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A Hezbollah Assassin and the Meaning of Justice

Israel’s reported killing of Salim Ayyash exemplifies the rule of the strong

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A Hezbollah Assassin and the Meaning of Justice
A statue of Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut, near the site of the 2005 bombing that killed him. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Early last week, Arab and Israeli media outlets reported that an Israeli airstrike had targeted the town of al-Qusayr in Syria. The area, near the Lebanese border, rose to prominence in 2013 at a critical inflection point in the Syrian war — Hezbollah, the Lebanese party-cum-militia, argued that it needed to intervene alongside dictator Bashar al-Assad in order to protect the Lebanese border from extremists. After taking over the town, Hezbollah would widen its involvement in the war to prop up its Syrian ally in the face of rebellion.

Israel has frequently bombed Hezbollah and Iranian facilities and weapons convoys in Syria, but what was notable about this particular strike in al-Qusayr was the identity of one of its victims. Media reports indicated that Salim Ayyash, a high-ranking member of Hezbollah, was one of those who perished in the strike, which also appears to have killed some civilians.

The recent wave of Hezbollah figures killed by Israel underscores the group’s extensive and storied history. They include individuals such as Ayyash and high-profile operatives linked to events like the 1983 barracks attack, in which two truck bombs killed 307 people in Beirut, mostly U.S. and French military personnel belonging to an international peacekeeping force. Ayyash stands out due to his alleged role in a series of assassinations in Lebanon, and his case holds significant implications as many Lebanese quietly reflect on it.

Ayyash’s name may not be as familiar to Middle East observers as other figures within the group. He is not as well-known as Hassan Nasrallah, the party’s former leader who was killed in September, or Wafiq Safa, the head of its intelligence apparatus in Lebanon, who was wounded recently in Israeli airstrikes. But in many ways, Ayyash symbolized its iron fist and reign of terror over its domestic opponents.

Salim Jamil Ayyash was born in the village of Harouf in Lebanon’s Nabatieh governorate in 1963. He would go on to join Hezbollah, rising in its ranks to the point where he married a relative of Mustafa Badreddine, the party’s former top military commander and brother-in-law of its most decorated operative, Imad Mughniyeh, who led its campaign against Israel during the 2006 war.

Ayyash would remain an unknown figure until 2011, when he was indicted by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon on terrorism charges. An international court established to investigate a series of political assassinations in Lebanon — including the 2005 Valentine’s Day attack, in which a massive truck bomb leveled much of downtown Beirut and killed Prime Minister Rafik Hariri — the tribunal’s prosecutor accused Ayyash of leading the assassination squad that conducted intense surveillance of Hariri in the run-up and then executed the assassination itself. 

The evidence pointing to Ayyash was assembled through the diligent work of Wissam Eid, a Lebanese security officer who painstakingly gathered telecommunication data and used colocation to track the movements of the squad and established the links between the five named members of Hezbollah who were accused of orchestrating the assassination. He paid for it with his life, when he was killed in a car bomb attack in January 2008.

Depending on how you look at it, Eid’s work may or may not have been in vain. Badreddine, the alleged overall “controller” of the attack and the most senior figure in Hezbollah who was directly involved in Hariri’s killing, was himself killed under mysterious circumstances while helming his group’s activities in Syria while his trial in absentia at the tribunal was ongoing. I personally attended the elaborate funeral Hezbollah held for him in Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs of Beirut. The proceedings against him were abandoned after his death.

Ayyash, meanwhile, lived on as the case progressed. In addition to Hariri, he was indicted in three other cases that the tribunal’s prosecutors determined were linked. He was convicted in 2020 and given five consecutive life sentences in absentia. The tribunal was shut down in 2023, with the U.N. publishing a self-congratulatory press release titled “Justice Served.” 

Such sentiments would have been alien to Ayyash, who continued to live unshackled by international assertions that he was now a wanted criminal. I was working at the tribunal in The Hague in 2011 when the indictments were first unveiled, and covered the start of the trial as a journalist in 2014. When Ayyash and his co-conspirators’ names were first revealed, Hezbollah’s former Secretary-General Nasrallah took to the airwaves from his bunker to declare them holy warriors. He extended the group’s protection to its vaunted assassination squad, vowing to “cut off the hand” that tries to remand them, a not-so-veiled threat in case the Lebanese security forces, which were supposed to enforce the tribunal’s indictment, sought to actually do their job. (They did in fact go to Ayyash’s supposed last address and knock on his door, then affixed the arrest warrant when they got no response.) Presumably, this blanket offer of protection expired after Nasrallah himself was killed.

Ayyash, then, was not simply a foot soldier in the Party of God’s army, but a linchpin of its efforts to forcibly subdue and quell any voices of opposition to its hegemony. The list of Hezbollah’s opponents who paid the ultimate price is long — from politicians and writers in Hariri’s orbit who wanted Syria’s occupation of Lebanon to end to more recent targets like Finance Minister Mohamad Chatah in 2013 and Shiite political activist and intellectual Lokman Slim in 2021. 

The tribunal’s motivating slogan, which often featured in its communications, stated that its goal was to “end impunity in Lebanon.” It is ironic, then, that the impunity of Hezbollah’s assassination squad was ended not by well-meaning bureaucrats in The Hague, but as a byproduct of the impunity of the Israeli military, which has undertaken a campaign that has leveled southern Lebanon, displaced over a million Lebanese and killed thousands.

International justice is a curious enterprise. Until recently, it focused on low-hanging fruit — primarily African dictators who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity and lacked the political superpower protection to shield them from prosecution. Only recently did organizations like the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice branch out to seek indictments and hold hearings related specifically to Russian crimes in Ukraine and Israeli crimes in Gaza, with the ICC famously issuing an indictment for Vladimir Putin. This unilateral expansion in what the ICC in particular perceives as its jurisdiction is a welcome development because justice applied only to the weak is not justice at all.

But it is also delusional to think that international justice precepts can be implemented when they are politically inconvenient. Putin, of course, remains at large, and Israel’s apparent ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza continues apace without even the attempt to hide it for plausible deniability. This is how it always worked. It took Serbia 12 years to arrest Radovan Karadzic, who seemingly managed to remain a fugitive while working in a private clinic in Belgrade, and 16 years to find Ratko Mladic. The urgency to detain them seemingly gathered pace after it became a precondition for Serbian EU accession negotiations.

What to make, then, of this sort of justice? Perhaps there is some succor in the simple fact that Ayyash is likely no longer alive to terrorize potential victims. Ashraf Rifi, the former head of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces and a mentor of Eid, who was killed for gathering the telecom evidence, said on X (formerly Twitter) in response to the reports of Ayyash’s death that he saw it as the “justice of the heavens.”

But perhaps it is simply a sign of the world we live in today. Hezbollah was once strong, and now it is weak, because another strong tyrant made it so. The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.


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