Hezbollah officials receiving condolences for the assassination of Fouad Shukur in a Beirut suburb on Aug. 6, 2024. (Photo: Mohammad Azakir/Reuters)
BEIRUT — The phone call that slain senior Hezbollah commander, Fouad Shukur, received which led him to go up to the seventh floor in the building he was staying in, "came from someone who had breached the group's internal communications network," the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Sunday, quoting an anonymous Hezbollah official.
In late July, Shukur, known only to a few, was assassinated in a targeted attack in Beirut. The commander, codenamed "Hajj Mohsin," was a key figure in Hezbollah’s operations.
Shukur's targeting was in response to the killing of 12 children in the village of Majdal Shams in the Israel-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, Israel said. Israel attributed this strike to Hezbollah, which the latter strongly denied.
According to the Hezbollah official WSJ quoted, Fouad spent his final day in his office on the second floor of a residential building in the southern suburbs of Beirut. He lived on the seventh floor of the same building, likely to limit his exposure.
"Shukur received a call from someone telling him to go to his apartment five floors up. Around 7 p.m., Israeli munitions slammed into the apartment and the three floors underneath, killing Shukur, his wife, two other women and two children," the official told the WSJ.
The call to draw Shukur to the seventh floor, where he would be easier to target amid the surrounding buildings, likely came from someone who had breached Hezbollah’s internal communications network, the official also said. Hezbollah and Iran continue to investigate the intelligence failure but believe that Israel beat the group’s counter-surveillance with better technology and hacking, the official added to the WSJ.
Born in 1962 in Nabi Sheet, in the Bekaa Valley, Fouad Shukur is one of the founding members of Hezbollah. He was a longtime Hezbollah figure who had played key roles in the group's operations dating back to the 1980s. According to the U.S. Treasury, which has had him on its sanctions list since September 2019, under the charge of "terrorism," he sat on the highest military body of Hezbollah, the Jihad Council, responsible for major strategic decisions.
The Israeli army claims Shukur is "responsible for Hezbollah's precision missile project," which it describes as "a highly secured and classified project, so much so that not only the Lebanese government is unaware of it, but several high-ranking Hezbollah and Iranian officials are also not informed."
