Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader, killed in Beirut in Israeli attack

Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, was killed in a massive Israeli airstrike on Beirut on Friday evening, the Lebanon-based group confirmed.

The Israeli army had claimed responsibility for the killing earlier in the day.

Nasrallah, who reached the height of his popularity after the 2006 war with Israel, was seen by many as a hero not only in Lebanon but also abroad. Standing up to Israel is what has defined him and his Iran-backed group Hezbollah for years. But that changed when Hezbollah sent fighters to Syria to suppress the uprising that threatened the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

Nasrallah was no longer seen as the leader of a resistance movement, but as the leader of a Shia party fighting for Iranian interests, and was criticized by many Arab countries.

Even before Hezbollah’s involvement in the war in Syria, Nasrallah had failed to convince many in the Sunni Muslim Arab world that his movement was not behind the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. An international tribunal charged four members of the group with the murder and one was later convicted.

Nevertheless, Nasrallah continued to enjoy support from his loyal base – mainly Lebanon’s Shia Muslims – who revered him as a leader and religious figurehead.

Born in 1960, Nasrallah’s early childhood in East Beirut is shrouded in political mythology. He is one of nine siblings and is said to have been devout from an early age. He often took long walks to the city center to find second-hand books on Islam. Nasrallah himself has described spending his free time as a child gazing reverently at a portrait of the Shia scholar Musa al-Sadr – a pastime that foreshadowed his future concerns about politics and Lebanon’s Shia communities.

In 1974, Sadr founded an organization – the Movement of the Poor – that became the ideological core of the well-known Lebanese party and Hezbollah rival Amal. In the 1980s, Amal gathered support from middle-class Shiites, who had become frustrated with the sect’s historical marginalization in Lebanon, to grow into a powerful political movement. In addition to championing an anti-establishment message, Amal also provided a stable income for many Shia families, creating a complex system of patronage in southern Lebanon.

After the outbreak of civil war between Lebanon’s Christian Maronites and Muslims, Nasrallah joined the Amal movement and fought with its militia. But as the conflict progressed, Amal took a resolutely unsympathetic attitude toward the presence of Palestinian militias in Lebanon.

Troubled by this position, Nasrallah split from Amal in 1982, shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and formed a new group with Iranian support that would later become Hezbollah. By 1985, Hezbollah had crystallized its own worldview in a founding document, which addressed the “oppressed of Lebanon” and named Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini as its only true leader.

Throughout the civil war, Hezbollah and Amal evolved in a bitter tandem, often jostling for support among Lebanon’s Shiite voters. By the 1990s, after numerous bloody clashes and with the civil war over, Hezbollah had largely outdone Amal due to its prominence among Lebanon’s Shiite supporters. Nasrallah became the group’s third secretary general in 1992 after his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, was killed by Israeli missiles.

Since the beginning of his career, Nasrallah’s speeches have helped cement his persona as a wise, humble figure, deeply invested in the lives of ordinary people – a leader who eschewed formal Arabic in favor of the dialect spoken on the streets. spoken, and who reportedly preferred to sleep. , every night, on a simple foam mattress on the floor.

In the book The Hezbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication, scholar and co-author Dina Matar describes how Nasrallah’s words have fused political claims and religious images, creating speeches of high emotional tension that have transformed Nasrallah into “the embodiment of the group”.

Nasrallah’s charisma was far-reaching; his elegies on the history of oppression in the Middle East have made him an influential figure across sects and nations. That has been helped by Hezbollah’s vast media apparatus, which uses TV, print news and even musical theater shows to spread its message.

When Nasrallah took over as Secretary General, he was accused of pushing Hezbollah into the fray of Lebanon’s post-war political scene. Hezbollah went from working outside the official boundaries of state politics to becoming a national party that solicited the support of every citizen by participating in democratic elections.

Presiding over this shift was Nasrallah, who first put Hezbollah on the ballot in 1992 and appealed to the masses with stirring speeches. As he told Al Jazeera in 2006: “We, Shiites and Sunnis, are fighting Israel together,” adding that he “did not fear any incitement, neither between Muslims and Christians, nor between Shiites and Sunnis in Lebanon.”

As head of Hezbollah for more than three decades, Nasrallah was often described as the most powerful figure in Lebanon, despite never personally holding public office. His critics said his political power came from the weapons Hezbollah possessed, which the country also used against domestic opponents. Nasrallah repeatedly rejected his group’s calls for disarmament, saying: “Hezbollah’s abandonment of arms would expose Lebanon to Israel.”

In 2019, he criticized nationwide protests calling for a new political order in Lebanon, and Hezbollah members clashed with some protesters. That has tarnished his image among many in Lebanon.

But Nasrallah’s supporters still saw him as a defender of the rights of Shia Muslims, while his critics accused him of showing loyalty to Tehran and its religious authority whenever their interests conflicted with those of the Lebanese people.

Hezbollah faced one of its biggest challenges after the group opened a front against Israel in October 2023 to help ease pressure on its ally Hamas in Gaza. The group suffered losses after months of cross-border fighting and Israeli attacks that targeted significant figures in the Gaza Strip. the movement. But Nasrallah remained defiant.

Although Nasrallah has been described as the “personification of Hezbollah,” the group he built over more than three decades is highly organized and determined to continue opposing Israel.

Hezbollah is unlikely to collapse under the weight of Nasrallah’s assassination, but in his death the group has lost a leader who was charismatic and whose influence extended far beyond Lebanon. The group will now have to select a new leader, who in turn will have to decide in which direction Hezbollah will be taken. Whatever the group decides, it will not only affect Hezbollah: the ripples will be felt across Lebanon and the wider region.