Hassan Nasrallah knew that Israel was trying to kill him. His predecessor as the leader of Hezbollah, Abbas al-Musawi, had been assassinated in an Israeli helicopter strike in 1992. Nasrallah himself had not spoken in public since the start of Israel’s war with Lebanon in 2006. Instead he rallied his supporters in live televised speeches broadcast from secret locations. But in recent weeks, as tensions mounted between Israel and Hezbollah, he had gone further underground. His last address, on 19 September, appeared to be pre-recorded, with Nasrallah making no reference to the Israeli jets that streaked across Beirut during the broadcast, breaking the sound barrier and detonating a wave of sonic booms above the Lebanese capital.
“Without a doubt, we have suffered a major blow,” Nasrallah acknowledged in that speech, which followed an extraordinary series of attacks in the previous weeks that had killed senior military commanders and set off thousands of explosions across Lebanon as Israel targeted pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members, injuring thousands and shattering the group’s communications infrastructure. With Israel and Hezbollah trading fire across the Lebanese border and seemingly poised on the brink of all-out war, Nasrallah warned that “the reckoning will come”.
But the reckoning that followed was his own. Eight days later, the Israeli military tracked Nasrallah to an underground command bunker in the suburbs of Beirut on 27 September. They dropped more than 80 bombs in a matter of minutes. The following day, Hezbollah confirmed that Nasrallah had been killed, reportedly alongside another of his top military commanders. The group described Nasrallah as “the highest, most sacred and most precious martyr in our journey” and vowed to “continue its jihad”.
The immediate outlook for Hezbollah is stark. Nasrallah was one of the most significant figures to emerge in the region in decades. To his followers, he was a uniquely gifted and charismatic orator who transformed Hezbollah from a militant group into a political force and perhaps the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor, with an estimated fighting force of around 100,000 foot soldiers and a vast arsenal of rockets and missiles capable of targeting Israel and US facilities across the region.
Born in 1960 in a suburb of eastern Beirut, Nasrallah was the oldest of nine children. His father sold vegetables from a small market stand. But the young Nasrallah believed he was destined to be a leader. In a 2006 interview, he described how, as a child, he had wrapped his grandmother’s black scarf around his head and told people “to pray behind me”. The family fled to Tyre in southern Lebanon in 1975 during the country’s civil war, and he subsequently moved to Iraq to study at a Shiite seminary, where he met the future leader of Hezbollah, Abbas al-Musawi. They returned to Lebanon together in 1978 after Saddam Hussein expelled hundreds of Shiite Muslims, and Nasrallah continued to study under Musawi.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 – with the intention of driving out the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) headquartered there at the time – Nasrallah joined a Shiite militant group to fight against the Israeli forces, which evolved into Hezbollah, whose name means “The Party of God”, with training, weaponry and financial support from Iran. The group expanded its attacks beyond Lebanon, with Nasrallah suspected of helping to plan the 1983 suicide bombing of the US embassy in Beirut, and an attack on US and French military barracks that killed at least 360 people. When Musawi was killed in 1992, Nasrallah, who was 32 at the time, took over as Hezbollah’s leader.
Over the next three decades, Nasrallah cultivated grassroots support for Hezbollah among Shiite Muslims in Lebanon, stepping in to provide housing, social services, and medical care, which the failing Lebanese state struggled to offer. Hezbollah’s political wing won eight seats in the 1992 parliamentary elections. Nasrallah then claimed victory in 2000, when Israel finally withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon, winning praise from Iran’s then supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. After the month-long Israel-Lebanon war in 2006 – which was sparked by Hezbollah kidnapping two Israeli soldiers – Nasrallah claimed a “divine, historic and strategic victory” over Israel and its ally, the United States, even though in reality the conflict ended in a stalemate. He emerged from the conflict as a seemingly invincible hero to his supporters. In a 2008 poll, he was named the most admired leader in the Arab world.
But Nasrallah’s decision to send Hezbollah fighters to Syria to help shore up Bashar al-Assad in the country’s civil war alienated some of his previous supporters. The group’s standing within Lebanon was further diminished with the financial crisis that began in 2019, which led to protests, including against Nasrallah. Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, Hezbollah has been escalating its air strikes across the border to tie down Israeli troops and force the evacuation of towns and villages in northern Israel. But whereas once Hezbollah was seen as an invaluable “state within the state”, as the clashes have escalated in recent weeks, including multiple strikes on Beirut, there has been growing concern that the group was leading the country into another all-out war with Israel, whose cost would be borne by Lebanese civilians.
Of course, Nasrallah did not build Hezbollah alone. The group owes much of its military strength and formidable resources to Iran, which views Hezbollah, strategically positioned on Israel’s northern border, as a powerful deterrent against direct Israeli strikes. The question now is whether, and how soon, Tehran and Hezbollah’s remaining leadership can rebuild the organisation, and whether Israel might be tempted to launch a ground invasion to try to prevent this from happening.
There is no question that leaders matter. Nasrallah was one of the region’s most significant figures in decades. By his own account, he reportedly saw himself as a visionary, revolutionary hero, who would be remembered alongside the likes of Che Guevara. But history offers a cautionary tale against writing off Hezbollah, or whatever organisation rises from its remnants. Nasrallah was seen as young, inexperienced leader when he took command of the organisation after the assassination of his mentor three decades ago. Hezbollah itself arose from the resistance to an Israeli invasion, and prospered in the void left by the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon.
Killing the Hezbollah leader and decimating its command structure and communications is a tremendous tactical victory for Israel, but we are about to find out if there is another Nasrallah waiting to take his place. And the first order of business for the next Hezbollah leader, and his backers in Iran, will be retaliation.
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