The New York Times today outlined the range of motives for, and the potential cascade effects of, the overnight assassination of Haj Hassan Hilu Laqis, a top Hezbollah figure who the outlet noted was “variously described as running the group’s sophisticated telecommunications network and working to procure strategic weapons.” The Times emphasized both that Laqis’s death was a “significant loss” for the Iran-backed terror group, and that “any of the group’s primary enemies – Israel, the Syrian insurgents the group is battling, or their backers, such as Saudi Arabia or Lebanese Sunni militants – could have had reason to want him dead.” Laqis was widely believed to have been playing a central role in Hezbollah’s military operations in Syria against the largely Sunni rebels fighting to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime, and a previously unknown Sunni group claimed responsibility for the killing. Mordechai Kedar, a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, further outlined to Jerusalem Post that “Sunni jihadists… promised long ago that they would kill [Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah]… in this case, it seems they were able to get [his] friend.” For their part Hezbollah leaders almost immediately blamed Israel.

“The Israeli enemy tried to get to our martyr brother several times, in more than one location, but these attempts failed until this repugnant assassination,” the group said. Israel would “bear full responsibility and all the consequences for this heinous crime”, it said.

The Christian Science Monitor late Wednesday reported that Hezbollah has been openly preparing for war with the Jewish state.

Under Israel’s wary eye, Hezbollah has ramped up the scope of its military training in east and south Lebanon, another sign that the militant group is girding for a future confrontation with Israel, which it has blamed for the assassination of a senior commander in Lebanon. The camps, which include firing ranges, assault courses and urban warfare sites, are training thousands of new recruits to the organization. They are clearly visible from the air, a reversal of tactics by an organization that for two decades had trained covertly in order to avoid detection by Israeli spy planes.

Hezbollah has seen its decades-old brand as an anti-Israel ‘resistance’ organization shattered by its participation in the Syrian conflict, and analysts are increasingly concerned that it might seek to provoke a conflict with Jerusalem in order to halt a precipitous slide in its domestic and regional stature.

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