Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sent senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Abbas Nilfroshan to warn Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, but Israeli bombing killed both.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Hezbollah leader Seyed Hassan Nasrallah to flee Lebanon days before he was killed in an Israeli attack, three Iranian sources said, and he now holds top government positions in Tehran. But the Israelis are very worried about the infiltration.

Shortly after the September 17 attack on Hezbollah’s bobby-trapped pagers, Khamenei sent a message with an emissary requesting the Secretary General of Hezbollah to leave for Iran, citing intelligence reports. There were reports that Israel had operatives within Hezbollah and was planning to do so. “Kill him,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters.

The official said the messenger was Brigadier General Abbas Nilfroshan, a senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who was with Nasrallah in his bunker when he was hit by an Israeli bomb and also killed.

A senior Iranian official said Khamenei, who has been in a safe haven inside Iran since Saturday, personally ordered about 200 missiles to be fired at Israel on Tuesday. The Revolutionary Guards said in a statement that this attack was revenge for the death of Nasrallah and Nilfroshan.

The statement also cited the July killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Israel’s attacks on Lebanon. Israel has not claimed responsibility for Haniyeh’s death.

Israel launched what it called a “limited” ground intervention against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon on Tuesday.

Iran’s foreign ministry and the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which oversees the country’s foreign intelligence agency Mossad, did not respond to requests for comment.

Nasrallah’s assassination followed two weeks of coordinated Israeli strikes that destroyed weapons sites, eliminated half of Hezbollah’s leadership council and decimated its top military command.

Iran’s fears about Khamenei’s safety and loss of trust between Hezbollah and Iran’s establishment, and between the two, came out in conversations with 10 sources for this story, who described a situation that Iran Resistance can complicate the effective functioning of the axis of the union. of illegal anti-Israeli armed groups.

Hezbollah, founded in the 1980s with the support of Iran, has long been the strongest member of this alliance.

Four Lebanese sources said the unrest is also making it difficult for Hezbollah to choose a new leader, fearing that ongoing infiltration would jeopardize a successor.

“Essentially, Iran lost its biggest investment in the past decades,” said Magnus Reinstorp, a Hezbollah expert at the Swedish Defense University, of the deep damage Hezbollah has done to Israel’s border attacks. reduced Iran’s ability to

“It shook Iran to the core. It shows how deeply infiltrated Iran is: they not only killed Nasrallah, but they also killed Nilfroshan,” he said, who Khamenei was a trusted military adviser.

Ransthorpe said Hezbollah’s lost military capability and leadership cadre could push Iran toward the kind of attacks against Israeli embassies and personnel abroad that it carried out more frequently before the rise of its proxy forces. .

Iran made arrests.

Another senior Iranian official said Nasrallah’s death has prompted Iranian officials, from the powerful Revolutionary Guards to top security officials, to conduct a thorough investigation into possible infiltration of Iran’s ranks. The first official said they are particularly focused on people who travel abroad or have relatives living outside Iran.

He said that Tehran became suspicious of some members of the Guards who were traveling to Lebanon. The official added that when one of the men started asking about Nasrallah’s whereabouts, specifically asking how long he would stay in certain places.

The man had been arrested along with several others, the first official said, after alarm was raised in Iran’s intelligence circles. The suspect’s family had moved out of Iran, the official said, without identifying the suspect or his relatives.

The second official said the killing had spread mistrust between Tehran and Hezbollah, and among Hezbollah itself.

“The trust that held everything together is gone,” the official said.

A third source close to Iran’s establishment said the supreme leader no longer trusted anyone.

During an Israeli airstrike on a secret location in Beirut in July, during a meeting between Hezbollah commander Fawad Shakar and the IRGC commander, two Hezbollah sources and a Lebanese security official told Reuters that there was a possible Mossad exchange between Tehran and Hezbollah. Alarm bells were already ringing about the infiltration. The assassination was timed hours after the assassination of Hamas leader Haniyeh in Tehran.

