It should come as no surprise that Hezbollah is operating a terrorist network in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Despite the strong mutual deterrence along Israel's border with Lebanon, and despite Hezbollah's deep involvement in the Syrian quagmire, the Shiite terrorist organization has not for one second abandoned its jihadist ideology or its efforts to harm Israel in a variety of ways and arenas. The organization's preferred modus operandi is to recruit Arab Israelis for terrorist purposes. The reason is clear: A blue Israeli identification card allows the holder access to (almost) anywhere in Israel, and it is certainly conducive to effective intelligence gathering. Due to the difficulty in identifying candidates for recruitment, Hezbollah occasionally uses criminal networks as a terror platform. Two such cells -- which were involved in drug dealing but were also utilized to smuggle weapons -- were exposed by the Shin Bet security agency in 2012 and 2014. In one of the cases, sophisticated bombs had already been smuggled into Israel. An alternative recruitment method, albeit less preferable to Hezbollah, is to approach residents of the West Bank. These individuals are recruited directly from Lebanon, or by Hezbollah agents operating out of the Gaza Strip (with the full knowledge of Hamas). While they are easier to recruit than Arab Israelis, the odds of success are far smaller both because of their access limitations and because of the Shin Bet's encompassing intelligence umbrella there, which has enabled the Israeli security agency to thwart a high percentage of planned terrorist attacks. In the past, Hezbollah has recruited most of its "internal" cells abroad, primarily in Arab countries and in Turkey. Recruitment agents exploit academic studies, family visits and medical treatments to convince operatives (using ideology or money) to carry out attacks in Israel. New technology and online social networks have provided new avenues of recruitment for the organization, and today the bulk of the recruitment is done on Facebook. Much like its counterpart Islamic State, Hezbollah also targets individuals who express extremist views or suicidal tendencies, contacts them and tries to persuade them to act on its behalf. These agents may or may not be aware of their handlers' true identity; the recruits are often given only partial information, certainly they have no knowledge of the wider operational picture. The Hezbollah outfit responsible for these operations is Unit 133 (formerly 1800), headed by Mohammed Ataya. This unit, which oversees all of Hezbollah's special operations in Lebanon's neighboring countries, has a long history of working against Israel and recruiting terrorist cells to act against it from the inside. The majority of these attempts, those that are known, have been thwarted, but the unit has also perpetrated attacks that have cost Israel dearly (the abduction of Israeli reservist Elhanan Tannenbaum, for example). Other attempted attacks failed due to sheer luck (would-be suicide bomber Hussein Miqdad entered Israel with a foreign passport in 1996 and accidentally blew himself up in an east Jerusalem hotel room before carrying out his planned attack). The working assumption is that despite the Shin Bet's most recent success, such recruitment efforts will persist because they allow Hezbollah to pursue jihad even when the border is calm (some may be inclined to view these efforts as the parallel to Israel's attacks on weapons convoys earmarked for Hezbollah). Against this backdrop, we can consider the Shin Bet's announcement on Tuesday as a message to Hezbollah that its supposedly clandestine activities are essentially transparent, and destined to fail.
