The heaviest blow of a ruthless military campaign in Lebanon devastates the group and may change the face of the Middle East.
The plan had been years in the making, the target one of the most famous figures in the Arab world, and one of the most hated in Israel.
In the 11 days before it was implemented, Israel had conducted a military campaign of metronomic efficiency in Lebanon, each phase meticulously and ruthlessly executed, each blow delivered as Hezbollah was still staggering from the one that preceded it.
But then, at dusk on Friday, came the heaviest blow of them all — one that may forever cripple Hezbollah, weaken Iranian influence and potentially even reshape the Middle East itself.
Their detonations echoing across the Beirut skyline, more than 80 bunker-busting bombs pulverised not just four high-rise buildings above the ground but also the subterranean complex that housed Hezbollah’s secret headquarters.
The synchronised sabotage of Hezbollah’s communication devices and other assassinations in previous days had shown Israel was not short of accurate intelligence about a movement that it had clearly infiltrated at all levels.
But this was on a different scale. If previous attacks had systematically severed many of the spokes of the Iran-backed movement, this one was striking at its very hub.
Not only did Israel know the location of the secret bunker of a man who had not been seen in public for two decades, they knew where Hassan Nasrallah would be and that he would be meeting some of the few senior commanders who had survived the assassination strikes of the preceding weeks.
In fact, Israel had known for months, tracking Nasrallah’s every movement until deciding to strike this week after learning that the Hezbollah leader planned to move to an unknown location, according to Israeli officials quoted by the New York Times.
As the plans were finalised, it was decided the operation should be mounted as Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly – something Israel’s military chiefs believed might persuade Nasrallah to lower his guard.
The ruse succeeded. As Netanyahu addressed the press in New York following his speech, an aide whispered in his ear and the Israeli prime minister withdrew to give the command to attack.
For hours afterwards neither side knew Nasrallah’s fate but gradually, amid the chaos in southern Beirut, there was enough intelligence to confirm that he was indeed dead – something Hezbollah itself grudgingly conceded a few hours later.
Sweetening the triumph for Israel, the bomb did not just kill Nasrallah.
A general from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was among the dead, as was Ali Karaki, a senior Hezbollah commander who survived a previous assassination attempt just days earlier.
Netanyahu said on Saturday that Israel had “settled the score” with the killing of Nasrallah.
“We settled the score with the one responsible for the murder of countless Israelis and many citizens of other countries, including hundreds of Americans and dozens of French,” he said, adding that Israel had reached “what appears to be a historic turning point” in the fight against its “enemies”.
The Israeli prime minister also claimed the death of Nasrallah would help facilitate the return of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
“The more (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar sees that Hezbollah will no longer come to his aid, the greater the chances of returning our captives,” he said, adding that Israel was “determined to continue striking our enemies”.
Israel’s military leadership also made it clear on Saturday that this was not the end of the assassinations, with remaining Hezbollah commanders still in their sights.
“This is not the end of our toolbox,” Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, Israel’s top army general, told reporters. “We have more capacity going forward. Anyone who threatens the state of Israel, we will know how to reach them.”
If this was a moment of unalloyed triumph for Israel’s military establishment and, so he hopes, a passage to possible political redemption for Mr Netanyahu, there is no question Hezbollah has suffered the most grievous in a litany of disasters.
Nasrallah might not have been involved in Hezbollah’s day-to-day military operations but he was the centrifuge around which the movement spun. For many in the Middle East, perhaps more than any other of Israel’s foes, he was the embodiment of resistance to the Jewish state.
The son of a greengrocer, he climbed through Hezbollah’s ranks until he reached the top after Israel killed his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi, one of the movement’s co-founders, in a missile strike on his motorcade in 1992.
Nasrallah proved a much more adept leader than Musawi, using his organisational skills and close ties to Iran to turn the movement into a formidable political and military force.
Having waged a guerrilla war that persuaded Israel to end its occupation in southern Lebanon in 2000, he was increasingly viewed as a hero by many in the Middle East.
He burnished that reputation when his fighters battled invading Israeli troops to a bloody standstill in the hills of southern Lebanon in 2006, a stalemate he successfully, if dubiously, portrayed as a great military victory to his fellow Shia Muslims in Lebanon and beyond.
Spinning Nasrallah’s death and the turmoil of recent days will be far harder.
Even before the killing of Nasrallah, a growing number of analysts believed that Hezbollah’s reputation as the world’s most powerful non-state armed group was withering.
Now, with its leader out of the equation, it may quite possibly be facing a slow but terminal decline. As its once formidable reputation shrinks so too might that of Iran, which created, nurtured, funded, armed and trained Hezbollah.
Iran’s ability to project influence through the region by means of proxy militias is now in question.
Despite warning Israel that it had “opened the gates of hell against itself”, Tehran appears to have abandoned Hezbollah to fend for itself, rebuffing calls from the movement to come to its rescue by attacking Israel directly.
“Nasrallah’s killing is going to cause irreversible damage for Hezbollah and I don’t think it will be able to recover from it,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, the international affairs think tank.
“I think we are seeing both a historic shift in Hezbollah’s power and a historic shift in the trajectory of Iran’s influence in the Middle East.”
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