Inside Nasrallah’s ‘Hezbollahland’: Life and death in and under Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburb
The ‘linchpin of Iran’s axis of resistance’ operated most but not all of the time from a network of underground bunkers, surrounded by a loyal few. He thought he was safe there
On Friday, Israeli fighter jets dropped over 80 bombs to penetrate Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in southern Beirut and eliminate its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with more than 20 operatives.
Six buildings were flattened in the massive strike on the subterranean complex, which the IDF noted was located near a United Nations-run school.
The strike culminated a three-decade-long effort to liquidate the leader of the Shiite terror group. Nasrallah had been at the helm of Hezbollah since 1992, but had become an elusive target after the 2006 Second Lebanon War, when he went into permanent hiding.
“Before 2006, Nasrallah traveled openly across Lebanon, delivering speeches and holding meetings,” said Eyal Zisser, an expert on Lebanon from Tel Aviv University’s Middle Eastern Studies Department.
During that war, Israel attempted to kill Nasrallah three times, according to sources cited by the Financial Times. One airstrike missed him, while two other attempts failed to breach the reinforced concrete bunker where he was hiding.
After that 34-day conflict, Israeli intelligence agencies stopped viewing Hezbollah as just a “terror army” and radically reoriented their approach to gathering intelligence on Hezbollah, the Financial Times wrote.
The paper said that for the past two decades, the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate and in particular signal intelligence unit 8200 have mined large amounts of data on the Shiite group — its military activities, its political ambitions and its growing connections with Iran.
With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011 and Hezbollah’s joining the fray on the side of President Bashar Assad, the group recruited new members extensively, and became “more vulnerable to Israeli spies placing agents or looking for would-be defectors,” according to the FT. Obituaries for slain operatives also provided a plethora of information, and funerals sometimes drew senior leaders out in the open.
Thanks to their technological edge, Israeli intelligence agencies managed to collect increasing amounts of information on the group through deploying spy satellites and drones, and hacking electronic devices, the FT also wrote.
As a result, Nasrallah became increasingly cautious, appearing in public only rarely and increasing his reliance on underground bunkers.
“His life changed dramatically,” Zisser told The Times of Israel. “In the last 22 years, he may have appeared in public just four or five times.”
He added that while Nasrallah was believed to live mostly underground, this wasn’t always the case. “Some people who met with him said it wasn’t always a bunker. But they all said they were prevented from knowing his location. Before meeting him, they would be blindfolded, or driven around Beirut.”
The last time Nasrallah was filmed aboveground was during a visit to his dying mother in a Beirut hospital in late May, captured on video and only circulated days later.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah goes to the hospital to say goodbye to his mother before she passes.
Advertisement— Leo (@LeoBalistreri) May 29, 2024
Though his image became iconic, adorning billboards across Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, Nasrallah only showed his face to the public in his fiery pre-recorded televised speeches, broadcast from undisclosed locations against a nondescript background, and watched throughout the Arab world.
While many speculated he was hiding in Dahiyeh, the Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut, his exact whereabouts were tightly guarded.
“Nasrallah did not stay in one location,” explained Col. (ret.) Shlomo Mofaz, director of the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center. “He had multiple hiding places, all likely within Dahiyeh, part of an extensive network of underground bunkers.”
Various assassinations of senior Hezbollah figures in Dahiyeh over the past weeks and months, including top commanders Fuad Shukr and Ibrahim Aqil, proved unequivocally that the suburb still hosted the terror group’s top leadership, as it did in 2006, when the IDF bombed the Hezbollah headquarters there. That leadership is much depleted now.
‘Hezbollahland’
Hanin Ghaddar, a Lebanese scholar at the Washington Institute who grew up in Dahiyeh, estimated in her 2022 book “Hezbollahland” that the population of the Shiite suburb was between 750,000 and one million. The area has over the decades become a Hezbollah bastion within Lebanon, its residents segregated from the rest of the population.
“Very few [outsiders] have actually been to Dahiyeh. This is by design. Hezbollah has implemented a strategy of concealing Dahiyeh over decades. The aim is to isolate Dahiyeh’s Shia community from other communities in Lebanon,” she wrote.
“Through services, indoctrination, education and cultural initiatives, Hezbollah has ensured that very few Shia are exposed to Lebanon’s other cultural and social practices. Indeed, many who reside [there] have no need to travel elsewhere in Lebanon, except to other Shia locales in the South or the Beqaa Valley, because most Dahiyeh residents originally come from those rural areas.”
In parts of Dahiyeh controlled by Hezbollah, such as in Haret Hreik, a mixed Maronite Christian and Shia Muslim municipal district, access is limited by checkpoints on the road.
“Security is tightened around sensitive locations above or below the ground where Hezbollah members live or work,” Mofaz said. “Only authorized people are allowed to approach those areas, and those who are not authorized are arrested. It has happened to various foreign journalists in the past.”
Nasrallah was killed along with several senior Hezbollah figures, including the head of his personal security unit, Ibrahim Hussein Jazini.
Being tapped as one Nasrallah’s bodyguards was a prestigious position within Hezbollah, requiring rigorous vetting. According to Mofaz, bodyguards were often handpicked from trusted family members or highly loyal Hezbollah operatives and were trained both in Lebanon and at IRGC camps in Iran.
A vacuum that will be hard to fill
Nasrallah’s death leaves a significant gap in Iran’s “axis of resistance” across the Middle East.
“Nasrallah was the linchpin of Iran’s seven-front axis of resistance,” said Mofaz. “Hezbollah was created by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to export the 1979 Islamic revolution and direct it against the Great Satan and the Little Satan, i.e. America and Israel. It established Hezbollah as a strategic arm that would be activated in case Iran was targeted on its territory – particularly as it developed its nuclear program.”
Following the 2020 US assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, Nasrallah became the closest leader of the regional axis to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Qaani, does not hold the same clout.
The slain Hezbollah leader also exerted a greater regional influence than Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who has also been living underground since October 7, in Gaza’s vast tunnel system. The similarities between the two leaders end there, said Mofaz.
“Hamas is a local organization. It was not founded by Iran but rather adopted by it. It is Sunni, and there have been various disagreements between its officials and Iranian leaders over the years,” he said. “Nasrallah’s charisma, his speaking style, and his narcissism set him apart.”
That same hubris may have contributed to his downfall.
“He claimed to know Israel well, that he knew how to read the Israelis, ” said Mofaz. “What happened last week proved him wrong.”
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