Phone call lured Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr to location before Israeli munitions killed him: report

Hezbollah official Fuad Shukr was lured by a phone call to go from his office to his apartment before Israeli munitions targeted his home, killing him, his wife, two children and two other women, a report from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) revealed.

Shukr was killed on 30 July in the southern Beirut neighbourhood of Dahiyeh, with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah saying that he had been in touch with him just a few hours before he was killed.

According to the report, the call which drew Shukr to the seventh floor likely came from someone who had breached Hezbollah’s internal communications network.

Both his office and his apartment were in the same building but on different floors, allowing him to move between the two without garnering a great deal of attention.

Shukr was considered one of the most important figures in Hezbollah and is believed to have been commanding the group’s cross-border exchange of fire with Israel since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza on 7 October.

A Hezbollah official said that the group and Iran are still investigating the intelligence failure, but believe Israel beat Hezbollah’s countersurveillance with better technology and hacking.

The killing of Shukr served as a huge blow to the group as he was one of their most senior operatives and founders. It came around the same time frame of the killing of Hamas’ political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

Shukr also had a leading role in 1982, when he helped organise Shia fighters in Beirut to oppose Israel’s invasion of Lebanon during its civil war.

Israel said it killed Shukr, 61, in retaliation for a July 27 rocket attack that killed 12 children aged between 10 and 16 in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

However, Hezbollah said it was not responsible for the attack, and pointed the finger at Israel.

His killing has sparked fears of a wider escalation in conflict in the region, with both Hezbollah and Iran vowing retaliation against Israel.