Interview of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, by Al-Jazeera channel, broadcast on July 21, 2006, the ninth day of the war against Israel.
“Where is Sheikh Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, who Israel vowed to kill? In a Hermel bunker, a region in northern Lebanon, bordering Syria, according to Israeli military sources. [...] As soon as the Israeli strikes started, the leaders of the Shiite movement 'buried' themselves.” Sheikh Nasrallah hidden in a bunker, Le Figaro, July 20, 2006.
“Our command structure and capabilities are in perfect condition and suffered no harm, and we have the ability to continue (the war at this rate) for very long. Also, regarding the situation on the ground, the fighters are not yet in action. Ground clashes that took place during the last two days are only the beginning of the confrontation. And therefore, these fighters present at the border provided no (serious) effort so far, and these last days, we are only at the beginning.” Hassan Nasrallah, 6th floor of a building in the southern suburb of Beirut, July 20, 2006.
At the height of the Israeli air strikes, Hassan Nasrallah, who had given three speeches during the first six days of the war, gave no sign of life for nearly a week. The Israeli media and war propaganda, who claimed from the beginning that he had fled to Syria or Iran, now announced his death as a virtual certainty, because of this unusual silence and of the magnitude of the strikes against Hezbollah strongholds, including southern Lebanon and especially the southern suburbs of Beirut (Dahiyeh). The destruction was such that it gave its name to a military doctrine, formulated by the Chief of staff of Tsahal Gadi Eisenkot in 2008, consisting of the annihilation of densely populated urban areas in retaliation against the “Party of God”.
Massively hitting infrastructure and civilian populations from the air was all the Israeli army was able to do, with the IDF infantry suffering serious losses during its unsuccessful ground incursion attempts –dozens of dead and wounded, and the destruction of several 4th generation Merkava tanks, the most modern ones. The intelligence services of the Zionist entity, despite their reputation for excellence, had failed to penetrate any of the secrets of the Resistance, so that even the air strikes proved to be militarily ineffective. Despite Ehud Olmert's initial rhetoric, announcing to the cameras that most of Hezbollah's ballistic capability had been destroyed, missile / rocket fire against Israeli settlements and cities went on increasing until the last day of the war, striking the Zionist entity ever deeper. The north of Israel was completely paralyzed, the country had lost billions of dollars and continued to suffer direct losses of $100 million a day (not counting indirect losses and repercussions on the rest of the economy). A million Israelis were displaced and another million were holed up in shelters: it was unprecedented in the history of the Arab-Israeli wars. On July 21, the White House received a request from Olmert and the IDF for the provision of large amounts of precision-guided munitions –another telltale sign that the Israeli Air Force had failed in its mission to degrade Hezbollah military assets significantly during the opening rounds of the war– , and mobilized its reserve forces in such a hasty and chaotic manner that until the end of the conflict, their supply of equipment, ammunition and even water will be defective. Every day, the official objectives of the Israeli aggression were revised downwards: the annihilation of Hezbollah, an insane objective to set, became its removal away of the border, then its mere weakening. But the Lebanese Resistance was to emerge from this war stronger than ever.
This interview, which was shot on July 20 and broadcast the next day by the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera, then the most important media in the Arab world –its luster was not yet tarnished–, shook the Zionist entity in more ways than one. The Hezbollah Secretary General appeared radiant and in an Olympian calm, during an interview of one hour and a half despite the security threats –the journalist Ghassan bin Jiddo himself revealed that he was stunned, the security service having originally announced half an hour as a maximum, but Hassan Nasrallah invited him to take all his time–, and he discussed at length not only the military situation, but also the Lebanese and regional political context. Above all, the information he revealed about the extent of Israel's failure was devastating: no Hezbollah cadre, all branches included, had been killed –although Israel claimed once again to have killed a multitude the day before, after dumping 22 tons of explosives on buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut; no prominent Hezbollah cadre will be killed during the conflict–, no weapons stockpile was hit, and to his knowledge, not a single launching pad had been destroyed. The enemy aircraft, which had no longer any military targets to hit, had got each and every military target wrong, which would be unbelievable if it was not stated by Hassan Nasrallah himself, who, as counterintuitive as it may seem to the Western audience, never affirms anything that is not strictly accurate, never promises anything that does not infallibly happen and never lies –quite unlike Israel, an entity built on usurpation and lies, and whose citizens trust the speeches of the sworn enemy more than the declarations of their own leaders. This was made possible by Hezbollah's extreme secrecy along with a real deception program against the enemy, undertaken by Hezbollah as early as 2000. As Alastair Crooke reported in the first part of his series of articles How Hezbollah defeated Israel,
“Hezbollah’s robust and hardened defenses were the result of six years of diligent work, beginning with the Israeli withdrawal from the region in 2000. Many of the command bunkers designed and built by Hezbollah engineers were fortified, and a few were even air-conditioned.
