Perhaps the most ingenious rocket launcher was a homemade contraption consisting of ten 122 mm Katyusha launching tubes arrayed in two rows of five encased in a block of cement. The cement blocks, hinged at one end, were laid horizontally into shallow pits prealigned in the direction of the targeted town or kibbutz. The blocks were then covered by a steel plate and camouflaged by a roll of turf. To launch them, the Hezbollah team would roll back the turf, remove the steel plate, and electronically raise the concrete block to a predesignated firing angle. Once the rockets were fired, the block was lowered back into its pit, the steel plate replaced, and the turf unfurled, and the militants would take cover in a nearby cave or bunker long before Israeli artillery initiated a counterbombardment.
Beyond a belt extending roughly six miles north of the border, Hezbollah built emplacements for its stock of larger-caliber rockets, some of them fired from multibarreled launchers on the back of Mercedes-Benz trucks. The trucks were hidden in ground-floor garages of buildings and houses, generally lying on the outskirts of towns or villages. In a time of war, the trucks would emerge from the buildings, unleash a salvo of rockets, and then return to cover inside.
Due to their longer range and larger size—which makes them more difficult to conceal—the Zelzal rockets were positioned farther north. According to Western intelligence sources, the Zelzals are launched from specially adapted shipping containers carried on trucks. The roof of the shipping container is hinged and flips open at the touch of a button, allowing the rocket to be elevated on a launch rail and fired.
“I Am 103 and Abu Mohammed Is 121”
Arguably the most significant improvement to the capabilities of the Islamic Resistance from 2000 on was the introduction of a new and more advanced communications and signals intelligence (SIGINT) infrastructure.
Originally, in the late 1980s, Hezbollah communicated by walkie-talkie and hand-cranked cable-linked military field telephones that connected the secret bases in the Jabal Safi Mountains on the western edge of the Jezzine enclave. The field telephones were apparently introduced after Israel was able to intercept Hezbollah’s radio chatter and track and target the fighters. Even Nasrallah is rumored never to have used a cell phone, for that same reason.
In the 1990s, Hezbollah installed an internal telephone network using copper lines that initially linked command nodes and senior officials and officers. The network was expanded during that decade until it connected Hezbollah’s main operational areas in southern Beirut, the south, and the southern Bekaa Valley. The cables were buried alongside government communications lines, allowing Hezbollah to take advantage of existing infrastructure and affording a level of security for its network. After 2000, the lines were extended into the border district, and some of the copper lines were replaced with fiber optic cables. In 2003, UNIFIL peacekeepers often saw Hezbollah engineers laying the inch-thick black fiber optic cables in trenches alongside roads in the south. Not only does a fiber optic cable transmit substantially more information than a traditional copper line (one fiber optic cable can carry about the same amount of data as a thousand copper lines), it provides greater security and is less prone to interception and tapping. In addition to voice communications, the network allowed Hezbollah to send images and to communicate by instant messaging and emails.
Hezbollah knew that in the event of war, the Israeli military would seek to impose a “jamming blanket” in southern Lebanon to block radio and cell phone signals. Each electronic jammer covers a relatively small geographic area, making it impossible for the Israelis to cover south Lebanon in its entirety. But Hezbollah anticipated that the frontline areas would be affected, requiring combat units to use the fiber optic network, which cannot be jammed electronically, to communicate with command posts farther north. Indeed, during the 2006 war, cell phones continued to operate in Tyre even when Israeli troops advanced to within eight miles of the town. But in Bint Jbeil, scene of one of the fiercest confrontations, neither cell phones nor satellite phones used by reporters worked due to Israeli jamming.
Still, Hezbollah had another trick up its sleeve to allow it to continue using radios even in jammed combat zones. Communications personnel carried military-grade portable spectrum analyzers, the size of a laptop computer, to discover which frequencies were being blocked. That allowed the fighters to switch to clear frequencies to maintain radio communications with one another even while operating in a jammed environment.
