Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Hezbollah leader Syyed Hassan Nasrallah to flee Lebanon days before he was killed in an Israeli strike and is now deeply worried about Israeli infiltration of senior government ranks in Tehran, three Iranian sources said.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Hezbollah’s booby-trapped pagers on Sept. 17, Khamenei sent a message with an envoy to beseech the Hezbollah secretary general to leave for Iran, citing intelligence reports that suggested Israel had operatives within Hezbollah and was planning to kill him, one of the sources, a senior Iranian official, told Reuters.
The messenger, the official said, was a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander, Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, who was with Nasrallah in his bunker when it was hit by Israeli bombs and was also killed.
Khamenei, who has remained in a secure location inside Iran since Saturday, personally ordered a barrage of around 200 missiles to be fired at Israel on Tuesday, a senior Iranian official said. The attack was retaliation for the deaths of Nasrallah and Nilforoushan, the Revolutionary Guards said in a statement.
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 on Tuesday began what it labelled as a “limited” ground incursion against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Iran’s foreign ministry and the office of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which oversees the country’s foreign intelligence agency Mossad, did not reply to requests for comment.
Nasrallah’s assassination followed two weeks of precise Israeli strikes that destroyed weapons sites, eliminated half of Hezbollah’s leadership council and decimated its top military command.
Iran’s fears for the safety of Khamenei and the loss of trust, within both Hezbollah and Iran’s establishment and between them, emerged in the conversations with 10 sources for this story, who described a situation that could complicate the effective functioning of Iran’s Axis of Resistance alliance of anti-Israel irregular armed groups.
Founded with Iran’s backing in the 1980s, Hezbollah has long been the most formidable member of the alliance.
The disarray is also making it hard for Hezbollah to choose a new leader, fearing the ongoing infiltration will put the successor at risk, four Lebanese sources said.
“Basically, Iran lost the biggest investment it had for the past decades,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a Hezbollah expert at the Swedish Defense University, of the deep damage caused to Hezbollah that he said diminished Iran’s capacity to strike at Israel’s borders.
“It shook Iran to the core. It shows how Iran is deeply infiltrated also: they not only killed Nasrallah, they killed Nilforoushan,” he said, who was a trusted military adviser to Khamenei.
Hezbollah’s lost military capacity and leadership cadre might push Iran towards the type of attacks against Israeli embassies and personnel abroad that it engaged in more frequently before the rise of its proxy forces, Ranstorp said.
