On November 27, 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientist who had for years overseen the Islamic Republic’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons, was assassinated while being driven through downtown Tehran. Based on interviews with unnamed sources, Jake Wallis Simons confirms what has long been assumed: that the Mossad carried out the assassination. Simons also sheds light on much that has so far been unknown, including the method by which it was done:

Neither [Fakhrizadeh’s] wife nor any of his [twelve-person] security team were harmed in the attack, which was carried out using a hyper-accurate automated weapon in order to protect civilians from collateral damage. The bespoke weapon, operated remotely by agents on the ground as they observed the target, was so heavy because it included a bomb that destroyed the evidence after the killing.

The Mossad made up its mind to eliminate Fakhrizadeh after examining the nuclear archive that it had spirited out of Iran in 2018:

“[The archive] contained original documents ordering the concealment of the nuclear program, many of them in Fakhrizadeh’s handwriting,” a source said. “Analysts realized they were looking at his ink, his fingerprints, his pressure on the paper as he wrote. He was the one who was behind the deception. [He] was the father of everything we found in the archive. All was under his command, from the science and the secret sites to the personnel and know-how. He had led an operation to hide it from the world. From that point, it was just a matter of time.”

Besides finding out some of the Hollywood style derring-do behind the operation, Simons also learned about its benefits. He quotes a source who told him:

Tehran has assessed that it will take six years to find a replacement for Fakhrizadeh. Israeli analysis has now put the breakout time (the period it would take Iran to finalize a nuclear bomb) at two years. Before Fakhrizadeh departed, it was about three months.

Yesterday, the head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—was in Washington meeting with officials from the State Department, CIA, and the White House itself. Among the topics no doubt discussed are rising tensions with Iran and the possibility that the latter, in order to defend its nuclear program, will instruct its network of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Yemen to attack the Jewish state. Oved Lobel explores the history of this network, which, he argues, predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution—when Shiite radicals in Lebanon coordinated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement in Iran:

An inextricably linked Iran-Syria-Palestinian axis has actually been in existence since the early 1970s, with Lebanon the geographical fulcrum of the relationship and Damascus serving as the primary operational headquarters. Lebanon, from the 1980s until 2005, was under the direct military control of Syria, which itself slowly transformed from an ally to a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nexus among Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories should therefore always have been viewed as one front, both geographically and operationally. It’s clear that the multifront-war strategy was already in operation during the first intifada years, from 1987 to 1993.

[An] Iranian-organized conference in 1991, the first of many, . . . established the “Damascus 10”—an alliance of ten Palestinian factions that rejected any peace process with Israel. According to the former Hamas spokesperson and senior official Ibrahim Ghosheh, he spoke to then-Hizballah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi at the conference and coordinated Hizballah attacks from Lebanon in support of the intifada. Further important meetings between Hamas and the Iranian regime were held in 1999 and 2000, while the IRGC constantly met with its agents in Damascus to encourage coordinated attacks on Israel.

For some reason, Hizballah’s guerilla war against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s was, and often still is, viewed as a separate phenomenon from the first intifada, when they were in fact two fronts in the same battle.

Israel opted for a perilous unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, which Hamas’s Ghosheh asserts was a “direct factor” in precipitating the start of the second intifada later that same year.