For wireless communications, Hezbollah fighters carry Icom V8, V82, and V85 handheld radios. The range of the radio signals are boosted by hundred-watt transmitter antennae, enabling conversations by walkie-talkie as far apart as Beirut to Tyre, a distance of forty-three miles.
Although the radio sets are not encrypted, secure communications are ensured through a regularly updated vocal code system using letters and numbers. “We have codes for everything, references to martyrs, casualties, locations, fighters, weapons, radio frequencies, tactics,” explains one Hezbollah fighter. “We change them regularly, at least once a month, sometimes every day.”
Hezbollah’s communications unit devises the codes, which are printed on laminated cards and distributed to unit commanders, who then pass them on to the fighters. Other than a universal code for the organization, separate codes are issued for different qita’at, or sectors, all the way down to a subsector of two or three villages. At the subsector level, fighters will augment the official coding system with an ad hoc code based on their intimate knowledge of the local terrain and of each other. Two veteran Hezbollah fighters in the southern village of Srifa gave a demonstration of how the code worked during the 2006 war. Hajj Rabieh, a schoolteacher in normal times, pulled from his pocket a small laminated card listing Hezbollah’s code numbers for positions in the area and for each fighter. “I am 103 and Abu Mohammed is 121,” he said, referring to his comrade squatting nearby. Abu Mohammed said, “Hajj Rabieh once loved a woman in the village. I could call him [on the walkie-talkie] and say ‘let’s meet at the house of the woman who melted your heart.’ How can the Israeli enemy understand that?”
During the 2006 war, each Hezbollah fighter went by the generic name Fallah but was identified by a following code number. In demonstrating how it worked, Hajj Rabieh picked up his walkie-talkie and spoke into it: “Fallah 47, 47, 47.” When a voice answered, he said in greeting, “God give you strength,” then “Go, go, go.” He tapped at the walkie-talkie, switching to a preselected frequency to continue the conversation.
“What did you have for lunch?” Hajj Rabieh asked.
“Rice and potatoes,” came the tinny answer.
Since the mid-1990s, Hezbollah had used scanners to record conversations on Israeli cell phones for translation by the party’s Hebrew speakers. This technique allowed Hezbollah to glean valuable intelligence from garrulous soldiers deployed in south Lebanon or in positions along the border.
From 2000 on, technicians from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps–Quds Force instructed a special Hezbollah intelligence-gathering unit in the use of the latest Iranian electronic interception devices and jamming equipment to monitor and block Israeli military communications. The high-tech Iranian equipment even overcame the complex frequency-hopping techniques used by the Israelis to avoid jamming and interception, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials as well as Hezbollah sources. Hezbollah’s SIGINT personnel were required to be fluent Hebrew speakers, and many were conversant in two or three more languages. Surveillance centers were established in apartments and houses in villages near the border, often within view of the security fence and adjacent Israeli army compounds. Here, the SIGINT personnel carefully monitored and recorded Israeli communications traffic, sending the data via fiber optic links to Beirut, where it was translated into Arabic. Even the individual cell phones of Israeli military commanders were tapped by the SIGINT specialists, thanks to Hezbollah’s network of spies in northern Israel passing on lists of the phone numbers. The buried fiber optic network also
ensured that in a time of war critical data collected by the SIGINT unit could be translated immediately by the intelligence operators and distributed directly to commanders in the field.
Hezbollah’s SIGINT capabilities also benefited from the military partnership between Iran and Syria. In November 2005, Iran and Syria signed and ratified a joint strategic defense cooperation agreement that in part called for the establishment of four SIGINT stations covering Syria’s border regions. The highly secret and compartmentalized listening stations are staffed by Syrian and Iranian intelligence officers, technicians, and electronic warfare experts as well as Hebrew-, English-, and Turkish-speaking translators. Two of the four stations were reportedly up and running by the outbreak of war in July 2006. One of the two was located on the Golan Heights and reportedly passed on intelligence data to Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon via dedicated fiber optic links, which were impervious to Israeli electronic countermeasures.1
Hezbollah’s electronic intelligence gathering was supplemented by a visual reconnaissance infrastructure along the Blue Line. CCTV cameras and long-range thermal vision cameras capable of detecting humans at night at a distance of six miles were installed in Hezbollah observation posts and other points along the Blue Line. In addition to the static observation posts, fighters reconnoitered the border from temporary camouflaged positions beside the security fence or even inside the Shebaa Farms, echoing the surveillance missions conducted by Hezbollah in the occupation zone in the 1990s.
