Israel’s intelligence services and the Lebanese Shiite Islamist militia Hezbollah have been waging a cruel and violent war in the shadows for more than 40 years.
One of Israel’s first defeats came in November 1982, five months after Tel Aviv forces invaded Lebanon with the aim of destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the country where it was then based.
After forcing armed PLO fighters to leave Beirut, Israel seemed to have won a major victory. Then a shocking explosion demolished the offices of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, in Tyre. Ninety-one people were killed in the blast in the Lebanese coastal city.
For years, authorities blamed a gas leak, but the explosion was actually caused by Islamist militants from the Shiite population in southern Lebanon during a suicide car bomb attack, one of the first of its kind. Those responsible for the explosion later joined Hezbollah, founded the following summer with the supervision and support of the new Iranian revolutionary regime, in power since 1979.
The same young Shiite radicals would succeed again in another bombing of the Shin Bet headquarters in Tyre. This was in November 1983, killing 28 Israelis and 32 Lebanese prisoners. The Israeli services were also unable to prevent other mass suicide attacks in which hundreds of people from France and the United States died. Thus began what was to become one of the most terrible clandestine conflicts in the world in recent decades.
The Israeli army fought Hezbollah directly in Lebanon until it was forced to withdraw from the country in 1999. It did so again in 2006, during a brief war. But the Israeli secret services have never stopped doing so.
For much of the 1980s, Israel had little knowledge of Hezbollah’s plans due to a severe shortage of people to provide intelligence from the ground. The whereabouts of one young Shiite, in particular, remained unclear: the Lebanese Imad Mughniyehthe mastermind behind the bombings and kidnappings. After several failed attempts, it took the Israelis more than 20 years to find him. Until 2008, a bomb in a car Damascus ended Mughniyeh’s life.
In the early 1990s, Latin America was a major battleground, with Hezbollah recruiting sympathisers among the large Shia diaspora from Lebanon.
After Israeli attack helicopters killed Abbas al-Musawi, the new leader of Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon in February 1992, the militant Islamist organization sought revenge in Argentina. The first attack was against the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people. This was followed by the 1994 suicide bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. Investigators They attributed the two attacks to Hezbollah.
South America has also become a major funding hub for Hezbollah, with sympathisers generating huge amounts of money from a wide range of legal and illegal activities. The sheer scale of these operations, often taking place in remote locations where local security services had little intelligence or presence, has hampered Israel’s attempts to crack them down.
Europe has been another theatre of hostilities that over the past decades has produced this war in the shadows. Israel’s intelligence services have not ceased in their attempt to block Hezbollah’s operations in order to extend its logistics on the continent using dozens of companies. Israel has had some success with a series of low-profile operations, in many cases thanks to the discreet help of local security services.
This was how Hezbollah’s attempt to attack the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan in revenge for the death of Mughniyeh was foiled. But what could not be prevented was the suicide attack in July 2012 in the Bulgarian town of Burgas on the Black Sea coast, where a bomb on a bus killed five young Israelis and the driver. (Investigators found evidence linking the attack to Hezbollah).
By then, the battle had already spread to the rest of the world. In 2012, U.S. intelligence analysts identified a multitude of Hezbollah plots against Israeli or Jewish targets over a period of just six months. These included two in Bangkok, one in Delhi, one in Tbilisi, one in Mombasa and one in Cyprus. A Delhi diplomat was injured in a series of magnetic car bomb attacks, a complex operation involving people from Thailand and India, several of them linked to Iran and Hezbollah.
For Hezbollah, the United States has been primarily a logistical hub, with large-scale financing operations a priority. These operations have reportedly allowed sympathizers to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah, a major source of funding for its military operations and its large social welfare budget.
U.S. government officials reported in 2011 that money laundering schemes controlled by Hezbollah were being used to funnel money from car sales and drug trafficking into Lebanon. In 2023, a well-known art collector was placed on a U.S. Treasury sanctions list. He was accused of using his collection, which includes masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Antony Gormley and Andy Warhol, to laundering Hezbollah money.
The clandestine war has also been waged closer to home. David Barnea, the head of the Mossad, spoke in 2023 of 27 plots by Iran against Israelis. According to the head of Israel’s main foreign intelligence service, there were plots as far away as Georgia, Cyprus, Greece and Germany. Hezbollah members have been active in Iraq, Yemen and Syria, where thousands of Hezbollah fighters were deployed during the civil war.
If in recent decades there were victories and defeats on both sides, in recent months the balance seems to have clearly tipped in Israel’s favour. Israeli officials have spoken of several attempts to carry out assassinations in Israel by Iranian agents or members of Hezbollah. None has come close to success.
The Mossad and other Israeli intelligence services are believed to be behind last week’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks that killed 42 people and wounded some 3,000. A clear victory for Israel, analysts say, in this long-running shadow conflict.
The organization’s top command has also been decimated by a string of Israeli assassinations of senior military officials that suggest a steady stream of accurate and timely intelligence. This information most likely has a variety of sources: intercepted communications, electronic surveillance and agents infiltrated within Hezbollah’s ranks. “This is a major intelligence coup… The Israelis are targeting the top and middle levels, leaving Hezbollah blind, deaf and mute,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a senior Hezbollah analyst at Sweden’s National Defense College.
The targeted killings also demonstrate the long institutional memory of the Mossad and other Israeli agencies. Both Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s chief of staff who was assassinated by Israel in July, and Ibrahim Aqil, who was killed last week, were founding members of Hezbollah and part of the network responsible for the attacks in 1982 and 1983. Both held senior positions in Hezbollah’s current military hierarchy. Had they not been killed, they would have played a key role in any potential all-out war that might come.
Translation by Francisco de Zárate
Source: www.eldiario.es
