On September 27, Hassan Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for more than three decades, was assassinated by Israeli airstrikes on Beirut.
| Photo Credit: AFP

When Hassan Nasrallah, then 32, became the Secretary-General of Hezbollah in 1992, after the assassination of the group’s leader and co-founder Abbas al-Musawi, one of the first things he did was to order rocket attacks into northern Israel. A car bomb hit the Israeli embassy in Turkiye, killing a security officer, while a suicide bomber blew himself up at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 29 people.

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to push the Palestine Liberation Organisation out of the country. It did so, but the war led to the rise of Hezbollah, which turned out to be a greater security challenge than the PLO. In 1992, when Israel killed Mr. Musawi, what it wanted to do was deal a lethal blow to Hezbollah. But Mr. Musawi’s successor sent a message in unmistakable terms that he would double down on Hezbollah’s resistance.

The rocket attacks and embassy bombings were just the beginning of Hezbollah’s violent resistance under Mr. Nasrallah, who would turn the organisation, which was largely a guerrilla militia when he took over, into a multifaceted movement, with a military wing that is more powerful than the Lebanese Army. On September 27, Mr. Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for more than three decades, was assassinated by Israeli airstrikes on Beirut.

Mr. Nasrallah “has joined his fellow martyrs”, Hezbollah said in a statement on Saturday (September 28, 2024), confirming his death. Martyrdom is a central ideological and religious theme of Shia political activism. It is the supreme sacrifice. In September 1997, after Mr. Nasrallah’s eldest son Muhammad Hadi was killed in an Israeli ambush near Mlikh, a mountain village in southern Lebanon, he said, “I am proud to be the father of one of the martyrs”.

Born and raised in a working-class suburb of Beirut, Mr. Nasrallah undertook his religious studies in Baalbek in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and then in Iran. When the Iranian revolution took place, which gave a new meaning to Shia political Islam and radicalised youths across the region, Mr. Nasrallah was 19. He saw the power of religion and martyrdom. He witnessed the devastation brought by the civil war in Lebanon. He also saw the aggression of Israel in 1982, which had hit the marginalised Shia community the hardest. He was initially part of the Amal party, a Shia movement. When the radical sections of Amal split from the party and formed Hezbollah, Mr. Nasrallah joined them.

After he assumed leadership of the movement, his focus was on resistance against Israel’s continuing occupation of southern Lebanon, where they had carved a buffer called ‘security zone’. Hezbollah, with rocket attacks and ambushes, had turned the security zone into an ‘insecurity zone’. Amid growing violence, in 2000, 18 years after it started the Lebanon invasion, Israel decided to withdraw troops from the south. Mr. Nasrallah termed it “the first Arab victory against the Zionist entity”. In 2006, a cross-border raid by Hezbollah triggered the wrath of Israel, which launched a ground invasion and massive air strikes. The war went on for a month, causing great damage to Hezbollah. But Israel, despite its firepower, failed to defeat Hezbollah or deter its rockets from southern Lebanon. When Israel withdrew from Lebanon after reaching a ceasefire with Hezbollah, the group claimed another victory.

Another pivotal moment of Mr. Nasrallah’s leadership was the civil war in Syria, an ally, where the regime of Bashar al-Assad was threatened by a multitude of rebel and jihadist groups, including the Islamic State. “If Syria falls in the hands of America, Israel and the takfiris (a reference to IS and al-Qaeda jihadists), the people of our region will go into a dark period,” Nasrallah said in 2013, confirming that Hezbollah was fighting in Syria alongside the troops of the Assad regime. Hezbollah, along with other Iran-backed Shia militias and Russia, played a crucial role in turning around the Syrian civil war.

The “obliteration” of Israel and the liberation of Jerusalem were two of the main declared objectives of Hezbollah. When Israel launched its retaliatory war on Gaza following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in Israel, Hezbollah started firing rockets into Israel “in solidarity with the Palestinians”.

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Ever since, Hezbollah has been fighting a limited war, turning northern Israel into a no-man’s area. But earlier this month, Israel decided to escalate the war dramatically. Within days, Israel launched back-to-back attacks without letting Hezbollah recover from the effects. It triggered pager and walkie-talkie explosions first and then launched waves of massive airstrikes, taking out Hezbollah’s senior commanders.

On September 27, by assassinating Mr. Nasrallah, Israel dealt the heaviest blow to Hezbollah and its ally, Iran. Mr. Nasrallah led the group through wars. And he was killed in a war. Israel might be hoping that Hezbollah would take time to recover from its punches. Hezbollah says it will continue its “holy war against the enemy”. West Asia will remain on edge.

Lebanon’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel said on Saturday (September 28, 2024) it has killed, has led Hezbollah through decades of conflict with Israel, overseeing its transformation into a military force with regional sway and becoming one of the most prominent Arab figures in generations – with Iranian backing. The Iran-backed Hezbollah has yet to issue any statement on the status of Nasrallah, who has led the group for 32 years. The Israeli military said it had killed Nasrallah in an airstrike on the group’s central headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut a day earlier.

The Israeli military “eliminated … Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Hezbollah terrorist organization,” Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote in a statement on X.

