Israel claims it killed Hezbollah’s long-time leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike on Beirut

Nasrallah’s reported death, if confirmed, could significantly alter the balance of power in the region and potentially spark a wider, bigger war.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on July 25, 2014, during a rare public appearance in Beirut’s southern suburbs. A source close to Lebanon’s Hezbollah group said on September 28 that contact had been lost since the previous evening with Nasrallah, after Israel said it had “eliminated” him in a strike on the group’s southern Beirut bastion. | Photo Credit: ANWAR AMRO/AFP/File Photo

Israeli forces have killed Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the military’s Arabic-speaking spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on September 28, a day after an Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut.

The military said that it carried out a precise airstrike while Hezbollah leadership met at their headquarters in Dahiyeh, south of Beirut. Ali Karki, the commander of Hezbollah’s Southern Front, and additional Hezbollah commanders, were also killed in the attack, the Israeli military said. The Lebanese Health Ministry said that six people were killed and 91 injured in the strikes on September 27, which levelled six apartment buildings.

Israel’s army chief vowed to “reach” anyone who threatens Israeli citizens, after the military said strikes in Beirut the previous day had killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. “This is not the end of our toolbox. The message is simple, anyone who threatens the citizens of Israel—we will know how to reach them,” Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi said in a statement.

Nasrallah has led Hezbollah for more than three decades. There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah. A source close to Hezbollah said on September 28 that contact had been lost since the previous evening with Nasrallah, after Israel said it had “eliminated” him in a strike on the group’s southern Beirut bastion. The source did not confirm whether Nasrallah had been killed.

Escalation of tensions

Israel maintained a heavy barrage of airstrikes against Hezbollah on September 28, as Hezbollah launched dozens of rockets toward Israel.

The Israeli military said it was mobilising additional reserve soldiers as tensions escalated with Lebanon. The military said on the morning of September 28 it was activating three battalions of reserve soldiers, after earlier sending two brigades to northern Israel earlier in the week to train for a possible ground invasion.

On the same morning, the Israeli military carried out several strikes in southern Beirut and eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Hezbollah launched dozens of projectiles across northern and central Israel and the Israel-occupied West Bank.

In Beirut’s southern suburbs, smoke rose and the streets were empty after the area was pummeled overnight by heavy Israeli airstrikes. Shelters set up in the city centre for displaced people were overflowing. Many families slept in public squares and beaches or in their cars. On the roads leading to the mountains above the capital, hundreds of people could be seen making an exodus on foot, holding infants and whatever belongings they could carry.

Smoke rises from Israeli airstrikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs, on September 28. | Photo Credit: HUSSEIN MALLA/AP

It was the biggest blast to hit the Lebanese capital in the past year and appeared likely to push the escalating conflict closer to full-fledged war. At least 720 people have been killed in Lebanon during the week, according to the Health Ministry.

The death toll is likely to rise significantly as teams comb through the rubble of six buildings. Israel launched a series of strikes on other areas of the southern suburbs following the initial blast.

Israel military releases statement

In a statement, the Israeli military said: “The strike was conducted while Hezbollah’s senior chain of command were operating from the headquarters and advancing terrorist activities against the citizens of the State of Israel.”

“During Hassan Nasrallah’s 32-year reign as the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, he was responsible for the murder of many Israeli civilians and soldiers, and the planning and execution of thousands of terrorist activities,” the statement said. “He was responsible for directing and executing terrorist attacks around the world in which civilians of various nationalities were murdered. Nasrallah was the central decision-maker and the strategic leader of the organisation.”

Hezbollah began firing into Israel one day after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza. Israel has in recent days shifted the focus of its operation from Gaza to Lebanon, where heavy bombing has killed more than 700 people and displaced around 1,18,000.

Who was Hassan Nasrallah?

Among supporters, Nasrallah was lauded for standing up to Israel and defying the United States. To enemies, he was head of a terrorist organisation and a proxy for Iran’s Shi’ite Islamist theocracy in its tussle for influence in West Asia. His regional influence was 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”.

“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.

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 had not given a broadcast address since then.

Israel has meanwhile 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.

Recognised even by his enemies as a skilled orator, Nasrallah’s speeches were followed by friend and foe alike. Wearing the black turban of a sayyed, or a descendant 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 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 Guards 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 from southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation.

‘Divine Victory’

Conflict with Israel 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 Shi’ite Iran and U.S.-allied Sunni Arab monarchies in the Gulf.

While Nasrallah painted Hezbollah’s engagement in Syria—where it fought in support of President Bashar al-Assad during the civil war—as a campaign against jehadists, 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, hoarding Iranian rockets in a carefully measured contest of threat and counter threat.

The Gaza war, ignited by the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, prompted 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 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.

Nasrallah grew up in Beirut’s impoverished Karantina district. His family hail from Bazouriyeh, a village in Lebanon’s predominantly Shi’ite south which today forms Hezbollah’s political heartland. He was part of a generation of young Lebanese Shi’ites 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’s occupying army. His teenage son, Hadi, died in battle in 1997, a loss that gave him legitimacy among his core Shi’ite constituency in Lebanon.

Powerful enemies

He 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 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 has 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 Shi’ite group to take over half the capital Beirut.

He strongly denied any Hezbollah involvement in the 2005 assassination of former 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.

(with inputs from agencies)