Has Hezbollah Been Penetrated?

Jerusalem – Following the announcement on Sunday by U.S. National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell that Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh was killed by Syria or his Hezbollah colleagues, a plethora of Arab analysts said the assassination represented a huge security lapse by both Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard and could be followed by the killing of other Hezbollah leaders. They said that Mr. Mughniyeh, the subject of a $25 million bounty, had been tracked for months by Western and Israeli intelligence services before he was killed in a car bombing last Tuesday in Damascus.

“Certainly, there is a very big security infiltration in many directions, and it is the duty of the Syrian security apparatuses to clarify what really happened,” Ahmed Mosulli, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, said.

Appearing on a Feb. 13 panel discussion on the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya satellite channel, Mr. Mosulli said the 45-year-old Mr. Mughniyeh, who had just left a reception in Damascus, was not protected by bodyguards. Instead, the Hezbollah operative was said to have moved without escorts to avoid being tracked through his security detail.

“Mughniyeh was not part of Hezbollah, but part of its founders, and consequently his activities were outside this organization,” Mr. Mosulli said.

The Arab analysts said that Mr. Mughniyeh was sought by at least four countries – France, Germany, Israel and the United States. They said the search was assisted by Arab victims of attacks attributed to Mr. Mughniyeh, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

“Either he was killed by the Israelis and Americans in retaliation for the many operations he carried out against U.S. interests, the U.S. Marines, and the U.S. embassy car in Beirut that was carrying a U.S. official,” Mohammed Al Qahtani, a Kuwaiti journalist and analyst, said, “[or] a vehicle that Imad Mughniyeh was booby-trapping for a next attack, probably in Beirut, blew up.”

Mr. Qahtani said the most likely scenario was that Mr. Mughniyeh, said to have worked for numerous state sponsors, was the victim of a false flag operation. The Kuwaiti analyst said Mr. Mughniyeh was paid to conduct a major attack in what allowed a hostile intelligence service to kill him.

“Imad Mughniyeh, like Carlos and Sabri Al Banna, alias Abu Nidal, was throughout his life a mercenary and was killed by the party that hired him,” Mr. Qahtani said.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and currently a researcher at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said that “regardless of who killed Mughniyeh, it is a fact that this party was able to infiltrate into the inner circle of the Hezbollah security system. Whoever was able to reach Mughniyeh will be able to reach other senior Hezbollah figures, including [Secretary General] Hassan Nasrallah.”

Israel To Lodge Complaint About Iran To U.N.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has instructed the Israeli delegation to the U.N. to write a formal letter of complaint to the president of the U.N. Security Council in response to the statements made by the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Mohammed Ali Jaafari, who said that “soon we will witness the extinction of the cancerous existence of Israel by the able and strong hands of Hezbollah warriors.”

According to a report by the Iranian news agency, Mr. Jaafari sent a letter of condolence to Nasrallah in the wake of the assassination of Mr. Mughniyeh last week. “I am convinced that with every passing day Hezbollah’s strength increases and in the near future we will witness the disappearance of the cancerous bacteria called ‘Israel,'” wrote Mr. Jaafari.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson noted that the Israeli letter would say that Mr. Jaafari’s statements expressed a wish for the destruction of the state of Israel. “This was an anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic and racist statement of the worst kind,” read the statement.

The Iranian threat to Israel is hardly new, but on Sunday an Iranian military source hinted that Iran would take part in the revenge for the Mughniyeh assassination. “Hezbollah has many friends,” the official told Al-Manar, Hezbollah’s television station. Mohammed Raad, the chairman of Hezbollah’s faction in the Lebanese parliament, said that negative repercussions “greater than can be imagined” would be felt by Israel in the coming days.

Iranian Vice President Pervez Daudi made a threatening statement on Sunday about Israel as well. “The Zionist entity feels now that its end is near, and it is acting hysterically,” he said. “The Zionist entity is trying, by means of acts as these, to buy time, but this blood that has been spilled will only hasten the collapse of the Zionist entity, and the Islamic resistance will continue forcefully and with determination even though it lost one of its leaders.”

Kassam Rocket Strikes Clinic In Kibbutz, Four Suffer from Shock

Monday was a day of fierce firefights on the southern front. Just a day after the ministerial committee approved a program that would allow for the houses in Kibbutz Nir Am to be fortified and after the local children joined the residents of Sderot in Jerusalem to demonstrate, two Kassam rockets landed inside the kibbutz, one near the local clinic. Four residents were evacuated and were treated for shock, and a building was damaged. A few hours earlier another rocket landed in the kibbutz’s fields, causing neither casualties nor damage.

Kibbutz Nir Am, which is situated between Sderot and the Gaza Strip, has been struck in the past years by hundreds of Kassam rockets.

Meanwhile, armed Palestinian men fired more salvos of Kassam rockets at the western Negev. One of the rockets landed in the driveway of a private home in Sderot. Teams from Magen David Adom (the Israeli version of the Red Cross) that were called in treated 10 people who suffered from shock and one woman who was injured. The Popular Resistance Committees and the Al-Quds Brigades, Islamic Jihad’s military wing, assumed responsibility for the rocket fire at Sderot. Half an hour later, another three Kassam rockets were fired out of the Gaza Strip and landed near a kibbutz in the Negev Regional Council. Another four rockets followed shortly after that. There were no reports of either casualties or damage as a result of those rockets.

The Kassam rocket fire into the western Negev continued throughout the day. At around 5 p.m., two more rockets were fired at Sderot. One of them landed near a house in the town and caused it light damage. The Red Color alert system failed to go off.

More rockets landed in farmland near Gevim, near the entrance to Nir Am, and another rocket struck a house in Sderot.

Five mortar shells that were fired by terrorists at the Gaza periphery communities landed close to the border fence. No one was injured. On Sunday afternoon, terrorists shot at IDF troops that were on operational duty near the border fence at Nahal Oz. No one was injured and no damage was caused.

David Bedein can be reached at Media@actcom.co.il. His Web site is www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com

©The Bulletin 2008