Hassan Nasrallah: Terror chief made Hezbollah a regional force, ignored Israeli warnings
Lebanese cleric, 64, was threatening public face of anti-Israel Hezbollah terror group founded by Iran. Was killed by IDF after intensifying rocket attacks on north since Oct. 8
Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Iranian-backed terror group through decades of conflict with Israel, was killed in an airstrike in Beirut on September 27, the Israel Defense Forces has confirmed.
Born in the Shia suburbs of Beirut in 1960, the radical Lebanese cleric oversaw Hezbollah’s transformation into a military force with regional sway to become one of the most prominent Arab figures in generations. An astute strategist, Nasrallah reshaped Hezbollah into an archenemy of Israel, cementing alliances with Shiite religious leaders in Iran and Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas.
Nasrallah became secretary general of Hezbollah in 1992 at just 35, the public face of a once shadowy group founded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in 1982 to fight Israel. It was the first group that Iran backed and used as a way to export its brand of political Islam.
Despite the power he wielded, Nasrallah lived largely in hiding for fear of an Israeli assassination. Israel killed his predecessor, Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi, in a helicopter attack. Nasrallah led Hezbollah when the IDF withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon in 2000, after 18 years.
Nasrallah grew up in Beirut’s impoverished Karantina district. His family hails from Bazouriyeh, a village in Lebanon’s predominantly Shiite south which today forms Hezbollah’s political heartland.
He is part of a generation of young Lebanese Shiites 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 in the so-called security stone that the IDF had set up inside southern Lebanon to distance terror groups from the border. His 18-year-old son, Hadi, a Hezbollah fighter, was killed with three other gunmen in an Israeli ambush in 1997, a loss that gave him legitimacy among his core Shiite constituency in Lebanon.
He was targeted on Friday in an Israeli attack on Hezbollah’s main underground headquarters that rocked Beirut, the latest in an escalating series of blows over 10 days that have shaken the group he has led for 32 years.
Nasrallah was unreachable following Israel’s strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday evening, a source close to the Lebanese armed group initially told Reuters. His death was confirmed on Saturday morning by the IDF. Hours after the strikes, Hezbollah had not made a statement on his fate.
Among supporters, Nasrallah was lauded for standing up to Israel and defying the United States. To enemies, he was head of a terrorist organization seeking to destroy the Jewish state and a proxy for Iran’s rapacious Shiite 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.”
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel on October 8, the day after the Hamas massacre in southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
“We are facing a great battle,” Nasrallah said in an August 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. Israel has not commented on the attack, even though it was widely blamed for it.
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 did not have a broadcast address since then.
Charismatic orator
Recognized even by his enemies as a charismatic orator, Nasrallah’s speeches were followed by friend and foe alike.
Wearing the black turban of a sayyed, or a descendent of the Prophet Mohammad, Nasrallah used his addresses to rally Hezbollah’s base but also to deliver carefully calibrated threats, often wagging his finger as he did so.
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 Shiite Iran and US-allied Sunni Arab monarchies in the Gulf.
While Nasrallah painted Hezbollah’s engagement in Syria — where it fought in support of Syrian 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, stockpiling tens of thousands of Iranian rockets and missiles to form a deterrent “balance of terror” in a carefully measured contest of threat and counter-threat.
The Gaza war, ignited by the October 7 Hamas invasion and slaughter in southern Israel, prompted Hezbollah’s worst conflict with Israel since 2006, after the terrorist organization began raining down barrages of projectiles and drones on northern Israel. Some 60,000 Israelis have been forced from their homes, and Israel stepped up its attacks on Hezbollah in a declared effort to enable their return. The IDF’s retaliation to the Hezbollah strikes has cost the terror group hundreds of its fighters, including many of its 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 August 1 speech.
Powerful enemies – and a powerful protector
Nasrallah 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 US warships in the Mediterranean, telling them: “We have prepared for the fleets with which you threaten us.”
In 2020, Nasrallah vowed that US soldiers would leave the region in coffins after Iranian general Qassem Soleimani — head of the Quds Force of the IRGC, a US-designated terror group — was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq.
He expressed fierce opposition to Saudi Arabia over its armed intervention in Yemen, where, with US 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 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 Shiite group to take over half the capital Beirut.
He strongly denied any Hezbollah involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, after a UN-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.
Israel in recent days and weeks had vowed to gradually escalate its attacks on Hezbollah unless it halted its rocket fire and entered a diplomatic process for withdrawing its forces deeper into Lebanon. Nasrallah ignored the threat and the escalating attacks.
On Friday, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel “must defeat” Hezbollah.
“It has tentacles that span all continents. It has murdered more Americans and more Frenchmen than any group except Bin Laden,” he said. “And it has attacked Israel viciously over the last 20 years.”
“In the last year, completely unprovoked,” he went on, Hezbollah’s attacks “turned vibrant towns in the north of Israel into ghost towns… Israel has been tolerating this intolerable situation for nearly a year. Well, I’ve come here today to say enough is enough.”
Shortly before delivering the speech, Netanyahu had approved the deadly strike on Nasrallah.
