Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem admitted on Tuesday that the Iranian-backed terror group underestimated the extent of Israel’s infiltration of its supply chain and communication systems before the September 17-18 pager attacks that injured thousands of its members.
“We did not know the supply chain had been exposed. With the means available to us, we could not detect the presence of explosives,” Qassem said in a wide-ranging interview with Hezbollah-affiliated Al Mayadeen, in reference to the rigged pagers supplied by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
“This could be seen as a failure, or as a limitation of our capabilities,” he continued, adding that while there were “efforts to examine the pagers differently,” Israel used explosives undetectable by standard methods.
Qassem said he had formed an investigative committee to probe numerous breaches, including the booby-trapped communication devices, as well as how Jerusalem was able to locate and assassinate his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, and top Hezbollah terrorist Hashem Safieddine.
“We received reports from relevant personnel indicating eavesdropping activity here and there,” Qassem told Al Mayadeen. “As per the intel we received, the breach was localized.” However, “no one had realized the full scale of it. There was a total breach of our communication to the point where the Israelis ... were aware of everything,” he admitted.
“Of course, we were not aware it was that massive,” he said, adding that the Israeli army also gathered surveillance on “every area” in Lebanon.
The Iranian-backed terrorist organization was “rebuilding, recovering and ready now” to take on the Israel Defense Forces, Qassem said, rejecting U.S. demands that Hezbollah disarm and withdraw from the south.
“If Israel were to attack, we would not stand by and watch—we would fight,” he vowed, adding that while the Israeli army destroyed many of Hezbollah’s weapon depots in Southern Lebanon, “the country is vast.”
Hezbollah had joined the war sparked by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border massacre in southern Israel in an attempt to “draw a significant number of Israeli forces” to the northern border as a diversion tactic, he explained.
Hezbollah aimed to force the evacuation of Israeli civilian “settlers” from the north and trigger a social, economic and security crisis, in addition to pushing the IDF “closer to defeat” by killing soldiers, said Qassem.
Hezbollah, he continued, had had “no prior knowledge” of when Hamas planned to launch the Oct. 7 massacre, which the Hezbollah leader praised as “bold, impactful and transformative.”
“I recall that some 30 minutes after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood began, His Eminence, the secretary-general, martyr Sayyed Hassan [Nasrallah] was told that it had been launched from the Gaza Strip and was asked what Hezbollah could do, in the hope it would fully join the battle,” he said.
However, the Lebanese terror group decided against launching a full-scale war on the Jewish state because this would carry “foreseeable consequences that require prior coordination,” according to him.
Instead, Nasrallah on Oct. 8 ordered Hezbollah to start striking Israeli territory with rockets, missiles and drones as a “support front” in an attempt to assist Hamas but avoid the “devastation of an all-out war” inside Lebanon.
The firing of thousands of projectiles toward northern Israel, forcing the evacuation of much of the area’s residents, eventually led Jerusalem to decide on a ground maneuver in Lebanon, which started in October.
On Nov. 26, 2024, Israel and Lebanon signed a truce that sought to end more than a year of cross-border clashes. Since the deal, the IDF has carried out frequent operations aimed at preventing Hezbollah from reestablishing its presence in Southern Lebanon, violating the truce.
U.S. envoy Thomas Barrack stated on Monday that Hezbollah “needs to see that there’s a future for them” to accept a roadmap to disarmament.
Speaking to reporters after meeting Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, Barrack quoted by AFP as saying that the terror group “needs to see ... that the road is not harnessed solely against them, and that there’s an intersection of peace and prosperity for them also.”
Hezbollah has been designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department since 1997.
A State Department official subsequently told JNS that “our position has not changed—[Hezbollah] is a designated terrorist organization, and we do not distinguish between its political or armed wings.”
“As Ambassador Barrack said while in Beirut, Lebanon must utilize this moment to make progress, and that includes progress on disarming” the Iranian-backed terrorist organization, the American official added.
Qassem has rejected the possibility of Hezbollah laying down arms, citing “Israeli threats” and warning of a “confrontation” in response.
Hezbollah has delayed its response to government representatives, as well as to its ally in parliament, Speaker Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s L’Orient Today daily reported on Sunday. Meanwhile, Aoun and Berri have both declared their commitment to bringing all weapons under state control.
