The countdown to Nasrallah’s assassination began with Majdal Shams

He certainly didn’t know it, but Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah signed his death warrant on July 27. That day, an errant Hezbollah rocket landed on a soccer field in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, where it killed twelve children—Israeli by citizenship but Syrian Druze by ethnicity. Hezbollah deployed every rhetorical and propaganda trick possible to deny responsibility, abetted by the political and spiritual leadership of the children’s co-religionists in Lebanon. But the cover-up could only work on a domestic audience and would not stay Israel’s vengeance. When that came, it was intentionally painful: assassinating Hezbollah’s chief-of-staff Fuad Shukr three days later.

Assassinating Shukr crossed all of Hezbollah’s red lines. The Israelis killed him in Haret Hreik, in the heart of Hezbollah’s “Dahiyeh” south Beirut stronghold, while causing incidental civilian casualties. The assassination carried insult in addition to injury: Israel openly claimed the attack and demonstrated the degree to which its intelligence apparatuses had penetrated the organization. Shukr, after all, was another Hezbollah “ghost commander,” whose anonymity had been built up by the organization over decades. And the Israelis managed to lure him to his death with a simple telephone call.

Arguably, this attack was meant to push Hezbollah’s limits. Throughout the war of attrition that Hezbollah initiated against Israel on October 8, 2023, the Israelis had been probing the group’s responses for weaknesses and limitations. The Israelis weren’t doing this gratuitously. Hezbollah’s daily attacks had virtually depopulated the frontier and were raining destruction on the area’s civilian objects and infrastructure.

Hezbollah was refusing to back down until a prior Gaza ceasefire—an unacceptable condition for the Israelis because this would have allowed Hamas to survive and regenerate to attack Israel again in the future. It would have decimated Israeli deterrence by having the Resistance Axis impose terms—i.e., the halting of its operations in Gaza—upon Israel after the setback of October 7. Finally, it would have allowed Hezbollah to claim the unprecedented victory of pushing the Israelis out of Israel and preventing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from enabling their return, which would vastly boost Hezbollah’s Lebanese and possibly its Arab popularity on the basis of the group’s apparent capability of “liberating Palestine from the river to the sea,” in Nasrallah’s oft-repeated words.

However, the Israelis wanted to return their citizens to their homes in genuine safety, not just to a superficial quiet where they would live in the shadow of a victorious Hezbollah, made all the more ominous by October 7, 2023, and Hezbollah’s twin “Liberation of the Galilee” plan. How Hezbollah would respond to Shukr’s assassination would force Hezbollah to expose its limits—and inform Israel’s next steps.

In stages, however, Hezbollah’s reaction revealed just how much the group feared a full war with Israel. Hezbollah waited a full month before retaliating. In the interim, Israel and Hamas were engaged in ceasefire negotiations, which, if successful, would have granted Hezbollah a face-saving off-ramp from the conflict and from responding to Shukr’s assassination. Shukr’s death, they could claim, was a worthwhile price to be paid in a battle where the Resistance Axis ultimately emerged victorious by bringing Israel to heel. In the interim, Hezbollah filled the time gap with worn propaganda: Nasrallah claimed Israel’s anticipation of a retaliatory attack was part of their punishment and claimed—without evidence—that this anticipation was hurting Israel’s morale and economy. In one of the group’s typical exercises in theatricality, Hezbollah also uncovered its Imad 4 underground tunnel facility. Though unlikely to be a genuinely strategic asset, the revelation had the intended effect of shoring up Hezbollah’s image among its supporters, convincing the more gullible among them that the group possessed tunnels reaching Tel Aviv.

When the negotiations between Israel and Hamas faltered, Hezbollah’s excuses ran out. Now, it had to respond—and its August 25 response was an utter failure. The Israeli Air Force preempted most of it and bombed an additional approximately 6,000 Hezbollah targets in the process. Israel’s defensive array neutralized the remainder, an estimated 210 rockets (Hezbollah claimed to have fired 320 total) and twenty loitering munitions. Furthermore, this barrage of projectiles—meager relative to Shukr’s value and to the humiliation of the Israeli strike—failed to reach their intended targets, according to Hezbollah: Mossad and Israeli Military Intelligence Unit Headquarters in northern Tel Aviv’s Glilot.

Hezbollah’s follow-up to this failure was pure theater. The group’s mouthpieces immediately shifted into claiming success, as did Nasrallah in a speech later that day. The late secretary-general denied Israel’s successes and exaggerated Hezbollah’s, claiming that the rockets had distracted Israel’s Iron Dome batteries just enough for the suicide drones—“our sources confirm,” said Nasrallah—to reach their intended targets in Glilot. In the coming days, Hezbollah’s propaganda outlets would try to buttress the legitimacy of Nasrallah’s claims with seemingly legitimate reports, first quoting “trustworthy” but anonymous sources “inside the Occupation Entity,” and weeks later “trusted” but still unnamed “European security sources,” that the attack had not only succeeded but had felled twenty-two Israeli officers and wounded seventy-five others.

This damage control was intended for Hezbollah’s support base. If the group could convince its base that it had been able to match the Israeli escalation in kind—thus demonstrating its alleged ability to maintain the balance of pain with Israel, which forms the basis of much of its popular support—then it could close the file on Shukr without provoking a larger Israeli counter-response.

Under the old rules of the game, this performance would have done just that. But Hezbollah, which had misread Israel on October 8, 2023, did so again. The Israelis, it would turn out, were in no mood to play by the old rules of the game—and if initiating the conflict with Israel was a painful mistake for Hezbollah, the group’s failure to properly respond for Shukr amidst that conflict would prove fatal.

Back in January, Israel assassinated senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in an airstrike in Dahiyeh but never claimed the attack. Hezbollah nevertheless fired a barrage of forty rockets and several missiles at the Israeli Air Force’s traffic control base in Meron—a significant escalation relative to the level of fighting at the time. However, months later, Hezbollah could only muster a failed strike for Shukr, which did not exceed the then-existing level of escalation. In short, whatever the effect of Hezbollah’s storytelling on its base, Israel knew the truth, and the group had shown its very weak hand.

In a few short weeks, the Israeli cabinet would add returning Israeli civilians to their homes in the north as a war objective and authorize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant to undertake all “offensive and defensive” measures to achieve that goal. From there, beginning on September 17, the Israelis began rapidly landing painful blows upon Hezbollah, including twin telecommunications device attacks, the elimination of the entire Radwan Force’s command, and an aerial blitz destroying 1,600 Hezbollah targets in one day, which would culminate in ten days with the assassination of Hezbollah’s secretary-general.

Hassan Nasrallah’s entire career is colored in infamy. But where he and Hezbollah truly demonstrated their murderousness—to the point that even Arabs who had once hailed the group turned against it—was in Syria. To save the Bashar al-Assad regime, Nasrallah and his fighters were willing to bring about the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrian children.

In many ways, then, it was fitting that shedding the blood of the ethnically Syrian Israeli children in Majdal Shams was the beginning of his end.

David Daoud is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), focusing on Hezbollah, Israel, and Lebanon issues. Follow him on X: @DavidADaoud.

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Image: Flowers, balls and others are offered in front of victims’ photos in Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on July 30, 2024. A rocket attack on a football field killed 12 people including children on July 27th. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah denied that Hezbollah carried out the deadly strike. ( The Yomiuri Shimbun )