Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been killed in an Israeli air strike. According to the French newspaper Le Parisien, the strike was based on information provided by an Iranian informant and targeted Hezbollah’s command structure.
A Lebanese security source told the paper that Israel had been tipped off by an Iranian informant about Nasrallah’s presence in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
The Israelis risked everything, they didn’t want to miss their target,” a Lebanese security official close to the matter said the day after Hassan Nasrallah’s death.
The Hezbollah leader was killed in his headquarters, a complex of six buildings in the centre of Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut. According to the same source, the Israelis were tipped off by an Iranian informer in the afternoon that the Hezbollah leader was approaching.
Israeli F-35s armed with bunker-busting bombs lurked in the skies over Lebanon, waiting for the target to reach the command centre.
At the same time, not far away in the Haret Hreyk area, the funeral was being held for Mohammed Hussein Srur, the commander of Hezbollah’s drone unit on the southern front, who had been killed in an air strike the day before.
Six bombs of 2 tonnes each
Immediately after the funeral, Hassan Nasrallah arrived at the headquarters in the same vehicle as the Iranian commander of the Quds Force, the elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Twelve other commanders attended this emergency meeting in Nasrallah’s presence. Israeli intelligence waited until everyone was in the high-security basement of the headquarters, in the room where Hezbollah soldiers plan their military operations, before ordering the bombing. In all, Israeli army pilots dropped six bombs, each weighing 2 tonnes.
“It is the biggest attack we have seen since 2006,” said the same security source.
The explosion could be heard as far away as downtown Beirut, while a thick plume of smoke billowed over the Hezbollah headquarters. All that remained of the building was a pile of rubble at the centre of a huge crater 30 metres deep. Two other neighbouring buildings were also blown up.
A source close to Hezbollah reported that the people in charge of following and relaying Nasrallah’s instructions lost all contact with him immediately after the bombing: “No one was able to locate him or communicate with his entourage”.
Although Hassan Nasrallah was ‘cut off’, the Americans immediately concluded that he was dead and declared that they had no knowledge of the attack. At the same time, the Lebanese army closed the perimeter of the American embassy in Avkar, a northern suburb of Beirut, and reinforced its forces there.
It was not until the following day that Hezbollah confirmed Nasrallah’s death, while in the morning there was another incident at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport.
As an Iranian civilian plane began to descend, an Israeli fighter jet contacted the control tower, ordered it not to land and threatened to bomb the runways if it did.
The Lebanese Minister of Transport, Ali Hamiyeh, immediately ordered that the Iranian plane be prevented from landing.
