For more than 40 years, a bloody and violent shadow war has raged between Israeli intelligence services and the Lebanon-based militant Shia Islamist organisation Hezbollah.
One of the earliest defeats for Israel came in November 1982, five months after its forces had invaded Lebanon set on the destruction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, then based there. When the PLO’s armed fighters were forced to leave Beirut, it appeared Israel had won a major victory.
Then came a shattering blast which demolished the headquarters of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence service, in the coastal town of Tyre. Ninety-one people died in the explosion, which authorities blamed then and for years afterwards on a gas leak.
In fact, it had been a massive suicide car bombing, among the first of its kind and organised by militant Islamists from among the Shia population of southern Lebanon.
Those behind the blast went on to join Hezbollah, which was founded the following summer with supervision and support from the new Iranian revolutionary regime that had taken power in Tehran in 1979. The same young radical Shias successfully bombed the Shin Bet’s headquarters in Tyre once more in November 1983, killing 28 Israelis and 32 Lebanese prisoners. They also caused hundreds of US and French casualties with other massive suicide attacks that Israeli services were powerless to prevent.
Thus began one of the hardest-fought clandestine conflicts of recent decades anywhere in the world.
Israel’s military fought against Hezbollah until forced to withdraw from Lebanon in 1999 and again during a brief war in 2006, but its secret security services have had no respite.
An acute shortage of human intelligence left the Israelis in the dark about Hezbollah’s plans throughout much of the 1980s. The whereabouts of one particular individual – a young Lebanese Shia called Imad Mughniyeh who masterminded bombs, hijackings and kidnappings – remained unclear. There were several near misses but it take more than 20 years for the Israelis to catch up with their quarry when a car bomb killed Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008.
A major battlefield in the early 90s was South America, where Hezbollah was able to recruit support from among the large Lebanese Shia diaspora.
When Israeli attack helicopters killed Abbas al-Musawi, the new leader of Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon in February 1992, the militant Islamist organisation sought its revenge in Argentina. First, the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 29, then in 1994 a suicide bomber killed 85 in a Jewish community centre in the Argentine capital. Both attacks were blamed on Hezbollah by investigators.
South America also emerged as a major hub of Hezbollah financing, with a wide variety of legal and illegal activities run by supporters there generating massive funds for the organisation. The sheer scale of the operations, often run from remote locations where local security services had a limited presence or knowledge, impeded Israel’s efforts to shut them down.
Through recent decades, Europe has been another theatre of hostilities in the shadow war.
As Hezbollah sought to extend its logistics operations on the continent through dozens of companies, Israeli intelligence services have tried to block the group’s efforts. A series of low-profile operations had some success, many due to the discreet assistance of local security services. An attempt by Hezbollah to avenge the death of Mughniyeh with an attack on the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan was thwarted. But then in July 2012 a suicide bus bombing killed five young Israelis and a driver in the Black Sea resort of Burgas in Bulgaria. Investigators found evidence of links to Hezbollah.
By then, the battle was raging across the globe. In 2012, intelligence analysts in the US identified multiple Hezbollah plots against Israeli or Jewish targets – including two in Bangkok and one each in Delhi, Tbilisi, Mombasa and Cyprus – in just a six month period. A diplomat in Delhi was injured during a spate of attacks with magnetic car bombs in a complex operation involving agents in Thailand and India, several of them linked to Iran and Hezbollah.
North America has been primarily a logistics hub for Hezbollah, with major financing operations a priority. These have allegedly allowed sympathisers to send hundreds of millions of dollars back to Hezbollah, an important stream of funding for its expansive social welfare budget as well as military operations.
In 2011, US officials claimed proceeds from car sales and narcotics trafficking were funnelled back to Lebanon through Hezbollah-controlled money laundering channels. Last year, a high-profile art collector was put on a US Treasury sanctions list and charged in the US over claims that he uses his collection, which has included masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Antony Gormley and Andy Warhol, to launder money for Hezbollah.
Then there has been the tit-for-tat clandestine war closer to home. In 2023, David Barnea, the director of the Mossad, the main Israeli overseas intelligence service, described 27 Iranian plots against Israelis including in Georgia, Cyprus, Greece, and Germany. Hezbollah agents have been active in Iraq, Yemen and Syria, where thousands of its fighters deployed during the civil war.
If there have been wins and losses on both sides over the decades, the balance appears to have tipped decisively in Israel’s favour in recent months.
Israeli officials have described attempts by Iranian operatives – or Hezbollah – to carry out assassinations in Israel. None have come close to success.
Last week’s pager attacks, which killed 37 and wounded about 3,000, are presumed to have been carried out by the Mossad and other Israeli services and have been seen by analysts as a resounding victory in the long covert conflict.
At the same time, Hezbollah’s high command has been decimated by a series of Israeli assassinations of senior military officials that suggest a flow of timely, precise inside intelligence, likely derived from a mix of intercepted communications, surveillance and agents within Hezbollah’s ranks.
“This is a huge intelligence coup … The Israelis are targeting the top and middle levels and that leaves [Hezbollah] blind, deaf and dumb,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a veteran Hezbollah observer at the Swedish Defence University.
The targeted assassinations also show that the Mossad and other agencies have long institutional memories.
Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah chief of staff who was killed by Israel in July, and Ibrahim Aqil, who was killed last week, were important members of Hezbollah’s current military hierarchy and would have played major roles in any coming all-out war. Both were also founder members of Hezbollah and part of the network responsible for the bombings of 1982 and 1983.
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