pera play Behind the Dismantling of Hezbollah: Decades of Israeli Intelligence

Right up until he was assassinatedpera play, Hassan Nasrallah did not believe that Israel would kill him.

As he hunkered inside a Hezbollah fortress 40 feet underground on Sept. 27, his aides urged him to go to a safer location. Mr. Nasrallah brushed it off, according to intelligence collected by Israel and shared later with Western allies. In his view, Israel had no interest in a full-scale war.

What he did not realize was that Israeli spy agencies were tracking his every movement — and had been doing so for years.

Not long after, Israeli F-15 jets dropped thousands of pounds of explosives, obliterating the bunker in a blast that buried Mr. Nasrallah and other top Hezbollah commanders. The next day, Mr. Nasrallah’s body was found in an embrace with a top Iranian general based in Lebanon. Both men died of suffocation, the intelligence found, according to several people with knowledge of it.

The death of Hezbollah’s feared leader, who for decades commanded a Lebanese militia in its fight against the Israeli state, was the culmination of a two-week offensive. The campaign combined covert technological wizardry with brute military force, including remotely detonating explosives hidden in thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, as well as a withering aerial bombardment with the aim of destroying thousands of missiles and rockets capable of hitting Israel.

Combined with the effort by Congress to force TikTok to cut its ties with its Chinese owners, the initiative is a major addition to the administration’s efforts to seal off what it views as major cybervulnerabilities for the United States. But the effort has, in effect, begun to drop a digital iron curtain between the world’s two largest economies, which only two decades ago were declaring that the internet would bind them together.

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The amendment, Proposition 139, would establish a fundamental right to abortion and prohibit the state from restricting or banning abortion before viability — the point at which a fetus can survive outside the uterus, generally around 24 weeks of pregnancy.

ImageThe Dahiya, on the southern outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon, in October. The Israeli campaign against Hezbollah this year combined covert technological wizardry with brute military force and deep intelligence.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

It was also the result of two decades of methodical intelligence work in preparation for an all-out war that many expected would eventually come. A New York Times investigation, based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli, American and European officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations, reveals just how extensively Israeli spies had penetrated Hezbollah. They recruited people to plant listening devices in Hezbollah bunkers, tracked meetings between one top commander and his four mistresses, and had near constant visibility into the movements of the militia group’s leaders.

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