Two years ago, I sat in a room where a decisive question was being discussed: Should Israel strike Hassan Nasrallah, a man I had spent much of my professional life studying? This fall, as Israel marks two years since his death and three years since Hamas\u2019s October 7 attack and the war it unleashed, I keep returning to that discussion.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of intelligence officers and analysts spent years building the intelligence case for targeting Nasrallah and minimising harm to civilians. I remember working around the clock with young analysts until the long-awaited confirmation came from Col. M., who led intelligence work on Hezbollah. One of the finest officers I have known, she told us: \u201cWe have it. If you decide to act, you can.\u201d<\/p>\n
What remained was the strategic decision. In the room, not one person objected. Mindful of the lessons of October 7, we sought dissenting views and contacted two people considered most likely to oppose the operation. Both supported it. The recommendation moved up the chain of command: Nasrallah blocked any cease-fire in Lebanon and would never unlink the Lebanese front from Gaza. Final approval came as Israeli Air Force jets were en route.<\/p>\n
I watched the live images as the bombs hit the compound where he was staying. When confirmation arrived, the defining moments of Nasrallah\u2019s career came flooding back. I felt profound relief and satisfaction that a man whose organisation had killed so many Israelis and Americans was gone. I also felt the strange emptiness intelligence officers sometimes experience when a subject who has occupied their thinking for years suddenly disappears from the world.<\/p>\n
Nasrallah was one of Israel\u2019s most capable and dangerous enemies. He led Hezbollah from 1992 and transformed it into a force that shaped Lebanon and served Iran far beyond its borders. Israel\u2019s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 allowed Hezbollah to claim that armed resistance had forced the Israeli military out. The 2006 Lebanon War, which Nasrallah cast as a divine victory despite the devastation in Lebanon, made him a star across much of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Afterward, Hezbollah amassed an arsenal and precision-strike capabilities that gave it firepower rivaling that of many states, deterring Israel for years from taking decisive action against it.<\/p>\n
To generations of Israeli intelligence officers, Nasrallah combined the qualities of a statesman, military commander and leader attentive to his constituency. He remained fanatical, antisemitic and fully committed to Iran, yet could be calculating and sensitive to the price Lebanon\u2019s Shiites would pay for his decisions. After 2006, he acknowledged that had he anticipated even a small chance of such devastation, he would not have ordered Hezbollah\u2019s cross-border kidnapping. Israel\u2019s intelligence community believed he had internalized one central lesson from that miscalculation \u2013 to avoid another full-scale war with Israel \u2013 and had become deeply risk-averse, almost traumatized by the prospect.<\/p>\n
Then something changed. Decades in power dulled his instincts and bred an arrogance that distorted his judgment. Hezbollah\u2019s arsenal and Israel\u2019s internal crisis convinced him he could defeat Israel and bring America to its knees. In March 2023, he said of Israel:<\/p>\n
\u201cGod willing, it will not reach its 80th birthday.\u201d<\/p>\n
His confidence grew as potential challengers disappeared. Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah\u2019s military chief, had been killed in a joint US-Israeli operation; his successor, Mustafa Badreddine, was later killed in Syria. As those who might test his assumptions disappeared, Nasrallah came to believe that no one understood Israel and the Jews better than he did. This fit his messianic, deterministic worldview: Iran\u2019s Shiite revolutionary project was destined to triumph and every development seemed to confirm that history \u2013 and divine providence \u2013 favoured the Islamic Revolution.<\/p>\n
The warning signs were unmistakable in 2023. In its first ground infiltration into Israel since 2002, Hezbollah sent an operative 37 miles south of the Lebanese border to plant a roadside bomb near Megiddo. That summer it erected an armed tent on the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border and refused to remove it despite warnings. Neither move followed an Israeli action; both were unprovoked tests of Israel\u2019s resolve. Israeli security officials urged a response, but senior decision-makers feared an escalation that could devastate cities. Israel held back to avoid such a war, and Nasrallah read that restraint as weakness.<\/p>\n
Hamas\u2019s October 7 attack surprised Nasrallah and forced a choice. He opened fire the next day to support Hamas while sparing Lebanon\u2019s Shiites a full-scale war. He bound Hezbollah to a pledge: no cease-fire in Lebanon before one in Gaza. That commitment trapped him: He could neither escalate to all-out war nor stop firing altogether, while Lebanon \u2013 and especially its Shiite communities \u2013 bore the cost. He also fell into the same analytical trap that had shaped Israel\u2019s thinking before October 7: he could not accept that the other side had changed.<\/p>\n
Nasrallah continued to assume that Israel would not risk an all-out war in Lebanon. Even after Israel killed Hezbollah\u2019s chief of staff, eliminated much of its elite Radwan force\u2019s senior leadership, struck Beirut and destroyed a substantial share of the group\u2019s firepower, he refused to believe the confrontation was no longer limited. The pager explosions exposed how deeply Hezbollah had been penetrated, but even that shock did not change his course.<\/p>\n
Nasrallah\u2019s killing marked a decisive turning point in Hezbollah\u2019s decline. The organisation still exists and remains dangerous, but it is a pale shadow of the force that once possessed the capabilities of a state military and threatened Israel, American lives and the stability of the Middle East. The strike shattered the leadership model built around Nasrallah and compounded the losses Hezbollah had already suffered. Hezbollah ultimately accepted a cease-fire in Lebanon without securing one in Gaza, while its leader, Naim Qassem, has neither Nasrallah\u2019s authority nor his charisma.<\/p>\n
Nasrallah was a formidable enemy, but his abilities fed the hubris that caused his fall and brought Hezbollah to the lowest point in its history. He failed to grasp that Israel would no longer live with an existential threat on its borders and would take risks to remove it. His fate should warn leaders everywhere: The moment you become certain you understand your adversary may be the moment you cease to understand them at all.<\/p>\n