Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah transformed the militant group into a potent regional force

BEIRUT (AP) — Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who transformed the Lebanese militant group into a potent paramilitary and political force in the Middle East, was killed in an Israeli airstrike, the group said. He was 64.

Nasrallah, who spearheaded Hezbollah’s war against Israel in 2006 and got the group heavily involved in neighboring Syria’s brutal conflict, was killed in a massive Israeli airstrike on the Beirut southern suburb of Haret Hreik Friday evening that knocked down several multistory apartment buildings.

“His eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, had joined his fellow great martyrs whom he had led for 30 years from one victory to another,” Hezbollah said in a statement. It added that Nasrallah “fell as a martyr on the road to Jerusalem.”

Fears of a regional war

Nasrallah’s death comes amid a dizzying escalation in the nearly yearlong conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, since the war in Gaza started, and more than three decades after he took leadership of the Iranian-backed militant group following the killing of his predecessor by an Israeli missile in 1992. Five years later, the United States designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

Hezbollah has been firing rockets, missiles and drones into northern Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and Hamas, an allied Iran-backed militant group. Israel has responded with increasingly heavy airstrikes and the targeted killing of Hezbollah commanders while threatening a wider operation.

This week has been the deadliest in Lebanon since the bruising 2006 monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah.

First, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used mainly by Hezbollah members exploded in different parts of Lebanon, killing 39 people and wounding nearly 3,000, many of them civilians. Lebanon blamed Israel, but Israel did not confirm or deny responsibility. Nasrallah had promised to retaliate.

Then, Israeli strikes on Lebanon killed more than 700 people in five days, including at least 150 women and children, according to Lebanese authorities.

Nasrallah had said the barrages would continue — and Israelis wouldn’t be able to return to their homes in the north — until Israel’s campaign in Gaza ended.

Seen by his supporters as a charismatic and shrewd strategist, Nasrallah had reshaped Hezbollah into an archenemy of Israel, cementing alliances with the ayatollahs in Tehran and Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas.

Idolized by his Lebanese Shiite followers and respected by millions of others across the Arab and Islamic world, Nasrallah held the title of sayyid, an honorific meant to signify the Shiite cleric’s lineage dating back to the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

Nasrallah’s image appears on billboards in the group’s strongholds across Lebanon — especially in southern Beirut, Hezbollah’s headquarters — and on trinkets in souvenir shops not only in Lebanon but also in countries such as Syria and Iraq.

Despite the power he wielded, Nasrallah lived largely in hiding in the last years of his life for fear of an Israeli assassination, giving speeches to followers via a satellite link.

A fiery orator viewed as an extremist in the U.S. and much of the West, as well as in some oil-rich Gulf Arab countries, he was also considered a pragmatist compared with the firebrand militants who dominated Hezbollah after its founding in 1982, during Lebanon’s civil war.

War after war in the Middle East

Under Nasrallah, Hezbollah fought Israel to a stalemate during the 34-day war in 2006 and was credited with leading the war of attrition that led to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from south Lebanon in 2000, after an 18-year occupation. Nasrallah’s eldest son, Hadi, was killed in 1997, while fighting against Israeli forces.

When Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011, Hezbollah fighters rushed in, siding with Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces — even though Hezbollah’s popularity took a dive as the Arab world ostracized Assad.

Along with Damascus’ key allies Russia and Iran, Hezbollah played a major role in helping Assad stay in power and eventually retake territory lost in the early years of the conflict.

Hezbollah saw its popularity among Arabs surge again when it came to the defense of Hamas, opening a front with Israeli forces along the Israel-Lebanese border barely a day after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The Hamas-led attack killed around 1,200 people in Israel and took about 250 hostage, triggering one of the most destructive military campaigns in modern history. Israel’s subsequent aerial bombardment and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

In June 2024, Nasrallah warned Israel that Hezbollah had new weapons and capabilities. Nasrallah also claimed that Hezbollah now has a far higher number of fighters than the 100,000 figure he gave three years earlier.

The early years

Nasrallah, the eldest of nine siblings, was born into a poor family in Beirut’s impoverished northern suburb of Sharshabouk. In 1975, the Lebanese civil war forced the family to flee south, to their ancestral home in Bazzouriyeh, a village near the ancient Phoenician port city of Tyre.

There, Nasrallah joined the Amal movement, a political and paramilitary organization representing the once-marginalized Shiites in Lebanon, and soon began his rise as a revolutionary.