The digging of the arsenals over the previous years had been accompanied by a program of deception, with some bunkers being constructed in the open and often under the eyes of Israeli drone vehicles or under the observation of Lebanese citizens with close ties to the Israelis. With few exceptions, these bunkers were decoys. The building of other bunkers went forward in areas kept hidden from the Lebanese population. The most important command bunkers and weapons-arsenal bunkers were dug deeply into Lebanon’s rocky hills – to a depth of 40 meters. Nearly 600 separate ammunition and weapons bunkers were strategically placed in the region south of the Litani.
For security reasons, no single commander knew the location of each bunker and each distinct Hezbollah militia unit was assigned access to three bunkers only – a primary munitions bunker and two reserve bunkers, in case the primary bunker was destroyed. Separate primary and backup marshaling points were also designated for distinct combat units, which were tasked to arm and fight within specific combat areas. The security protocols for the marshaling of troops was diligently maintained. No single Hezbollah member had knowledge of the militia’s entire bunker structure. [...]
Lebanese (and Hezbollah) intelligence officials arrested at least 16 Israeli spies in Lebanon, though they failed to find or arrest the leader of the ring. Moreover, during two years from 2004 until the eve of the war, Hezbollah had successfully “turned” a number of Lebanese civilian assets reporting on the location of major Hezbollah military caches in southern Lebanon to Israeli intelligence officers. In some small number of crucially important cases, Hezbollah senior intelligence officials were able to “feed back” false information on their militia’s most important emplacements to Israel – with the result that Israel target folders identified key emplacements that did not, in fact, exist.”
Deeply entrenched Hezbollah fighters were thus eagerly awaiting a ground operation that would allow them to inflict considerable losses on enemy forces. All the firepower of the most formidable army in the region, far from repeating a thundering and victorious blitzkrieg as in 1967, failed to inflict any damage to the guerrillas –or rather mujahideen– of Hezbollah, for whom serious business had not even begun, and whose position remained inflexible. Hassan Nasrallah calmly envisioned a more dazzling victory than that of May 25, 2000, for both Lebanon and Palestine (Gaza was then feeling the full force of Operation Summer Rains), which he never lost sight of. And he even allowed himself to thumb his nose at the Israelis by mocking their essays over the length of his beard, as well as the Western countries and the Gulf monarchies –who were assisting the Israeli war effort with all their resources–, explaining how he would infallibly force them to participate in the reconstruction of Lebanon.
The most remarkable aspect of this interview was only revealed six years later by Hassan Nasrallah, in another interview with Ghassan bin Jiddo on September 3, 2012. The journalist had never revealed it to anyone, respecting the secrecy he was bound to. He had, moreover, fully justified the trust Nasrallah had in him, having left Al-Jazeera after its interventionist drift during the “Arab Spring”, and founded the Al-Mayadeen channel, which is, with Al-Manar and Al-Alam, one of the three major media of the Resistance Axis.
At the beginning of the July 2006 interview, Ghassan bin Jiddo had maintained ambiguity about where they were, identifying the location as “a certain place in the world”, so as not to inform an Israeli enemy in full hysteria. Israeli commanders indeed made the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah an absolute priority, as they desperately sought the least military success to present to their public opinion. And as it will be revealed later, in addition to the western and Gulf intelligence services, Hassan Nasrallah was also hunted by a special Lebanese unit mandated by the felonious government of Fouad Siniora, who was plotting against Hezbollah. In 2012, Hassan Nasrallah revealed for the first time that the interview of July 20, 2006 took place not in Iran, in Syria or in any remote part of Lebanon, but in the heart of the southern suburbs of Beirut, which were bombed daily, and who had just suffered the day before a massive raid of 40 enemy planes. And it was not even held in a bunker or umpteenth basement, but on the sixth floor of a building, in a neighborhood that had been bombed several times by the Israeli air force, and from which one could hear enemy warplanes. Ghassan bin Jiddo, based in Beirut, immediately identified the place, as the safety measures during the roadtrip that took him to Hassan Nasrallah were minimal.
