Assessing Hezbollah’s Intelligence Failure

Editor’s Note: Studies of intelligence failures usually focus on the United States or its allies, noting how—as on Oct. 7, 2023—they failed to anticipate and avert major attacks or other threats. Yet the bad guys have failures as well. Reichman University’s Nadav Pollak argues that Hezbollah failed to understand the Israeli response to Oct. 7 and explains how Israel’s intentions and capabilities have changed. The result has been deadly for the group’s leaders and, so far, inhibited its ability to respond to Israel’s escalation.

Daniel Byman

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It started with the famous “pagers attack” on Sept. 17, which injured thousands of Hezbollah fighters. Then came the walkie-talkie attack on Sept. 18, which also inflicted significant damage. Two days later, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) took out Ibrahim Aqil, the head of Hezbollah’s operations unit, along with the entire command of the Radwan unit, which was planning to conduct another Oct. 7-like attack against Israel. A few days later, on Sept. 23, Israel bombed more than a thousand military targets belonging to Hezbollah. Later that week, the IDF took out the commander of Hezbollah’s strategic missile units, Ibrahim Muhammad Qubaisi, and the head of Hezbollah’s drone unit, Muhammad Hussein Srur—both top-level commanders in Hezbollah’s ranks.

Then, on Sept. 27, came the attack that shocked the region: The Israeli air force bombed Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s bunker, killing him and other senior Hezbollah and Iranian commanders.

For many longtime Hezbollah researchers and analysts, the speed and destruction of these strikes was a remarkable surprise. For years, Hezbollah has had a reputation for both its immense power relative to other terrorist groups—primarily through its large arsenal of rockets and missiles and tens of thousands of trained fighters—and its tight operational security standards, which made it difficult for Israel to target these strengths.

Hezbollah has experienced something very similar to what Israel experienced on Oct. 7—a devastating intelligence failure. Hezbollah, which for years thought it understood Israeli officials’ decision-making and operational conduct, not only missed key signals that indicated Israel had changed profoundly after the Oct. 7 attack but also failed to see that Israel’s leadership was willing to take risks it was not willing to take in the past. Israel’s adversaries would do well to update their assessment of Israeli strategy and its new tolerance for escalation. Hezbollah paid a high cost for not understanding that Israel was no longer deterred by its arsenal; Iran could make the same mistake.

Hezbollah had deep-rooted assumptions about Israel and Israel’s leadership. These assumptions were formed from years of fighting Israel, negotiating with Israel via intermediaries, and observing and learning about Israeli society through the news, analysis, and polls, among other resources. That experience and knowledge about Israel also made Hezbollah and Nasrallah himself an asset to the Iranians.

From time to time, Nasrallah shared his views on Israel in his speeches and interviews. In these comments, Nasrallah mostly demonstrated that he thought Israeli society was weak, unwilling to fight for its security, and deterred from fighting Hezbollah. Back in July 2022, in an interview with Al-Mayadeen, he said, “I believe that this entity has no future. I call it a temporary entity … I believe that [its end] is very near … The image I see before my eyes is of people grabbing their suitcases and heading to the airports, sea ports, and the Jordanian and Egyptian borders. This is the image I envision. This entity has no future.”

The truth is that Nasrallah was partially right. For years, Israel tried to avoid escalation with Hezbollah, fearing a war that would unleash Hezbollah’s rockets and missiles on Israeli communities and lead to unimaginable damage to the home front. Israel did not target Hezbollah in Lebanon directly, despite watching its rearmament campaign very closely; and even in Syria, where Israel operated more freely, the IDF tried to avoid killing Hezbollah terrorists to prevent escalation.

For example, in March 2023, Hezbollah sent a terrorist across the Israel-Lebanon border with explosives with the intention of killing Israelis. The terrorist was not able to follow through with his plans, but this was the first time in 21 years that Hezbollah had sent terrorists across the border, a clear violation of what were considered by then the acceptable “rules of the game” between Hezbollah and Israel. Israel did nothing in response due to fears of escalation.

But Israel before Oct. 7 is not the Israel after Oct. 7, and Hezbollah and Nasrallah missed this profound change. The atrocious attack by Hamas and Hezbollah’s attacks that followed on Oct. 8 shocked Israelis to their core. The threat of Hezbollah invading was not an extreme scenario anymore, but a likely one unless Israel did something to stop it.

The Israeli public not only suddenly felt the necessity of dealing with the Hezbollah threat but also understood that this would require sacrifices, and these sacrifices—namely sending Israeli soldiers into combat and long periods of living under threat of rockets—were acceptable in order to remove the threat. In a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, 80 percent of Israelis said that it was the right move by Israel to start this attack against Hezbollah. This data point is even more telling, given that more than 60 percent of those surveyed said they are concerned about their own safety or the safety of their loved ones as a result of the escalation in the north.

Israel’s military and political leadership have also been willing to take more risks. Even after Oct. 7, some members of the Israeli leadership still did not seek a war against Hezbollah, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These leaders thought that it would be a mistake to open a second front against Hezbollah in Lebanon, especially while Israel is still recuperating from the Oct. 7 attack and the war in Gaza still required significant resources. This thinking persisted for many months. In June, the minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, stated that Israel did not want a war with Hezbollah and it preferred diplomacy.

As the war in Gaza became less intense, there were several clear signs that showed the Israeli leadership was now willing to risk war to achieve its goals in the north, signs that Hezbollah missed completely.

The first sign was when, in retaliation for Hezbollah’s killing 12 children in Majdal Shams with rockets in late July, Israel targeted Hezbollah’s military chief of staff, Fuad Shukr. He was the highest Hezbollah commander Israel had killed in decades, and Israel killed him when he was in a residential building in Beirut, a red line that Nasrallah warned many times not to cross. Israel executed this attack knowing that it could prompt a full-scale war.

The second signal came when Israel conducted a preemptive strike as Hezbollah was planning to retaliate over Shukr’s assassination. This was the first time Israel conducted such an attack, using around 100 fighter jets and targeting thousands of Hezbollah’s rocket launchers. In fact, as a leading Israeli reporter wrote recently, this was when the Israeli leadership decided to enter a war against Hezbollah. Hezbollah missed this sign as well.

Then came the extraordinary campaign of Israeli attacks against Hezbollah that started on Sept. 17 with the pagers attack.

Up to the moment of his death, Nasrallah was still convinced that the Israeli leadership was not interested in a full-blown war with Hezbollah. He was also probably convinced that he was safe in his bunker because he presumed that Israeli leaders were not interested in escalating the situation further or did not know where his bunker was. Those assumptions turned out to be wrong—and deadly for the individual who led Hezbollah for more than 30 years and his organization.

When Iranian leaders wanted to understand Israel, they came to Nasrallah, but in the end he failed to understand Israel’s changing strategy. As Israel moves on from destroying Hamas and Hezbollah’s offensive capacity, it will be important for the Iranian leadership not to miss the signals that Nasrallah did. Israel is now willing to take much greater risks to reestablish its security.