In June 2005, Israeli troops stumbled across a three-man Hezbollah Special Forces squad that had established a camouflaged observation point in dense brush inside the Shebaa Farms, about three hundred yards from the Blue Line. In the ensuing firefight, one member of the squad was killed and his body left at the scene. Hezbollah fire support teams shelled Israeli outposts to cover the extraction of the two surviving squad members, killing one Israeli soldier and wounding three others. Israeli troops recovered equipment abandoned by the Hezbollah unit, including expensive digital SLR cameras with an array of lenses, video cameras, GPS devices, and night vision goggles.
The SIGINT and communications personnel are among the most highly trained and secretive operators within the Islamic Resistance. Each recruit undergoes a far more extensive vetting process than a normal newcomer into Hezbollah. Even after being accepted, they are kept under continual close scrutiny by security officers.
The information gleaned from SIGINT, spy rings in Israel, surveillance cameras, and reconnaissance patrols along the Blue Line was carefully collated and disseminated to unit commanders. In November 2009, Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper revealed that the Israeli army had obtained a 150-page book stamped “Top Secret” in which Hezbollah gave a highly detailed and accurate analysis of Israel’s security infrastructure along the border.2 The table of contents alone was four pages long. It included detailed descriptions of the ground radar, surveillance cameras, and UAVs used by the IDF to monitor the border and the area just to the north. It contained photographs of Israel’s northern border taken from inside Israel as well as details of Israeli patrolling procedures, protection for maintenance crews operating along the border fence, security for border settlements, operational procedures of the IDF’s tracking unit, and even techniques for fooling the trackers and their sniffer dogs.
“It is hard to believe, but the Hezbollah intelligence sources who wrote the document seem to have copied from internal documents belonging to the Northern Command,” wrote Ronen Bergman, the Yedioth correspondent.
Deployment
Following Israel’s troop withdrawal in 2000, Hezbollah reconfigured its administrative division of south Lebanon to include the newly liberated areas in the border district. The Islamic Resistance was divided into four territorial commands covering the south, southern Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and the Mediterranean coastline.
The Nasr Unit (Wahadiyah Nasr) was positioned between the Blue Line and the Litani River and formed the operational core of the Islamic Resistance. Its total strength was estimated at a few thousand, of which some eight hundred to one thousand were Special Forces operatives and full-time regulars deployed in the rural “security pockets” and the rest, perhaps three thousand, were members of the tabbiyya, the “village guard” reservists.
The area under the command of the Nasr Unit was split into at least five qita’at, or sectors, of around twelve to fifteen villages each, the same system that Hezbollah introduced in 1985 following Israel’s pullback to the occupation zone. The sectors were further divided into smaller components of two to three villages each. The headquarters of each sector was responsible for the military preparations within its area, from the construction of bunkers and the deployment of rocket-firing positions to the disposition of weapons arsenals and the organization of individual combat units.
Houses and apartments in villages were purchased or rented from landlords, after a vetting process by local Hezbollah security personnel, and used as storage facilities for arms and other items such as medical supplies, food, and water. Basic ammunition stocks such as Katyusha rockets, mortar rounds, and small arms ammunition were kept separately from more advanced weapons systems including antiarmor and antiaircraft missiles. Hezbollah constructed houses specifically to store weapons and ammunition. In February 2004, a two-story building used as an ammunition dump near Shehabiyah village blew up when a lightning storm caused a short circuit. The arms dump was packed with mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades.