It is difficult to explain or even qualify such a fact. Is it courage, heroism, a spirit of sacrifice? Is it rather negligence and unconsciousness? Or is it the act of a particularly methodical, disciplined and impenetrable organization, which leaves nothing to chance, and which is therefore particularly sure of itself? This is clearly not an act of psychological warfare, as it was only revealed years later, probably to spare further destruction of Hezbollah bastions and let the enemy believe that Hassan Nasrallah had indeed taken refuge abroad. Anyway, if we want to understand such a fact, we must keep in mind that Hezbollah is the “Party of God”, who, although it takes all the necessary material measures with the most infallible rigor, nevertheless believes with the most absolute conviction that any help, strength and victory come from God only, and that non-material factors always prevail. God helps those who help themselves, certainly: this precept is undeniable. But the help of God is always the decisive factor, and if we asked Hassan Nasrallah what elements he believed had contributed the most to his security during this war, he would undoubtedly answer that well before a protocol worthy of the President of a superpower, it is his –and his brothers' and supporters'– punctual prayers, days of fasting (he fasted on the day of the interview, as every Thursday –and Monday), the keen reading of the Qur'an, the recitation of the Invocations & Visits of the Prophet's Family, resorting to Istikhara (which has certainly determined the location of the interview), ethics, good behavior, good deeds, acts of alms and piety, attachment to justice, etc., so many acts highly accepted by God and rewarded by His invincible help. And if Nasrallah was to mention one thing in particular, it would be this fact that he evoked on April 2, 2016 during an interview devoted to the memory of Sheikh Bahjat (1916-2009), an Iranian Gnostic who was one of his main spiritual references:
“A few months before the 33-days war, one of our brothers, a student of theology in Qom (Iran), informed me that His Eminence Sheikh Bahjat –may God protect him, as we used to say then; now, we say may God Sanctify him– henceforth enjoined me to recite this invocation: ‘‘O my God, protect me with your invincible shield behind which You place whoever You want’’. (I had to recite it every single day), three times in the morning and three times in the evening. I asked him if there was a particular reason for this, and he replied that he knew nothing about it and that he had only been instructed to transmit this reminder (taught by the Prophet).
Of course, the content of the invocation indicates a security aspect, attention, protection, vigilance. And it is known that our conditions in Lebanon are very difficult because of security threats and the omnipresent possibility of an assassination, as it happened to our brothers in the past, and as it happened to our own (previous) Secretary General, Sayed Abbas Mousawi, who was martyred (murdered by Israel) with his wife and (5-years-old) son (in 1992). It is natural that one always feels in danger. So I told myself that something was going to happen, and my mind went to the security aspect and the possibility of an assassination, an attack (against me) or something like that. But a few months later, the war took place. And during the war, the Israelis, from the first day, tried by all means to locate me and hit massively any place where my presence was supposed. [...] And then I understood that this invocation was meant to protect and safeguard me during the war, not before it.”
It is likely that many readers will chuckle at what they'll consider to be mere superstition, comparable, for example, to the protective rituals of the great Cheyenne chief Roman Nose (Woo-ki-nay) before each fight, orto his inseparable sacred war bonnet, supposed to make him invulnerable –he died all the same during the Battle of Beecher Island. But it lies nonetheless at the foundation of the identity, belief, and even military doctrine of Hezbollah, which is certainly the most formidable unconventional military force in History.
Sayed Hasan
Transcript:
[1/3]
Ghassan bin Jiddo: Dear viewers, God's peace be upon you. Suffice it to say that I am in the presence of the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Eminent Sayyed (descendant of the Prophet) Hassan Nasrallah, right now. The battles are continuing in that moment. We are at a certain time, in a certain place in the world, not just of Lebanon, as I used to say earlier. That is why I will make no introduction, and turn directly to Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah to ask him questions.
Eminent Sayyed, first, thank you for agreeing to this meeting at this (particularly sensitive) time. Today, it's been almost ten days since the war began. What can you tell us about the military and political developments?
