hezbollah has agents “here and there” and the group has tried several maneuvers—such as laying honey traps online, posing as beautiful women to try to get Israeli officials to spill state secrets—they are nowhere near Israel’s extensive intelligence tentacles and covert warfare capabilities.
But Nicholas Noe—the editor of Voice of Hezbollah, a collection of speeches by Nasrallah—described the group as a highly patient and disciplined force that he said has deliberately exercised strategic restraint. The organization’s relative reticence thus far should not be misunderstood for a lack of ambition or capabilities, Noe said.
Hezbollah’s specific covert capabilities are unknown, but a look at its past missions paint a picture of what it is capable of, even if it is unlikely to adopt any of these options amid a leadership crisis in the short term.
The group has often been accused of using car bombs to kill leaders at home and hit Israeli interests abroad. It reportedly has a trained assassination team named Unit 121; a global outreach among its supporters; a billion-dollar international crime syndicate, according to an investigation by Politico; experience in abducting hostages; and alliances with regional militias that could hurt Israel and the United States’ interests in the region and block international trade running through the Red Sea. Experts warn that all these resources could be used in a full-fledged war against Israel.
Last November, Hezbollah’s slain chief, Nasrallah, had threatened that in case of a war with Israel, “all options are on the table, and we could resort to them at any time.” A Lebanese expert—who spoke on the condition of anonymity considering the sensitive timing—said that comment likely translates into the group adopting every tactic it has used in the past, and more.
“Given all the history, all options are open,” the analyst said. “From assassinations to bombings, they have not denied, starting with U.S. Marine embassy bombings. Why will they refrain now when they say all options are on the table?”
The existence of Unit 121 was revealed in 2020, after the Special Tribunal for Lebanon established by the United Nations and Lebanon itself ended its long investigation into the killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He was killed with a car bomb in 2005, allegedly carried out by Hezbollah members. The same unit is believed to be behind the killing of Lokman Slim, a Lebanese political commentator who was critical of the group before he was assassinated in February 2021. It remains unknown whether this unit was trained to be active in foreign countries, but assassinations have long been a part of Hezbollah’s arsenal.
The group has also been accused of carrying out attacks on Israelis in third countries. In 2012, a bomb in a bus carrying Israeli tourists exploded outside the airport in the Bulgarian Black Sea resort of Burgas. Bulgarian state authorities sentenced in absentia two Hezbollah operatives who landed in the country with help from a Lebanese French dual national. Hezbollah was also accused of an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, and two years later in the same city, the group was once again accused of using a car bomb and a local asset to attack a Jewish community center in an incident that killed 85 people.
“Hezbollah has a global reach in terms of projecting military power against Israeli and civilian targets,” Noe said. “But is that useful for Hezbollah now? No. Could it be later? Yes, absolutely.”
After Israel’s bombings this month in Dahiyeh—Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut—the extent of Hezbollah’s response remains unclear. Several experts and military insiders inside Lebanon told Foreign Policy that Hezbollah could exact revenge at a time of its choosing. The group is capable of both showering a large number of missiles that could overwhelm the Israeli air defense system or undertake its much-touted infiltration operation dubbed “Conquer the Galilee.”
Gen. Elias Farhat, a retired Lebanese army officer, told Foreign Policy a few weeks ago that Hezbollah deploys a mix of symmetric and asymmetric warfare, and in case of a full-scale invasion, it could be expected to cause heavy damage in Israel.
“We don’t rule out an advance of Hezbollah in the Galilee,” he said, in reference to the proposed infiltration of northern Israel by Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit.
Israel has been preparing for such an eventuality for a while. Lerman, the former Israeli deputy national security advisor, told Foreign Policy, prior to Oct. 7, 2023, Israel had expected Radwan to mount a major infiltration, rather than Nukhba, Hamas’s special unit. “We had been preparing for Radwan instead,” he said.
To mitigate that threat, Israel successfully eliminated Radwan’s top commander, Ibrahim Aqil, and his deputy, Ahmed Muhmud Wahbi, in an attack in Dahiyeh on the night of Sept. 20. And yet in the past, Hezbollah has shown that it can replace its dead or assassinated leaders seamlessly with a new crop.
Wahbi, for instance, took over from Wissam al-Tawil, who carried out the 2006 cross-border raid that sparked that year’s Israel-Lebanon war. Tawil was killed by Israelis in January this year.
Even if Hezbollah’s strengths may appear more rudimentary compared to Israel’s technological prowess, the group is hailed as one of its kind in the world, possessing both stockpiles of conventional weapons and a mastery of irregular warfare tactics. Its real strength, many say, is guerrilla warfare.
Lerman conceded that Hezbollah has unmatched experience as a guerrilla force, which could turn any ground invasion by Israel into a painful strategy. “They are much stronger than Hamas as a guerrilla force,” he said, “and are deeply dug into a difficult terrain in south Lebanon.”
A ground invasion by Israel could hand Hezbollah a chance at a “righteous ground war,” Noe added, “that they can wage from tunnels and hideouts, and inflict severe military blows on Israel just as they did in 2006.”
It is possible that Hezbollah’s capabilities have degraded over time and that Nasrallah’s killing will break the organization, but those who have observed the group over a longer period of time have cautioned against dismissing the group and falling victim to hubris.
Back in 2011, when Hezbollah identified a network of CIA spies working in Lebanon and captured them, Bob Baer, a former CIA operations officer, said that Hezbollah’s counterintelligence capabilities are formidable and should not be underestimated.
Clearly, thus far in the latest spate of attacks, Israel has had an upper hand, but that doesn’t mean that it has decimated the group, and it’s still unclear if it has crushed Hezbollah’s will to put up a fight. Despite exercising strategic restraint to stay on the good side of the Lebanese people and present themselves as rational actors, Hezbollah’s leaders see it as a success that their rockets have forced more than 80,000 Israelis to leave their homes in northern Israel.
Sarit Zehavi, the founder and president of Alma, an Israeli security research center, told Foreign Policy that Israel’s goal is to “damage Hezbollah’s military capabilities” in a way that Israelis can return to their homes in the north without fearing Hezbollah’s rockets and missiles. “It can go back to being a guerrilla force,” she said.
But the Lebanese analyst added that it was nearly impossible to defeat Hezbollah as an idea—and, since at its heart it is a guerrilla force, “it wins if it survives.”
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