Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah
Editor’s note (September 28th): This article was updated after Hizbullah confirmed Mr Nasrallah’s death.
IN THE BEGINNING he was never alone. In the tight, winding quarters of al-Sharshabouk, a neighbourhood in East Beirut mostly inhabited by refugees and squatters, it was hard to find silence. At home he was surrounded by eight younger siblings. Yet he always searched for solace, travelling to neighbouring areas to find religious books to read. It was in these pages that he found God, and read the teachings of Shia Islamists. And when he was young, Israeli attacks on Lebanon, particularly in the south, were common. These things would shape Hassan Nasrallah—bringing him to the leadership of Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia backed by Iran, and enduring hostility to Israel.
Enduring to the end. On September 27th Israeli fighter-jets bombed the Dahiyeh neighbourhood of Beirut, destroying residential buildings, in a raid Israel says was aimed at Hizbullah’s “central headquarters”. On September 28th Israel claimed Mr Nasrallah was among the many dead. Hizbullah later confirmed that he had perished.
He was born in 1960. His father, a fruit and vegetable salesman, hailed from Bazouriyeh, a small Shia village in southern Lebanon. Mr Nasrallah said he was an observant Muslim from the age of nine; he admired the teachings of Musa al-Sadr, an Iranian-Lebanese cleric revered by Lebanon’s Shias and the founder of Amal, a Shia political party.
When civil war broke out in 1975, Mr Nasrallah’s family returned to Bazouriyeh. There he joined Amal, and at just 15 was given responsibility for helping to organise members in his village. But a year later he left for Najaf, a city in Iraq, to study in a seminary. There he met Abbas Musawi, a cleric who became his mentor and friend. It was in Najaf, too, that Mr Nasrallah first met Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the future leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. A star-struck Mr Nasrallah later recalled that “time and space no longer existed” in Khomeini’s company.
During a crackdown on Shia Islamists in Iraq, Mr Nasrallah and Musawi together returned to Lebanon in 1978, around the time when Israel invaded the south of the country. Musawi established a religious school for displaced students in Baalbek, in the Bekaa valley in eastern Lebanon. Mr Nasrallah completed his education there, and helped run “awareness-raising” seminars and lectures for Amal. But when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Mr Nasrallah decided to leave the movement, which he felt was “no longer up to the task” of resisting Israel. The invasion left around 20,000 dead, and ended with the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which thousands of Palestinian refugees were killed by Christian militias as Israeli forces looked the other way.
He joined a paramilitary group, co-founded by Musawi, which would soon become Hizbullah. Iran helped train young Shia militants in southern Lebanon. By 1985, Hizbullah was a coherent organisation with clear aims: in an open letter it vowed to fight Israel and Western powers in Lebanon. (In 1983 it had already killed more than 200 American soldiers and 58 French paratroopers in twin attacks in Beirut.)
After Musawi was killed by an Israeli missile strike in 1992, Mr Nasrallah succeeded him as its leader. He blamed Israel for the “blood-soaked carnage” and accused its “protector”, America, of being “responsible for all Israel’s massacres”. Such anti-Israeli and anti-Western rhetoric became common in his speeches.
For a long while his charisma and strong organisational skills won him support in Lebanon. Under his leadership, Hizbullah developed a large welfare network in the country, which includes health centres and schools. Mr Nasrallah presided over the party when it won eight seats in parliamentary elections in 1992 for the first time—and over its political growth since: today the pro-Hizbullah bloc has 62 of the 128 seats in Lebanon’s parliament.
He also ruled the group at a time when it significantly expanded its military arsenal, with continued help from Iran: Hizbullah has hundreds of Fateh 110 ballistic missiles, thought to have a range of 260km. Mr Nasrallah earned clout for Hizbullah’s military wins, including Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.
In 2006 Hizbullah went to war with Israel. After pushing the Israeli army to a standstill, Mr Nasrallah claimed a “strategic, historic victory”. His speech was lapped up across the Middle East. Even Israelis tuned in. A Lebanese woman requested the abaya he wore while giving it, and later travelled around the country showing it to adoring fans, who treated it like a holy relic. After the assassination in 2020 of Qassem Suleimani, an Iranian general who co-ordinated foreign militias backed by the Islamic republic, Mr Nasrallah increasingly appeared as his own man. He took on a more powerful role in Iran’s network of allied militias. Hizbullah played a crucial role in propping up Bashar al-Assad’s bloody regime in Syria, and it provides training and guidance to other Iranian-backed militias.
After Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th last year, Mr Nasrallah tried to avoid all-out war with Israel, mostly firing projectiles at depopulated parts of northern Israel. But things slipped out of his control. On September 17th the pagers of thousands of Hizbullah’s members exploded more or less simultaneously; the next day walkie-talkies blew up. At least 37 people were killed. Mr Nasrallah blamed Israel, and vowed “a reckoning”. Hizbullah fired more than 100 projectiles towards Israel; subsequent Israeli strikes on Lebanon killed more than 700. And on September 27th the bombs fell on Dahiyeh.■
Correction (September 30th): In an earlier version of this article, we incorrectly said that in 2006 Hizbullah went to war with Israel in support of Hamas. Sorry. We have also amended it to mention Hizbullah’s role in Syria.
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