Hezbollah crisis adds to threats facing Jews during High Holidays and ahead of Oct. 7, experts say
The terrorist group is battered in Lebanon but retains a formidable presence outside the Middle East
Ariel Mercovich remembers his sister Ileana, who died at the age of 21 in the 1993 bomb attack on the AMIA Jewish community center, Buenos Aires, July 18, 2024. (Cristina Sille/dpa picture alliance via Getty Images)
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — As Israel escalates its fight against Hezbollah, Jewish security organizations are on particularly heightened alert ahead of the High Holidays.
On Friday, Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, following a barrage of strikes that have eliminated much of the group’s leadership, the latest stage of an intensifying multi-front war launched last Oct. 7 by Hamas and joined by Hezbollah on Oct. 8. On Monday, Israeli forces entered Lebanon in what the military said would be a limited operation meant to demolish the group and distance it from the border.
But the terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction retains a formidable presence outside the Middle East, one that has survived Israel’s assault on the Iran-backed group’s infrastructure in Lebanon and Syria.
“The intelligence question that everyone is asking right now is: Hezbollah has been beaten badly recently, they are looking significantly diminished in stature, and are they looking to exact revenge?” said Kerry Sleeper, deputy director of intelligence and information sharing for the Secure Community Network, a consultancy for the national U.S. Jewish community.
That question preoccupied Jewish security officials who met Monday afternoon in a closed-door meeting called by the Jewish Federations of North America. Already on alert in advance of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and with anti-Israel demonstrations expected around the anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, the officials now worry Hezbollah’s overseas networks “are being folded into what is an incredibly toxic threat environment,” Sleeper said.
“The Jewish community is facing the most significant threat towards the community in modern history,” he said. “The combination of High Holidays, the 10/7 anniversary and now the potential for the world’s largest terrorist organization to exact revenge on either Israeli facilities, embassies or consulates, or prominent Jewish leaders or prominent Israeli leaders anywhere in the world.”
Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who also once worked for the FBI and who studies counterterrorism, said he feared that Hezbollah, cornered, might well lash out.
“This is a situation where one fears Hezbollah might feel the need to do something, and they have a history of not making a distinction between Israeli and Jewish targets,” he said.
Hezbollah’s readiness to exact revenge on Jews abroad is evident in how Nasrallah ascended to the terror group’s leadership. Israel assassinated his predecessor, Abbas al-Mussawi, in 1992. Nasrallah led the organization when it retaliated by carrying out two attacks in Buenos Aires, Argentina: one on the Israeli embassy there in 1992 and a massive attack on the AMIA Jewish community center in 1994 that killed 85 people and wounded more than 300. The group is also seen as responsible for a deadly attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in 2012 and a plot against Israeli tourists in Thailand in 2014.
Sleeper emphasized that U.S. authorities have said there is no specific known threat to Jewish communities at this time.
“There have been no specific threats and I’m comfortable that our federal partners would let us know if they’re seeing something like that,” said Sleeper, a former assistant director at the FBI. “We’ve been in near constant contact with them at this point.”
Threats are most acute overseas, Sleeper said, noting among other incidents the arrests in December of Hezbollah operatives surveilling Jewish targets in Brazil. Law enforcement officials in multiple countries have also averted threats to Jewish targets by affiliates of other groups since Oct. 7, including across Europe and in Argentina. Last month, police in Munich, Germany, killed a man with a gun who they believed was targeting the Israeli consulate there.
“The most likely two regions for that to occur that I know already have enhanced security because of the concerns would be Europe and Latin America, where they have significant numbers of operatives, where they have conducted significant pre-operational surveillance, where they have weapons caches and they are likely prepared to execute on an ops plan on short notice,” he said.
U.S. authorities have in recent years jailed Hezbollah operatives who surveilled potential U.S. targets, Levitt said, among them Ali Kournai in 2019 and Alexei Saab in 2023.
“If there’s a hardened Hezbollah guy who, like Karani, like Saab, were here for a specific purpose, and they were given a directive to do something, you know, they would try,” he said.
Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president at the Foundation of Democracies who tracks terrorist groups, said Hezbollah’s reach was long.
“I think there’s a probably greater likelihood of seeing Hezbollah activate cells or assassination units or what have you, in areas of weaker authority, in some of the kind of less security minded European states or in Latin America,” he said. “But I wouldn’t rule out an attempt to cross into the United States, or an effort to activate cells that are already here.”
Levitt said Israel’s wiping out of much of Hezbollah’s leadership could conceivably inhibit an attack by disorienting the group and removing chains of command. On the other hand, he said, mid-level Hezbollah commanders might choose to act on their own.
He noted that Hezbollah’s Unit 910, the section responsible for overseas terrorist activity and sequestered from other parts of Hezbollah, is not known to have been degraded or eliminated.
Even absent the leadership, any plot for revenge is “still in the hands of people who are professional,” he said.
Amateurs also pose a threat, Levitt said. “Now is one of those moments where you have to be concerned that someone is seeing what’s going on, watching too many Al Manar clips in their mama’s basement, and decides to try and do something on their own,” he said, referring to the Hezbollah-run propaganda outlet.
One mitigating factor, Levitt said, is that a direct attack on the United States would likely draw the country into the fight, something that Hezbollah’s backers in Iran do not want, Levitt said.
“They understand that carrying out an attack in the United States is probably the only thing that can drag America more into this right now,” he said.
Sleeper shared the same assessment but noted that Iran and Hezbollah have in recent years hired organized crime proxies to carry out attacks on enemies abroad.
“They may very well try to distance themselves from an operation by leveraging or hiring criminal enterprises,” Sleeper said, noting Hezbollah’s own vast drug-running business.
The Hezbollah volatility adds to an already intense threat environment facing Jewish communities in the United States. In addition to ongoing threats from the far right, which security officials have long assessed as the most dangerous and where white supremacists have accelerated their activity in connection with the Israel-Hamas war, there is also a risk that anti-Israel demonstrations taking place during the period could result in clashes or violence. Synagogues have also been hit with a string of false bomb threats over the past year.
The violence in Lebanon is “likely to fuel or or spike protest activity that was already planned for the coming week, with the anniversary of Oct. 7, with the High Holidays, the so-called ‘Week of Rage’ that’s been called for on social media,” said Rafael Brinner, the community security program manager for the Jewish Community Federation in California’s Bay Area.
Brinner was referring to plans announced by Students for Justice in Palestine to hold demonstrations from Oct. 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attacks, to Oct. 11 — a period that overlaps with the beginning of Yom Kippur.
Molly Jozer, a community security adviser for the Bay Area federation, said the advice to the Jewish community during the week was to avoid known protest areas.
“Don’t go to these areas during these times, because if it does lead to violence, we don’t want people to get caught in the crossfire,” Jozer said.
U.S. Jewish worshippers should be prepared for a heightened security presence at their synagogues this week but should feel free and secure to attend Rosh Hashanah services, Sleeper said.
“We certainly do not want to convey any type of a message that is unsafe to go to their house of worship, that’s the very last thing we want to do,” he said. “In some areas, they will see a large presence of whether it’s police or armed guards, depending on each institution what they feel they need to do to provide the comfort for people to attend services.”
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