Not surprisingly, then, Hezbollah has been determined to thwart the investigation using all means, abasing the tribunal’s credibility by calling it the “Israeli Project,” and targeting its members and informants.

Nonetheless, the evidence already disclosed is enough to put Nasrallah’s eulogy over Hariri’s grave, in which he praised the slain prime minister as a “Lebanese patriot,” in a ridiculous light.

Now that the tribunal’s final conclusions prove publicly that Hezbollah is culpable for Hariri’s assassination, Nasrallah is bound to receive a mark of Cain for undermining Lebanese national interests. Ironically, under the same claim of patriotism, Hezbollah not only continued its armed struggle against Israel after its unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, but also attained its special status as the leader of Lebanese resistance against its enemies without submitting to the authority of the elected political representatives. Hezbollah also used its military force to impose its will in internal disputes, such as the 2008 violent takeover of several Beirut neighborhoods by Shi’ite gunmen, which nearly drove the country into a new civil war.

After continuously building its strength with its patrons’ assistance, over the past few years, a dramatic development has occurred between Syria and Hezbollah, who have upgraded their partnership to “strategic alliance.” Iran, on the other hand, has preserved its position as the traditional patron of the Lebanese Shi’ite party, a role it undertook when the Iranian Revolutionary Guards trained and organized Hezbollah troops in the early 1980s.

Thus, although the tribunal declared it would prosecute “only individuals – and not groups, organizations, states,” anyone knowledgeable about Hezbollah’s relationship with these two regimes could affirm that the leadership of both Syria and Iran would not only have been well informed about the assassination, but also have approved it.

Such a grand-scale operation, targeting a political leader with international prestige, could not have occurred without prior intense dialogue between Hezbollah and its patrons; an operational approval from the highest-ranking officials in Assad’s regime, along with the explicit consent of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei.

Furthermore, if Hezbollah members are indicted in the upcoming trial, there should be no doubt that Nasrallah himself approved the operation, and that his military commander Imad Mughniyeh (killed a year later in Damascus) planned and personally supervised the execution.

Iran and Syria are likely to use the “probable denial” tactic often used by state sponsors of terrorism to rebuff any evidence of legal responsibility. However, since in our era confidential information often finds its way to the media, and due to the possibility of Assad’s fall, we are likely to see documented evidence of that crime in the future.

**Yoram Schweitzer is director of the Low-Intensity Conflict and Terror Project at the INSS, and Gilad Stern is an intern at the INSS.