BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, whom Israel said on Saturday it had killed, has led Hezbollah through decades of conflict with Israel, overseeing its transformation into a military force with regional influence and becoming one of the most prominent Arab figures in generations. – with Iranian backing.
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 headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut a day earlier.
The Israeli army “eliminated… Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Hezbollah terrorist organization,” Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee wrote in a statement on X.
If Hezbollah confirms the Israeli claim of his death, Nasrallah will be remembered among his supporters for standing up to Israel and defying the United States. To his enemies, he has been the head of a terrorist organization and a representative of Iran’s Shiite Islamist theocracy in its fight for influence in the Middle East.
Its regional influence has been evident during nearly a year of conflict sparked by the Gaza war, when Hezbollah entered the fray, firing at Israel from southern Lebanon in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas, and Yemeni and Iraqi groups followed suit. , operating under the umbrella command of “The Axis of the 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 attack on Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut.
However, when thousands of Hezbollah members were wounded and dozens killed when their communications devices exploded in an apparent Israeli attack last week, that battle began to turn against their group.
Responding to 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 stated.
Since then he has not given any television speeches.
Meanwhile, Israel has 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.
Recognized even by his enemies as a skilled orator, Nasrallah’s speeches are followed by friends and enemies alike.
Wearing the black turban of a sayyed, or a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, Nasrallah uses his speeches to mobilize 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 Guard 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 out of southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation.
‘DIVINE VICTORY’
The conflict with Israel has largely defined his leadership. He declared “Divine Victory” in 2006 after Hezbollah waged 34 days of war with Israel, earning 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 broader Arab world as Hezbollah’s area of operations expanded to Syria and beyond, reflecting an intensifying conflict between Shiite Iran. and the Sunni Arab monarchies allied with the United States in the Gulf.
While Nasrallah described 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 exacted an unbearable toll on Lebanon, leading once-friendly Gulf Arabs to shun the country, a factor that contributed to its 2019 financial collapse.
In the years after the 2006 war, Nasrallah walked a tightrope around a new conflict with Israel, hoarding Iranian rockets in a carefully measured contest of threats and counterthreats.
The Gaza war, sparked by Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, sparked 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 once again focused attention on Hezbollah’s historic fight with Israel.
“We are here paying the price for our front of support for Gaza and the Palestinian people, and for our embrace of the Palestinian cause,” Nasrallah said in the August 1 speech.
Nasrallah grew up in the impoverished Karantina district of Beirut. His family comes from Bazouriyeh, a village in the predominantly Shiite south of Lebanon that today forms the political heart of Hezbollah.
He was part of a generation of young Lebanese Shiites whose political outlook was shaped by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Before leading the group, he often spent nights with frontline guerrillas fighting against Israel’s occupying army. His teenage son, Hadi, was killed in battle in 1997, a loss that gave him legitimacy among his core Shiite constituency in Lebanon.
POWERFUL ENEMIES
He has a history of threatening powerful enemies.
As regional tensions escalated following the outbreak of the Gaza war, Nasrallah issued a thinly veiled warning to American warships in the Mediterranean, telling them: “We have prepared for the fleets you threaten us with.”
In 2020, Nasrallah promised that US soldiers would leave the region in coffins after Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq.
He expressed fierce opposition to Saudi Arabia for its armed intervention in Yemen, where, with the support of the United States and other allies, Riyadh sought to push 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 stop the Yemen war to protect themselves.
“Do not bet on a war against Iran because they will destroy you,” he said in a message to Riyadh.
Under Nasrallah’s leadership, Hezbollah has also clashed with adversaries in Lebanon.
In 2008, he accused the Lebanese government, backed at the time by the West and Saudi Arabia, of declaring war by banning his group’s internal communications network. Nasrallah vowed to “cut off the hand” that tried to dismantle him.
It sparked four days of civil war that pitted Hezbollah against Sunni and Druze fighters, and the Shiite group seized half of the capital, Beirut.
He strongly denied any Hezbollah involvement in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in 2005, after a UN-backed court indicted four members of the group.
Nasrallah rejected the court, which in 2020 ended up convicting three of them in absentia of the murder, considering it a tool in the hands of Hezbollah’s enemies.