Israeli spy agencies have uncovered information about Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr’s plans to marry his four mistresses over the phone, according to a report.
The New York Times reported this week about its investigation into how deeply Israeli spies had penetrated Hezbollah leading up to the assassination of its top leader Hassan Nasrallah, as well as other commanders in the Iran-backed terror group.
Israel announced in July that its forces had killed Shukur during what was, at the time, a rare and provacative strike in Beirut.
It came in response to Israel assessing that the Hezbollah commander was behind the rocket attack days earlier in the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that killed 12 people, including schoolchildren.
The United States had also long blamed Shukur for staging and planning a bombing of a Marine Corps barrack in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 American service members.
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Leading up to the strike that killed Shukr, Israeli intelligence agencies had identified four of his mistresses, according to the Times.
Shukr – apparently uneasy about his affairs – earlier this year reached out for help from Hashem Safieddine, one of Hezbollah’s highest religious clerics, to have the four women wedded, two Israeli officials and a European official told the Times.
Safieddine, in turn, reportedly arranged four marriage ceremonies conducted over the phone.
The intimate and sometimes mundane details of Shukr’s personal affairs point to how closely Israeli intelligence agencies managed to track the moves of Hezbollah’s leadership.
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Beyond tracking meetings with mistresses, the Times report revealed how Israeli spy agencies recruited human sources within the terror group to plant listening devices in bunkers and expose hideout locations.
After a pager attack that had been orchestrated by Israel’s Mossad for years, and increased strikes that killed Hezbollah leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while en route to New York City to speak before the United Nations General Assembly, finally ordered the killing of Nasrallah, according to the Times. Nasrallah, who headed Hezbollah for the past three decades, was killed in an Israeli air raid that leveled six apartment buildings in Beirut on Sept. 27.
The Times reported that Nasrallah had brushed off warnings from his commanders to change locations from his 40-foot underground Hezbollah bunker before the attack.
Unaware of the methodical Israeli intelligence providing clear visibility of his every move, he apparently believed that the Jewish state had no interest in an all-out war with Hezbollah.
Israeli F-15 jets soon after destroyed the bunker by dropping thousands of pounds of explosives, and Nasrallah, found locked in an embrace with an Iranian general who was based in Lebanon, reportedly died of suffocation underground.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
