The continuous Israeli assassinations of fighters and leaders in Hezbollah highlight a security and technological breach that the party has been unable to address, despite the Iranian devices that have not stopped the security exposure of its members and the deadly pursuit that led to the targeting of a member in the mountains of Btum in the south, just hours after targeting a leader in the Islamic Group in Baalbek. Israeli drones assassinated the leader of the Islamic Group, Muhammad Hamad Jabara from the town of Qaroun, due to a strike on the town of Gaza in the Baalbek area. Shortly after, a Hezbollah member was killed when a drone targeted his Rapid car shortly after he left his mother’s house in the town of Btum in the south, which the party announced in the afternoon.
These assassinations are part of a long series of Israeli pursuits targeting leaders in Hezbollah, the Islamic Group, and Hamas, across southern and eastern Lebanon. Security measures and precautions have not thwarted the Israeli pursuit, which benefits from a security and technological breach that enables Israel to track them, as noted by military and strategic affairs researcher Mustafa Assad in an interview with "Asharq Al-Awsat".
Although the frequency of assassinations sometimes decreases and intensifies at other times, it is not politically motivated, according to Assad, but is strictly military in nature. He explains that when Israel has the opportunity to target brigade leaders, battalion leaders, or regional leaders, it will seize that opportunity and utilize all types of available technology in its pursuits, in addition to internal human factors for tracking movements. He adds that drones wait for the target person to leave their home or another location in order to strike them in the manner they are accustomed to.
Assad points out that Hezbollah has not yet been able to stop breaches and exposures despite the encrypted communication devices it has adopted, which are mostly Iranian-made and developed from Chinese, Russian, and North Korean devices. They have proven that these devices are not secure but rather infiltrated, indicating that their encryption is ineffective.
Regarding the human factor, Assad notes that Israel, with its technological capabilities, sometimes does not need an informant, considering that irregular groups do not maintain strict security protocols, which can expose them inadvertently to their own detection and to others they interact with through images they capture or by relaxing movement restrictions. He sees that what applies to Hezbollah also applies to Hamas members or the Islamic Group, but he includes the pursuit of these individuals within the framework of elimination and threat, noting that the operations of the Islamic Group and Hamas are not very active and occur sporadically, whereas Hezbollah is primarily responsible for the bulk of the ongoing conflict according to "Asharq Al-Awsat".
