Nasrallah’s demise

Hassan Nasrallah is dead. An 80-ton barrage of Israeli air force bombs killed the leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah and many of his lieutenants on Friday at their underground bunker in Beirut.

Hand-selected and installed by Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 1992, Nasrallah had made Hezbollah into a scourge on Israel and a parasite on Lebanon. Over time, Hezbollah had infiltrated all levels of the Lebanese government, effectively taking control of the southern portion of the country as well as major sectors of the Lebanese state. Hezbollah’s rule siphoned the vitality and pluralism from Lebanon, deepened its sectarian divisions, and turned the once-proud nation into Iran’s proxy.

Nasrallah had dedicated his life to the barbaric cause of the destruction of Israel. More than two decades ago, the journalist David Ignatius asked Nasrallah if he would ever support peace with Israel. Ignatius described Nasrallah’s “cold-blooded answer”: “I can’t imagine a situation, based on the nature of the Israeli project and the nature of the Israeli leaders, where the Palestinians would agree to lay down arms.”

For the next 20 years, Nasrallah directed unrelenting hostility toward the Jewish state. At the behest of his Iranian overlords, he amassed a massive arsenal of rockets and missiles in southern Lebanon, all targeted at Israeli population centers. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Hezbollah had shifted from the occasional rocket strike to regular attacks that had rendered northern Israel uninhabitable. Hezbollah’s strikes forced tens of thousands of Israeli citizens to flee their homes as internally displaced refugees. It became an intolerable crisis for Jerusalem.

Israel struck back. The past two weeks have displayed a series of Israeli intelligence operations that rank among the most sophisticated and successful covert tradecraft in modern history. Consider, two weeks ago, in what my former National Security Council colleague Michael Doran calls “Operation Grim Beeper,” the Mossad engineered a massive sabotage of thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies. The operation caused the devices to explode suddenly in the pockets of their owners. It killed dozens of Hezbollah operatives, injured thousands more—and left every surviving Hezbollah affiliate frightened of making a phone call or sending a text message.

A few days later, Israeli forces attacked a gathering of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Brigade leadership, killing at least 16 members. Then, on Friday, came the operation that liquidated Nasrallah.

These operations show that the Mossad has thoroughly penetrated Hezbollah. Israeli intelligence now controls agents and informants throughout Hezbollah’s entire infrastructure, including its supply chains, communications channels, and leadership organization. The result is not only the decapitation of Hezbollah’s senior ranks but also the demoralization of the entire organization. Now every remaining Hezbollah member, from the surviving leadership to the lowliest operative, lives in unremitting suspicion of his colleagues and unrelenting paranoia of his surroundings. The terrorists have become the terrified.

These stunning successes also mark a redemption for Israel’s intelligence services. The decapitation of Hezbollah comes on the eve of the first anniversary of Israel’s worst intelligence debacle in a half-century: the failure to detect and deter Hamas’s gruesome assaults on Oct. 7. Ordinary Israelis are now restoring their trust in their nation’s intelligence professionals.

The big question is, what comes next in the region? From this follows many further specific questions. Such as:

Will Hezbollah retaliate?

Will Iran retaliate?

Who will be the next Hezbollah leader, and will he matter? Recall that Israel had also assassinated Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, in 1992. Eliminating the leader does not mean defeating the organization.

And most importantly, does Israel intend this operation as a prelude to an invasion of Lebanon or as an alternative to invading Lebanon?

After all, Hezbollah retains its massive arsenal of rockets, missiles, and shock troops in southern Lebanon. These forces can continue to target Israel. Some Israeli strategists privately see a ground invasion of southern Lebanon as the only way to eradicate the Hezbollah threat. Other Israeli strategists raise cautionary notes from history. Israel’s previous invasions of Lebanon in 1982 and 2006 came at a tremendous cost and failed to eliminate the terrorist menace.

As of this writing, Israel has continued its air assault on Hezbollah encampments in Lebanon, in addition to targeting other Iranian proxy forces elsewhere such as the Houthis in Yemen. Whether ground operations will follow remains to be seen.

Not to be forgotten are the people of Lebanon. While some Lebanese Shiites support Hezbollah, most Lebanese—especially Christians and Sunni Muslims—detest the terrorist group and seek to be free from the misery it has inflicted on them for several decades. Israel’s weakening of Hezbollah creates an opportunity for the country.

As my former National Security Council colleague Emily Harding writes in The Wall Street Journal, “In the long term, there is a path out of conflict and war for Lebanon. A Lebanon not in thrall to a global terrorist network masquerading as a legitimate political party will have a chance to rebuild as a real, sovereign government. … The remnants of Hezbollah will need to make the decision Nasrallah should have made for them decades ago: to turn to peace, politics and a door cracked open to prosperity.”