The mission of the Nasr Unit was to pound Israel with a steady barrage of short- and medium-range rockets to pressure the Israeli civilian population (and, by extension, the Israeli government) and to vigorously confront any ground invasion by Israeli troops. Maintaining the flow of rockets into Israel was critical to Hezbollah’s strategic thinking, which is why so much effort went into the deployment and camouflaging of the rocket-firing posts to make them as hard as possible to detect and destroy. If Israeli forces were on the ground in sizable numbers and met with limited opposition, they would soon neutralize the rocket-firing positions, denying Hezbollah its main leverage to influence the outcome of the war. Therefore, Hezbollah had to mount a far more robust defense of the border district than the fleeting hit-and-run tactics of classical guerrilla warfare, a requirement that led to the construction of the secret and extensive underground fortifications and static-firing points where ground could be defended.
Targets in northern Israel, both civilian and military, were carefully selected. Some of the targeting data was provided by agents in northern Israel through military maps and photographs. Hezbollah may have been able to acquire satellite photographs of northern Israel from commercial companies. The introduction of the Google Earth global satellite imagery program in 2005 may have also helped facilitate the collation of targeting data. Most of northern Israel is covered by satellite images with a resolution of two meters, clearly showing useful military sites such as the air traffic control base on Mount Meron, six miles south of the border.
The Nasr Unit’s artillery section prepared ranging cards for each rocket-firing position listing the target number, the target name, and aiming data such as range and angle of elevation. Meticulously detailed battle plans were drawn up in which each combat unit (al-tashkeel al-qutali), numbering from five to a dozen fighters each, depending on the task, was given precise instructions on their respective missions, whether laying IEDs and antitank mines, manning antiaircraft defenses, providing fire support, or preparing ambushes. The orders also analyzed potential actions by the Israelis and listed the required responses by the combat units. Battle plans were coded in conformity with Hezbollah’s communications security. UNIFIL peacekeepers overheard conversations between fighters during the 2006 war, when Hezbollah sometimes broke in to UNIFIL’s radio frequencies to communicate. “They say, ‘This is Brother 13. We are going to carry out operation seven. Hope you are all safe,’ ” a senior UNIFIL officer in Naqoura told me at the time.
“Hunter-K
iller” Teams and Frogmen
The topography of south Lebanon, with its steep hills and ravines, is not suited to armored warfare, as the Israelis had discovered during two decades of occupation. The Islamic Resistance took advantage of the terrain to form tank “hunter-killer” teams of around five fighters each, armed with half a dozen missiles seeking targets of opportunity as well as laying ambushes at natural choke points. The numerous munitions bunkers dotting the landscape ensured that the antitank teams could maintain mobility without worrying about straying too far from sources of resupply. Fighting bunkers and firing points were also constructed specifically along axes of anticipated Israeli advance. The generally east-west orientation of the road network between the border and the Litani River limited the number of possible northbound routes for advancing Israeli forces, allowing Hezbollah’s battle planners to narrow down the best locations to construct fortified permanent ambush sites. One of them was the Wadi Salouqi–Wadi Hojeir valley system, the occupation zone’s front line between 1985 and 2000. The valley begins near Bint Jbeil beside the border and runs north for eleven miles before joining the Litani River, a convenient axis of northbound advance for Israeli armored columns. Hezbollah constructed numerous firing posts and ambush positions in the dense undergrowth on the side of the valley and its tributaries to which fighters could quickly deploy if Israeli forces entered the valley system.
A dedicated sniper unit was created after 2000 with marksmen equipped with Russian semiautomatic 7.62 mm Dragunov rifles and possibly Austrian Steyr HS50 12.7 mm rifles, eight hundred of which were sold to Iran in 2004. The sniper teams are among the most heavily trained members of the Islamic Resistance. Not only must they develop expert marksmanship skills, they have to learn the arts of camouflage, stealth, and patience when lying prone for long periods of time in search of targets.
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