At the age of 16, he went to Iraq’s holy Shiite city of Najaf where the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, lived in exile at the time and taught theology. Later, Nasrallah studied in the city of Qom, the seat of Iran’s religious hierarchy.

Nasrallah was among Hezbollah’s founders when the party was formed by Iranian Revolutionary Guard members who came to Lebanon in the summer of 1982 to fight invading Israeli forces.

He built a power base as Hezbollah over time became part of a cluster of Iranian-backed factions and governments known as the Axis of Resistance. It was also the first group that Iran backed and used as a way to export its brand of political Islam.

Two days after its leader, 39-year-old Sayyed Abbas Musawi, was killed in an Israeli helicopter gunship raid in south Lebanon, Hezbollah chose Nasrallah as its secretary-general in February 1992.

Like Musawi, Nasrallah was committed to the struggle against Israel and Khomeini’s anti-Western teachings, and famously declared: “America will remain the dreadful enemy and Israel a cancerous growth that should be uprooted.”

A black-turbaned cleric or a militant leader?

Wearing spectacles and sporting a bushy gray beard like many religious Shiite men, Nasrallah’s image was far from that of a militant who commanded thousands of heavily armed, well-trained and battle-hardened followers.

He often paused in his speeches to make jokes or break into local dialect and once, responding to a reporter asking about his monthly salary during a television interview, Nasrallah said it was about $1,300.

Following the end of Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war, Nasrallah gradually turned the organization into a “state within a state,” with an elaborate social welfare network that provided schools, clinics, and housing in the impoverished and predominantly Shiite parts of Lebanon.

After Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, Nasrallah rose to iconic status both within Lebanon and throughout the Arab world. His messages were beamed on Hezbollah’s own radio and satellite TV station.

In a famous speech marking the Israeli withdrawal, he said: “It (Israel) has a nuclear weapon and the strongest air force in the region, but in truth, it is weaker than a spider’s web.”

As Israel, and later Syria, pulled their armies out of Lebanon, Nasrallah began to steer Hezbollah increasingly into the realm of politics. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, the first after Syria ended its 29-year military presence in Lebanon, Hezbollah made substantial gains and joined the Cabinet for the first time, holding two seats.

Politics and war

In July 2006, after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border attack, Israel launched a monthlong massive air, sea and ground campaign against Lebanon. Nasrallah’s home and offices and much of the group’s infrastructure were destroyed, as well as much of south Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Hezbollah fired around 4,000 rockets into Israel and after 34 days of fighting, a truce took effect and Nasrallah declared a “divine victory” over Israel.

While he was cheered for standing up to the Israeli army, Nasrallah was criticized by many for providing the spark for that war during which more than 1,200 people died in Lebanon — most of them civilians — and 159 in Israel.

Nasrallah later expressed regret — an unprecedented move for him — and said during a televised interview that Hezbollah had not expected “even one percent” that the capture of the Israeli soldiers “would lead to a war of this magnitude.”

“You ask me, if I had known … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not,” he said.

In May 2008, Hezbollah’s reputation suffered a setback when its fighters briefly seized much of west Beirut, turning their guns on local Lebanese foes after the government took measures against the group’s private telecommunications network.

In the years that followed, a U.N.-backed tribunal in the Netherlands sentenced three Hezbollah members in absentia to five concurrent life sentences over the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Hezbollah ignored the tribunal and repeatedly denied its members were involved in the massive suicide bombing along the Beirut corniche that killed Hariri and 21 others, an attack that deeply divided Lebanon.

During the Arab Spring uprisings against autocratic governments, Hezbollah’s close alliance with Syria and Iran opened the group to accusations that it was merely a well-armed tool of Damascus and Tehran.

Hezbollah was also pulled into the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia and in 2016, the Saudi-led, six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council branded Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

But Hezbollah’s anti-Israel campaign remained at its forefront as the group continued to build up its arsenal of tens of thousands of missiles, including precision-guided missiles, as well as drones.

After 2006, the Lebanon-Israel border remained mostly calm until Hamas’ October 2023 deadly incursion into Israel. The next day, Hezbollah began attacking Israeli military posts and drawing Israeli fire in what became near-daily exchanges. Nasrallah said the aim was to ease the tension from the Gaza Strip.

Nasrallah is survived by his wife, Fatima Yassin. He also has three sons Jawad, Mohammed-Mahdi and Mohammed Ali, and a daughter Zeinab, as well as several grandchildren.

Bassem Mroue, The Associated Press