Transcript of Nasrallah Assassination: How Israel tracked down and killed Hezbollah leader | BBC News

Well, Hezbolar has suffered a string of blows to its command structure over the last fortnight, culminating in the killing of its elusive leader, Hassan Nasrallah on Friday. So how did the Israel Defense Forces manage to track him down, and how have they been able to target so many of Hezbolar's top commanders? Well, our security correspondent, Frank Garner, has been looking into it. Frank.

Well, targeting the Hezbolar leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was a strategic decision by Israel. In hiding for years, he'd long been in Israel's sights. So how did they do it? Israeli intelligence was already widely assumed to be behind the lethal sabotage of all those thousands of Hezbolar's pages and walkie-talkies. The Mossad, that's Israel's overseas spy agency, is thought to have inserted explosives into the supply chain. Now, that was almost a fortnight ago. What's transpired since then is that Israel's penetration of the Hezbolar command structure goes deeper still. Just have a look at this pyramid here. The Israeli military says that it has assassinated all of these senior Hezbollah commanders. So just how has this Israeli campaign been able to penetrate Hezbollah's security so comprehensively?

It certainly looks like something that would have been put together over probably years. It would have been built up from multiple disciplines, so that signals intelligence intelligence, interception of communications, the analysis of imagery, be that satellite or covertly taken photographs, but almost certainly some human intelligence.

Yeah, in other words, spies on the ground. Once the Israelis located Nasrallah, their Air Force F-15 warplanes reportedly dropped 80 bunker-busting bombs. They hit the underground cellar in South Beirut and Dakhia, where he was meeting top commanders. It's clear that Hezbollah's security is deeply compromised by Israeli intelligence. Nasrallah will be replaced, and soon, by someone with similar religious credentials. But it could take years for that new leader to build up a following. In this climate, time is probably not on his side.