After Qassem and Fakhrizadeh: Is it Hassan Nasrallah’s turn?

Ali Ragab

The assassinations that targeted Iranian officials, most notably Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, chief Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and Iraq’s Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, are among the scenarios for an expected assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.

Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported about the failure of a plot to assassinate Nasrallah recently. Leaks were published just one day before the assassination of Fakhrizadeh.

According to Iranian sources close to current Quds Force commander Major General Esmail Ghaani, Lebanon’s Hezbollah managed to uncover a large operation that Israel had prepared to assassinate Nasrallah and a large number of pro-Iranian faction leaders in Syria, Iraq and Palestine.

Days before the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist, Ghaani visited Lebanon and Iraq, where he met with Nasrallah and other leaders. He also met PMF leaders in Baghdad. He asked for calm, preserving the existing reality, and not giving Israel or the United States any opportunity to escalate or start a battle, but he also asked them to stop operations against US interests.

Will Nasrallah be assassinated?

Talk about the assassination of Nasrallah is nothing new. Many Arab and foreign newspapers and media outlets have reported about plans and operations to thwart the assassination of the Hezbollah leader.

Israeli’s Chief of the General Staff Gadi Eisenkot confirmed in late September 2017 that Nasrallah “is a legitimate target for assassination at the moment we realize that he is working against us.”

There have been many attempts to assassinate the Hezbollah leader. In May 2004, a Lebanese and Arab newspaper reported about the attempted assassination of Nasrallah through a network that Israel had recruited to carry out security operations against the leaders of the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance in Lebanon, indicating that the top of the targeted figures was Hassan Nasrallah.

As-Safir newspaper published the details of the news that “a Palestinian woman in her forties, named Jamal Zaaroura, is a resident of Nahr al-Bared camp in the north, and she holds a Tunisian passport. She has been traveling between Beirut and Tunisia during the past period, as Israeli intelligence contacted her through representatives in the Tunisian capital, and it was found that, according to Zaaroura’s confessions, they work there through the Israeli Commercial Office.”

Also in 2004, Nasrallah was subjected to a failed assassination attempt through food poisoning, while Nasrallah’s residence was subjected to Israeli bombardment in 2006.

It is also believed that there was an assassination attempt on Nasrallah in July 2011 through an explosion in a residential building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which was believed to be used as his headquarters.

Also in late 2017, Maariv newspaper published the threats of Israeli Construction Minister Yoav Galant to assassinate Nasrallah following the speech he delivered on the memory of Ashura in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Nasrallah’s security

In 2014, the Israeli newspaper Maariv published on its website a lengthy report on the Special Unit for the Protection of the Secretary-General of Hezbollah Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, indicating that Nasrallah’s personal security team reaches about 20 experienced and loyal family security guards who work under the leadership of the team leader, Abu Ali Jawad. Their training was for one mission: to protect “the master”.

The newspaper indicated at the time that Nasrallah’s security was strengthened by 130 people, after information about an American attempt to assassinate him. Nasrallah has been hiding in a secret location since the assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Will Israel assassinate Nasrallah?

Hassan Nasrallah is one of three people on Israel’s target list, and the other two people were assassinated within a short time of each other. Baha Abu Al-Ata, military and field commander of the military arm of the Islamic Jihad Movement in the Gaza Strip, was assassinated in November 2019, while Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in January 2020. Could Nasrallah be next in the chain of assassinations?

The head of the Research Division in the Israeli Military Intelligence, Dror Shalom, told Elaph in October that if Israel wanted to kill Nasrallah, it would have killed him.