Hezbollah confirms longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah killed in Israeli strike in Lebanon
- Hassan Nasrallah helped found the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and had led it for three decades.
- He was killed in a devastating strike Friday evening in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a stronghold of the Iranian-backed group.
The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah confirmed Saturday that its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had been killed in an Israeli air raid the evening before, even as Israel pressed ahead with a new round of punishing airstrikes and the region appeared to reel closer to all-out war.
The announcement came hours after Israel’s military declared that it had killed the 64-year-old Nasrallah, who helped found Hezbollah and had led the Iranian-backed group for three decades, in a devastating strike Friday evening in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.
Overnight and into Saturday, Israeli warplanes continued to pummel Hezbollah-dominated neighborhoods on the city’s southern outskirts, leaving the Lebanese capital shrouded in choking smoke and lending apocalyptic air to the open-air encampments that sprang up overnight.
Thousands who fled devastated areas spent the night outdoors, huddling where they could in parks, squares and on walkways near the seafront promenade.
Israel says the militant group’s headquarters is located under residential buildings in Beirut suburb, which were hit.
The death of Nasrallah represents the most staggering blow yet dealt to the Iranian-backed group by Israel, which over a span of nearly two weeks turned a low-level campaign of retaliatory cross-border strikes into an all-out effort to decapitate the group.
The Israeli military initially disclosed the death in a terse statement posted on social media.
“Hassan Nasrallah will no longer be able to terrorize the world,” it declared.
Later, it posted a graphic depicting 11 high-ranking members of Hezbollah’s military chain of command. Ten had the word “eliminated” beside their picture, including Nasrallah.
Hezbollah responded with seeming defiance, sending a heavy barrage of rockets across the border into Israel. The Israeli military reported no casualties from what it said were 40 projectiles fired at the country’s north.
In Beirut, the wave of Israeli strikes caused widespread panic, with thousands of people trudging with backpacks, duffel bags, roller suitcases and pet cages as they fled their homes in the the densely populated suburb of Dahieh and the nearby Burj al Barajneh refugee camp.
Khaled Mustafa, a 45-year-old Syrian tailor from Aleppo who lived with his family for the last nine years in Haret Hreik, a neighborhood with many Hezbollah administrative offices, sat cross-legged in the shade of a palm tree on a sidewalk overlooking the Mediterranean. After a large Israeli airstrike on the Dahieh on Friday evening, he left his apartment without taking any of his belongings.
“I sent my family back to Syria last night. Eight people. I’m alone here,” Mustafa said. Though he did not feel safe returning to Syria, a country embroiled in a civil war since 2011, it was still better than being in Dahieh, he said.
“Where can I go? What can I do? Sit on the streets here with no food, no water? Is this good?”
Hezbollah posted on its official social media channels a flier with phone numbers that could facilitate transportation to Syria for those wanting to leave Lebanon.
A drive through Dahieh revealed a ghost town, with a few cars and scooters racing through abandoned thoroughfares, pausing at columns of smoke rising from the bowels of attack sites before they sped off.
Even Hezbollah security officials, normally a constant presence on the streets here, were scarce, with only a few stragglers posted near stricken areas. Checkpoints normally manned by Lebanese army soldiers stood empty.
At the site of the wrecked residential compound that had overlaid the targeted underground headquarters, black smoke still belched from the basement level.
“After this, how can we feel anything?” asked a 26-year-old Hezbollah security man who identified himself only as Ziyad.
His companion Zain, another 26-year-old, appeared almost tearful, saying: “The future is gone.”
According to the Lebanese health ministry, Friday’s strike killed six people and injured more than 90 others. The ministry said in an update on Saturday that Dahieh hospitals were to be evacuated. It added that medical facilities in other parts of the city would suspend non-urgent cases until the end of next week to deal with the flood of casualties.
Hezbollah, a paramilitary faction and political party, has long been viewed as Israel’s top regional adversary. The group began a campaign of cross-border attacks almost immediately after the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel last Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people and seizing around 250 hostages.
Over the last 11 months, parallel to the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, Israel and Hezbollah engaged in an escalating series of strikes, mainly confined to the frontier region and always falling short of full-scale conflict.
On both sides of the border, tens of thousands fled their homes — some 90,000 Lebanese were displaced from the country’s south, and about 60,000 were driven from northern Israeli communities.
But Israel’s calculation changed in recent weeks, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying his government would make the ability of northern residents to return home a formal war objective. In the days following, Israel staged a two-day wave of detonations with booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, followed by intensive airstrikes and targeted pursuit of the group’s top leadership.
Here’s a look at the so-called Axis of Resistance, an Iran-backed coalition including Hezbollah, Hamas and other militant groups devoted to destroying Israel.
Analysts said Nasrallah’s death represents a body blow to Hezbollah, but not a fatal one — particularly if Iran continues to train, supply and arm it.
“The root of the organization remains, in the sense that there is still the narrative of the belief in the cause,” said Mohamad Hage Ali, a Hezbollah expert at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “I fail to see how the core organization would just go away and sit at home after this.”
Hezbollah, he said, can “continue to cause harm to the Israelis in the next phase,” especially in the event of a ground incursion. Earlier this week, the Israeli military sent two brigades to the country’s north to train for such a potential scenario, and said additional reservists have been mobilized.
Nasrallah was not the only top Hezbollah leader to die in Friday’s strike. Ali Karki, the commander of Hezbollah’s Southern Front and other commanders were also killed, the Israeli military said.
Iran’s official IRNA news agency said Saturday that Abbas Nilforushan, a prominent general in its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, had been killed as well.
On Saturday, before Nasrallah’s death was confirmed by Hezbollah, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei castigated Israel for “the massacre of the defenseless people of Lebanon.”
Denouncing the “Zionist entity” — a reference to Israel — the Iranian leader said that what he called the resistance, a coalition of Iranian regional proxies, would prevail. That encompasses forces including Hezbollah, the Palestinian groups Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthi rebels in Yemen, various Syrian and Iraqi militias, and the Syrian government.
Hamas, still locked in combat with Israel in Gaza, sent condolences. It said the deaths left it and allied groups “more valiant, stronger, and more determined to continue the confrontation.”
Bulos reported from Beirut, King from Washington.
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