The Syrian civil war played a key role in Israel’s success in penetrating the inner circles of the Hezbollah terror group, the UK’s Financial Times (FT) reported.

Israel revamped its intelligence strategy toward Hezbollah following the 2006 Second Lebanon War, including technological advancements that became “insurmountable,” such as satellites, advanced drones, and the capabilities to hack cell phones and turn them into listening devices.

When Hezbollah sent its forces to support Assad in his war against his own citizens who were rebelling against his brutal regime, Israel seized the opportunity. The report quoted a senior Lebanese official who said that Hezbollah operatives had to “expose themselves in Syria,” sharing information with Assad’s corrupt intelligence services or the Russian intelligence agencies, which were under constant American surveillance. The official emphasized that the Syrian civil war was the “price of supporting Assad,” as operatives were forced to expose themselves.

The report stated that “for almost a decade, Israeli intelligence treated Hezbollah as an ‘army of terror,’ and not as a terrorist group like [Osama] bin Laden’s. This was a conceptual change that forced Israel to scrutinize Hezbollah closely and widely. As Hezbollah grew stronger, and as it deployed to Syria in 2012 to help [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad suppress the uprisings against him, it gave Israel the opportunity to take its step. What emerged was a dense ‘intelligence picture’ – who was responsible for Hezbollah’s operations, who was promoted within the organization, who was corrupt, and who exactly returned from an unexplained trip.”

“While Hezbollah members struggled in the bloody war in Syria, and to keep up, the organization’s forces grew. The growth left the organization more vulnerable to Israeli spies who placed agents or looked for defectors. Syria was the beginning of Hezbollah’s expansion. This weakened Hezbollah’s internal control mechanisms and opened the door for large-scale infiltration.”

After Israeli intelligence agents identified Hezbollah operatives, they meticulously logged their daily schedules into a database, extracting data from their vehicles, locations, and even their spouses’ cell phones.

“Unit 9900, whose designated role is visual intelligence gathering, wrote algorithms that filter terabytes of images, aimed at identifying the smallest changes in the hope of detecting an improvised explosive device on the roadside, a ventilation opening above a tunnel, or something else like a concrete reinforcement addition that hints at a bunker. Once a Hezbollah operative was identified, his daily movement patterns were fed into a vast database. The information can be obtained from devices such as his wife’s mobile phone, a smart car’s odometer, or his location. This can be identified from various sources like a UAV flying overhead, a hacked CCTV camera feed he walks past, or even his voice captured on a modern TV remote control’s microphone.”

A former senior Israeli official told FT: “For years, Israeli intelligence managed to populate a huge target bank. Israel had a lot of capabilities, a lot of intelligence that was accumulated and awaited use. We could have used these capabilities during the war a long time ago – but we did not.”

The report added that in recent months or years, Israeli intelligence officials developed a technique that allow them to pinpoint Hassan Nasrallah’s location.

A plan to eliminate Nasrallah was almost carried out at the beginning of the war but was canceled due to the Biden administration, the report said.

“In the days following October 7, Israeli fighter jets took off with instructions to bomb the place where Nasrallah was located thanks to the IDF Intelligence Corps. The attack was canceled due to a demand from the White House,” an Israeli source said.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)