Israel Says Hezbollah Killed a Christian Politician and Faked a Crash

The Israeli military released video footage on 14 November 2025 that it says shows Hezbollah operatives killing Elias Al-Hasrouni, a senior Christian politician in Lebanon, on 1 August 2023. The material was published by Avichay Adraee, the Israel Defense Forces' Arabic-language spokesperson, who said Hezbollah had circulated rumours that Al-Hasrouni (known for his strong opposition to the group) had died in a car accident.

According to the IDF, the footage instead shows that he was kidnapped by Hezbollah operatives and murdered "by poisoning and breaking his ribs". The spokesperson said that "in order to create the impression that he veered off the road and died in a car accident, they placed Al-Hasrouni's body back in his vehicle, stuck against a tree in a ditch beside the road."

The spokesman with an Arabic-speaking audience of millions

Adraee is not an ordinary military press officer. He heads the Arabic media division of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit and has built an audience across the Arab world (more than half a million followers on X as of December 2023 and around 2.5 million on Facebook) through which the Israeli military delivers warnings, rebuttals and material of this kind directly to Arabic speakers, according to a reference profile of him. That profile records that he was promoted to colonel in July 2024 and handed the role over in February 2026; the release describing this footage referred to him as a lieutenant colonel. Critics, including Amnesty International, have challenged the accuracy of some of his evacuation warnings, and his use of Quranic quotations on social media has drawn objections.

The claim as reported in Israel

The release was picked up widely on the day. Ynetnews and the Jerusalem Post both carried the IDF's account, reporting that the military attributed the killing to Hezbollah's Unit 121, which it described as the group's surveillance and special operations unit, and that surveillance footage showed two vehicles trailing Al-Hasrouni before he was seized. Both noted that his death in August 2023 had originally been recorded as a traffic accident. Neither outlet reported an independent verification of the footage.

A front that never fully quietened

The release came almost a year into a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. That agreement took effect on 27 November 2024, requiring Hezbollah to withdraw north of the Litani river, Israel to pull its forces out of southern Lebanon, and 5,000 Lebanese army troops to deploy there under monitoring by a five-country panel led by the United States. In practice Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon continued through 2025, and the arrangement broke down on 2 March 2026. Publishing evidence of Hezbollah violence against Lebanese civilians serves an argument Israel has pressed throughout that period: that the group is a danger to Lebanon itself.

What is still unclear

The military did not say how or when it obtained the footage, why it was released more than two years after the killing, or what parts of the sequence the video actually shows. The statement carried no response from Hezbollah and did not say whether Lebanese authorities had reopened any investigation into the death.