Unlike Haniyeh’s death, Israel publicly claimed responsibility for the assassination of Shukar, a low-profile figure whom Nasrallah nonetheless described as a central figure in Hezbollah’s history, developing its most important talents. what was

Israel’s military has said Shukar was key to developing Hezbollah’s most advanced weapons, including precision-guided missiles, and was in charge of the Shiite group’s operations against Israel over the past year.

Iranian concerns about Israeli infiltration of its upper ranks have spanned years. In 2021, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the head of an Iranian intelligence unit that was supposed to target Mossad agents was himself an agent of the Israeli spy agency, telling CNN Turk that Israel had intercepted Iran’s nuclear weapons. Obtained sensitive documents related to the program, a reference. In a 2018 raid, Israel obtained a large cache of highly classified documents about the program.

Also in 2021, Israel’s outgoing spy chief Yossi Cohen detailed the raid, telling the BBC that 20 non-Israeli Mossad agents were involved in stealing the archive from a warehouse.

Pager warning

Khamenei’s invitation to Nasrallah to move to Iran came after thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah were blown up in deadly attacks on September 17 and 18, the first official said. Israel has been widely blamed for the attacks, although it has not officially claimed responsibility.

However, Nasrallah was confident of his security and fully trusted his inner circle, the official said, despite Tehran’s grave concerns about possible infiltration into Hezbollah’s ranks.

Khamenei tried a second time, delivering another message to Nasrallah last week via Nilfroushan, asking him to leave Lebanon and move to Iran as a safe haven. But Nasrallah insisted on staying in Lebanon, the official said.

The official said several high-level meetings were held in Tehran to discuss the security of Hezbollah and Nasrallah after the Pager blasts, but declined to say who attended those meetings.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Hezbollah launched a major investigation to purge Israeli spies among its ranks, interrogating hundreds of members after the Pager blasts, three sources in Lebanon told Reuters.

A Hezbollah source said Sheikh Nabil Kauk, a senior Hezbollah official, was leading the investigation. The investigation was progressing quickly, sources said, before an Israeli raid was carried out a day after Nasrallah’s murder. Another raid earlier last week targeted other senior Hezbollah commanders, some of whom were involved in the inquiry.

Sources said Kauk had summoned Hezbollah officials involved in logistics and others “who participated, mediated and received offers on pagers and walkie-talkies” for questioning.

The sources said a “deep and comprehensive inquiry” and cleanup was now needed after Nasrallah and other commanders were killed.

Ali al-Amin, editor-in-chief of Daksuniya, a news site focused on the Shiite community and Hezbollah, said reports indicated that Hezbollah had detained hundreds of people for questioning following the Pagers story.

Hezbollah is troubled by Nasrallah’s death in its bunker deep in the command headquarters, surprised by how successfully Israel infiltrated the group, seven of the sources said.

Mohnad Haig Ali, deputy research director at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, focusing on Iran and Hezbollah, called the attack “the biggest intelligence infiltration by Israel” since Hezbollah in the 1980s. It was established with the support of Iran.

The latest Israeli tensions follow nearly a year of cross-border fighting after Hezbollah launched rocket attacks in support of its ally Hamas. The Palestinian group attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages.

In Gaza, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli retaliation, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Loss of confidence

Fears of Israeli aggression and further attacks on Hezbollah also prompted the Iranian-backed group to organize a nationwide funeral on a scale that reflected Nasrallah’s religious and leadership status, according to four sources familiar with the debate within Hezbollah. Stopped doing it.

A Hezbollah source lamented the situation and said that no one can allow a funeral in these circumstances where the authorities and religious leaders could not come forward to pay proper respect to the late leader.

Several of the commanders killed last week were discreetly buried on Monday, with a proper religious ceremony planned for when the conflict ends.

Four Lebanese sources said Hezbollah is considering the option of obtaining a religious decree to temporarily bury Nasrallah and hold an official funeral once circumstances permit.

He said Hezbollah has refrained from officially naming Nasrallah’s successor, possibly to avoid making his replacement a target for Israeli assassination.

“The appointment of a new secretary-general could be dangerous if Israel kills him soon after,” Amin said. “The group cannot risk further chaos by appointing someone only to see them killed.”

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed. Reuters)