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If the Israeli claim of his death is confirmed by Hezbollah, Nasrallah will be remembered among his supporters for standing up to Israel and defying the United States. To enemies, he has been head of a terrorist organisation and a proxy for Iran’s Shi’ite Islamist theocracy in its tussle for influence in the Middle East.

His regional influence has been on display over nearly a year of conflict ignited by the Gaza war, as Hezbollah entered the fray by firing on Israel from southern Lebanon in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas, and Yemeni and Iraqi groups followed suit, operating under the umbrella of “The Axis of Resistance”. “We are facing a great battle,” Nasrallah said in an Aug. 1 speech at the funeral of Hezbollah’s top military commander, Fuad Shukr, who was killed in an Israeli strike on the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut. Yet when thousands of Hezbollah members were injured and dozens killed, when their communications devices exploded in an apparent Israeli attack last week, that battle began to turn against his group.

Responding to the attacks on Hezbollah’s communications network in a September 19 speech, Nasrallah vowed to punish Israel.

“This is a reckoning that will come, its nature, its size, how and where? This is certainly what we will keep to ourselves and in the narrowest circle even within ourselves,” he said. He has not given a broadcast address since then.

Israel has meanwhile dramatically escalated its attacks, killing several senior Hezbollah commanders in targeted strikes and unleashing a massive bombardment in Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon, which has killed hundreds of people. Recognised even by his enemies as a skilled orator, Nasrallah’s speeches are followed by friend and foe alike. Wearing the black turban of a sayyed, or a descendent of the Prophet Mohammad, Nasrallah uses his addresses to rally Hezbollah’s base but also to deliver carefully calibrated threats, often wagging his finger as he does so.

He became secretary general of Hezbollah in 1992 aged just 35, the public face of a once shadowy group founded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in 1982 to fight Israeli occupation forces.

Israel killed his predecessor, Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi, in a helicopter attack. Nasrallah led Hezbollah when its guerrillas finally drove Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation.

‘DIVINE VICTORY’

Conflict with Israel has largely defined his leadership. He declared “Divine Victory” in 2006 after Hezbollah waged 34 days of war with Israel, winning the respect of many ordinary Arabs who had grown up watching Israel defeat their armies.

But he became an increasingly divisive figure in Lebanon and the wider Arab world as Hezbollah’s area of operations widened to Syria and beyond, reflecting an intensifying conflict between Shi’ite Iran and U.S.-allied Sunni Arab monarchies in the Gulf.

While Nasrallah painted Hezbollah’s engagement in Syria — where it fought in support of President Bashar al-Assad during the civil war — as a campaign against jihadists, critics accused the group of becoming part of a regional sectarian conflict. At home, Nasrallah’s critics said Hezbollah’s regional adventurism imposed an unbearable price on Lebanon, leading once friendly Gulf Arabs to shun the country — a factor that contributed to its 2019 financial collapse.

In the years following the 2006 war, Nasrallah walked a tightrope over a new conflict with Israel, hoarding Iranian rockets in a carefully measured contest of threat and counter threat.

The Gaza war, ignited by the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, prompted Hezbollah’s worst conflict with Israel since 2006, costing the group hundreds of its fighters including top commanders.

After years of entanglements elsewhere, the conflict put renewed focus on Hezbollah’s historic struggle with Israel.

“We are here paying the price for our front of support for Gaza, and for the Palestinian people, and our adoption of the Palestinian cause,” Nasrallah said in the Aug. 1 speech.

Nasrallah grew up in Beirut’s impoverished Karantina district. His family hail from Bazouriyeh, a village in the Lebanon’s predominantly Shi’ite south which today forms Hezbollah’s political heartland.

He was part of a generation of young Lebanese Shi’ites whose political outlook was shaped by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Before leading the group, he used to spend nights with frontline guerrillas fighting Israel’s occupying Army. His teenage son, Hadi, died in battle in 1997, a loss that gave him legitimacy among his core Shi’ite constituency in Lebanon.

POWERFUL ENEMIES

He has had a track record of threatening powerful enemies.

As regional tensions escalated after the eruption of the Gaza war, Nasrallah issued a thinly veiled warning to U.S. warships in the Mediterranean, telling them: “We have prepared for the fleets with which you threaten us.” In 2020, Nasrallah vowed that U.S. soldiers would leave the region in coffins after Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq.

He expressed fierce opposition to Saudi Arabia over its armed intervention in Yemen, where, with U.S. and other allied support, Riyadh sought to roll back the Iran-aligned Houthis.

As regional tensions rose in 2019 following an attack on Saudi oil facilities, he said Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates should halt the Yemen war to protect themselves.

“Don’t bet on a war against Iran because they will destroy you,” he said in a message directed at Riyadh.

On Nasrallah’s watch, Hezbollah has also clashed with adversaries at home in Lebanon.

In 2008, he accused the Lebanese government — backed at the time by the West and Saudi Arabia — of declaring war by moving to ban his group’s internal communication network. Nasrallah vowed to “cut off the hand” that tried to dismantle it.

It prompted four days of civil war pitting Hezbollah against Sunni and Druze fighters, and the Shi’ite group to take over half the capital Beirut.

He strongly denied any Hezbollah involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, after a U.N.-backed tribunal indicted four members of the group.

Nasrallah rejected the tribunal — which in 2020 eventually convicted three of them in absentia over the assassination — as a tool in the hands of Hezbollah’s enemies.