On March 12, 2021, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot published what it purported to be a secret profile of Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrallah, prepared by a research team from the IDF’s Intelligence Branch that follows Hizbullah’s secretary-general 24/7. Below is an excerpt:
Nasrallah is a megalomaniac, paranoid, and obsessed with the media in Israel who reads every word written about him. A narcissist and liar. The coronavirus makes things worse, but he rejects vaccines made by the enemy, America. He is not going to retire anytime soon, and he is not grooming an heir.1
Hizbullah responded immediately to the Israeli article, “Nasrallah’s Secret File,” in a column in the Al-Akhbar newspaper, written by editor Ibrahim al-Amin who is close to Nasrallah.2 The response was stinging. The article was described as a “professional insult” because “a student at the Faculty of Mass Communication” would have produced a better article about the man considered to be “the most prominent enemy of Israel, Hassan Nasrallah.”
Al-Akhbar published Yediot Ahronot’s article in total, and in his accompanying article, Ibrahim al-Amin paid back in full the journalists who wrote it and “fell for it” without asking questions about the reliability of the information and its intelligence value. The article was primarily intended to glorify the Israeli military intelligence, the Nasrallah associate charged. In this context, al-Amin reflected a debate in the Israeli media, exemplified by Israel’s Channel 11, where some commentators pointed to the arrogance behind the publication of “Nasrallah’s Secret File.”
Without addressing the veracity of the information gathered in an interview with 15 experts and analysts of the IDF intelligence branch, al-Amin claimed that material was primarily taken from the Arab media.
Al-Amin claimed that contrary to what was written in Nasrallah’s Secret File,
Nasrallah does not live underground, travels outside Lebanon and moves between the cities, villages, neighborhoods, and streets of Lebanon. He has teams specialized in everything and an agenda dealing with Joe Biden to the mayor of Meiss al-Jabal [in Lebanon] and the head of the local [Israeli] council in the settlement (sic) of Shlomi.3
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