A phone call led Hezbollah's Fuad Shukr to his death, says Hezbollah official - WSJ

On the last day of Fuad Shukr’s life, he was in his office on the second floor of a Beirut residential building, when that evening, Shukr received a phone call at 7 p.m. in which he was told to go to his apartment on the seventh floor where he was shortly thereafter killed, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a Hezbollah official. 

The explosion also killed his wife, two other women, and two children, and 70 individuals were wounded, according to Lebanon’s Hezbollah-run health ministry.

The call that urged Shukr to move to the seventh floor of the building likely came from an individual who had infiltrated Hezbollah’s internal communications network, the WSJ reported, citing the Hezbollah official. 

Hezbollah and Iran are still investigating the intelligence failure, however, the official believes that it came down to the fact that Israel's technology and hacking were better than Hezbollah’s countersurveillance.

Shukr had lived a secretive life, according to the WSJ, and hardly anyone ever saw him. He lived in and worked in the same building in the southern Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyeh, so he would not need to move around outside. 

Just hours before his death, he had been in touch with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Nasrallah said in his eulogy to Shukr, the WSJ reported. 

Shukr's notoriety

Shukr gained notoriety for planning the hijacking of a plane in 1985 in order to release 700 prisoners in Israeli prisons. On June 14, 1985, a group of hijackers seized TWA Flight 847 after takeoff from Athens and flew the plane back and forth between Beirut and Algiers for three days. After orchestrating this terror operation, he went into hiding. 

After October 7, when Hezbollah began attacking Israel again, Israeli strikes killed approximately 400 of the group’s operatives, including key commanders. As a result, Nasrallah told Hezbollah fighters and their families to “Abandon your phone, disable it, bury it, lock it in a metal box,” he said.

To prevent Israeli spying, Hezbollah began using coded language on open channels and on their internal communications network as well, the Hezbollah official told the WSJ. On the day he was killed, Hezbollah sent out orders for high-ranking commanders to disperse amid concerns they were at risk, the Hezbollah official said. 

After he was killed, his neighbor said, “We’d heard his name, but we never saw him. He was like a ghost.”