Phone call lured Hezbollah’s Shukr to his Beirut apartment minutes before strike – report
Official from Lebanon-based terror group tells WSJ it’s working with Iran to probe how Israel breached security to hurry secretive commander into easy-to-target 7th-floor home
The Beirut airstrike that killed Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr last month came minutes after a telephone call telling the shadowy terror chief to go up from his second-floor office to his seventh-floor residence, where he was easier to target, according to a US report citing an official from the Iran-backed group.
The Hezbollah official told the Wall Street Journal that the terror group was working with Iran to investigate the security breach, and believed Israel’s superior technological capabilities had bested the terror group’s countersurveillance system.
The Journal assessed that Shukr lived and worked in the same building to limit his time outside. He went into hiding after he helped plan the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 from Athens to the United States.
“We’d heard his name, but we never saw him,” the paper quoted a neighbor as saying. “He was like a ghost.”
The Israel Defense Forces strike on July 30 killed Shukr, his wife, two other women, and two children. It came in response to a deadly Hezbollah rocket attack on the northern town of Majdal Shams that killed 12 children and teenagers.
Hours after Shukr was killed, an explosion in Tehran killed Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh. Both Hezbollah and Iran have vowed to take revenge on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the blast that killed Haniyeh.
Shukr helped command a 2006 cross-border assault that saw eight Israeli soldiers killed and two kidnapped, sparking a war in Lebanon. In the aftermath of that conflict, Shukr is thought to have orchestrated the expansion of the terror group’s rocket arsenal from about 15,000 to some 150,000, making it the best-armed nonstate actor in the region.
According to the IDF, he was Hezbollah’s point man for smuggling in, through Syria, Iranian components that could make guided missiles out of unguided ones.
The Journal noted that Shukr’s life was so secretive that Lebanese media reporting on his death showed pictures of the wrong man.
Much of the world’s media (though not The Times of Israel) followed suit.
In early 2024, Shukr appeared in public for just a couple of minutes to attend the funeral of his nephew, who was killed fighting Israel, an acquaintance told the Journal.
Shukr had been wanted by the US for orchestrating the bombing that killed 241 American servicemen at a US Marines barracks in Beirut in 1982, before Hezbollah was officially founded.
He helped organize Shiites for guerrilla fights against Israel, which invaded Lebanon in 1982 in response to frequent rocket attacks on Israel’s north.
Earlier that year, Shukr was working for the General Directorate of General Security, Lebanon’s intelligence agency. Shukr, then in his twenties, was dismissed for failing to prevent the abduction of Iranian diplomats whom he was escorting from the Syrian border to Beirut, according to Qassem Kassir, a Lebanese political analyst who had known Shukr for some four decades.
When Hezbollah was officially founded in 1985, Shukr was made its military commander. He was seen as a close friend of Hassan Nasrallah, who was made the terror group’s leader after Israel assassinated his predecessor in 1992.
According to Kassir, Shukr helped plan the June 14, 1985, hijacking of the TWA flight, for which Hezbollah has denied responsibility.
The plane was flown back and forth between Beirut and Algiers for three days until Israel released 700 Shiite fighters as demanded by the hijackers. Shukr went into hiding soon afterward.
“He became invisible,” said an acquaintance of Shukr.
After that, Shukr’s public appearances were rare. The acquaintance said Shukr personally intervened to prevent violence between Hezbollah members and Lebanese security forces during 1993 protests against the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In 1996, during a pilgrimage to Mecca, Shukr led a large group of Muslim worshipers in chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” said the acquaintance, who accompanied Shukr.
Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the Lebanese border on a near-daily basis since October 8. The group says it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there, sparked by Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre in southern Israel.
Fearing a similar attack from Hezbollah, Israel evacuated northern border communities soon afterward. Some 60,000 Israelis remain displaced, as do about 95,000 residents of southern Lebanon.
So far, the skirmishes on the northern border have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 18 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Hezbollah has named 412 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. In Lebanon, another 71 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and dozens of civilians have been killed.
