Hassan Nasrallah, the iconic leader of Hezbollah who captivated many in the Arab world with his charismatic oratory, was killed on Friday in an Israeli attack on Beirut. At the apex of his career, the cleric was so popular that shops sold DVDs of his speeches, and many Lebanese used lines from them as ringtones. But he was also loathed or feared by rivals for the formidable power he wielded, both politically and militarily, well beyond Lebanon’s borders. Nasrallah’s death will be a political earthquake for Hezbollah, a Shiite movement that he built from clandestine terrorist cells thirty-two years ago into a powerful political party, network of social services, and the most heavily armed non-state militia in the world today. It could have a rippling impact across the volatile Middle East, with implications for the United States, too. The Biden Administration, which had already sent more troops in response to increasing violence between Israel and Hezbollah, moved quickly to assess the safety of U.S. military personnel and diplomats in the region.
The bombings, which killed other top Hezbollah officials, and civilians, in the Lebanese capital, “crossed the threshold of all-out war” and sought “to deliver a mortal blow,” Firas Maksad, a Lebanese American who is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, told me. Hezbollah is “reeling” from the wave of Israeli military and intelligence operations conducted in the past two weeks, he added. Its military wing has been decapitated in the targeted assassinations of top commanders. Israel has also carried out extensive air strikes on what it has said were weapons caches and other military infrastructure, and has also been blamed for sabotage of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah fighters and followers that injured thousands.
Nasrallah, who often invoked both God and guns with a distinctive lisp, wore a black turban signifying his descent from the Prophet Muhammad. He had dreamt from an early age about leading Lebanon’s Shiites, he told me, in 2006. “When I was ten or eleven, my grandmother had a scarf,” Nasrallah said. “It was black, but a long one. I used to wrap it around my head.” Then he would tell his family, “I’m a cleric, you need to pray behind me.” He mobilized allies well beyond Lebanon. After the U.S. assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general and regional strategist, in 2020, Nasrallah became even more pivotal to the so-called Axis of Resistance under Iran’s tutelage.
Hezbollah emerged to fight Israel during its second invasion of Lebanon, in 1982, when Nasrallah was just twenty-two years old. “We noticed what happened in Palestine, in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in the Golan, in the Sinai,” Nasrallah told me. “We reached a conclusion that we cannot rely on the Arab League states, nor on the United Nations.” He went on, “The only way that we have is to take up arms and fight the occupation forces.”
Nasrallah’s death will weaken but not eliminate the movement—or the threat it poses to Israel. The C.I.A estimated earlier this year that Hezbollah had up to fifty thousand armed combatants, full- or part-time. Many have battlefield experience from fighting in Syria’s civil war. (Hezbollah sought to bolster the regime of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, one of Iran’s most important Arab allies.) And it still has a vast arsenal of missiles and rockets. Hezbollah is an “exponentially more capable military organization” than it was when Israel killed Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, in 1992, Maksad said. It is possible that Hezbollah’s militia may soon respond by fighting “as if this war had no limit, no ceiling and no redlines.”
The audacious attack, during which more than eighty bombs were dropped on residential buildings that sit atop the group’s underground headquarters, was ordered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from New York, before delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly. Hezbollah, he said, angrily, is a “quintessential terror organization” with tentacles worldwide. “It’s murdered the citizens of many countries represented in this room,” he said. He described Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks into Israel, which it undertook in solidarity with Hamas during the year-long war in Gaza, as “intolerable.” More than sixty thousand Israelis have fled northern Israel as a result, emptying out entire towns. “I’ve come here today to say enough is enough,” he told the assembly. Shortly thereafter, the bombs were unleashed. Israel rarely acknowledges its military operations, but this time the Prime Minister’s office released a picture of Netanyahu on the phone communicating the order.
The Israeli operation made a mockery of U.S. diplomacy. Just two days earlier, the Biden Administration—alongside allies in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia—had announced a plan for a twenty-one-day ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel. In a late-night briefing on Wednesday, a senior U.S. official claimed that they had worked “tirelessly” with Israel and Lebanon on the terms. (The Lebanese government has often acted as an interlocutor with Hezbollah, which holds cabinet posts and parliamentary seats in Lebanon but is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.) Just hours before the Israeli strike, John Kirby, the strategic coördinator for the National Security Council, confirmed that the U.S. believed it had buy-in from Israel. Netanyahu stiffed U.S. diplomats—again. In May, President Biden rolled out a three-phase ceasefire plan for Gaza that his Administration said was based on Israeli demands and was supported by Netanyahu. It has gone nowhere in four months.
