Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, has died aged 64 in an Israeli bomb attack on the movement’s HQ in Dahiyeh, Beirut. His death came after 11 months of conflict between his fighters, based in Lebanon, and Israel.
On 7 October last year Hamas militants from Gaza entered Israel and killed more than 1,200 people. The next day Nasrallah ordered cross-border bombardments on Israel, and a limited conflict of attrition followed. This month Israel dramatically escalated matters by assassinating Hezbollah leaders, infiltrating the group’s security apparatus, hitting tower blocks and sabotaging pagers, walkie-talkies and arms silos, while rebuffing US calls for a ceasefire.
Over three decades Nasrallah, politically astute and often ruthless, transformed his Shia Muslim community, the largest yet most marginalised of Lebanon’s 18 sects – Muslim, Christian and Druze – into Beirut’s powerbrokers. His “party of God” also grew from a local militia into a disciplined body active elsewhere in the region.
Adored by supporters, Nasrallah was essential to Hezbollah’s success. His state-within-a-state runs schools, clinics, scout troops, support for farming, an alternative banking system, armed checkpoints, prisons, radio and TV stations and telecom networks.
Central to Hezbollah’s ethos is muqawama – resistance to Israel and its allies.
Hezbollah claimed credit when in 2000 Israel ended its 18-year-long occupation of southern Lebanon. The militia armed Palestinian factions during the second intifada of 2000-05 (the first having come in 1987-93); it trained Houthi rebels in Yemen and Shia factions in Iraq and Bahrain.
Nasrallah’s fighters became the most powerful non-state military in the Middle East. Hezbollah’s estimated 60,000 troops and 150,000 Iranian-supplied rockets eclipsed Lebanon’s national army.
In July 2006 Hezbollah fought a month-long war with Israel, with more than 1,100 dead on the Lebanese side, and more than 160 Israelis killed. Once hostile Sunnis hailed Nasrallah as the restorer of Arab pride. Their mood changed when in 2012 his forces joined President Bashar al-Assad and Iran in an internal Syrian war that killed half a million mostly Sunni civilians.
In October 2019 many Shia joined protests against him after gross mismanagement led Lebanon to the brink of bankruptcy. Foes blamed Nasrallah for overseeing the same corrupt political system he had once condemned.
Despite championing the Palestinian cause, Hezbollah did little to ease insufferable conditions for Palestinians in Lebanon. Then in August 2020, there was an explosion caused by 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate in a part of Beirut harbour under Hezbollah control.
The blast killed 218, rendered 300,000 people homeless, and caused billions in damage, leading demonstrators to hang Nasrallah in effigy.
Hezbollah had a turbulent role in other aspects of Lebanon’s domestic affairs. It was the only civil war militia that had been allowed to keep its weapons after fighting ended in 1990. Nasrallah became Hezbollah secretary general in February 1992, the day after Israel assassinated his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi.
He was re-elected in 1993 and repeatedly thereafter. Nasrallah rejected UN calls to disarm after Israel withdrew in 2000 and prevented Lebanon’s army from guarding the southern border.
In 2005 a car bomb in Beirut killed Lebanon’s former premier, Rafik Hariri. UN investigators named Hezbollah and Syria as likely culprits. Two months later massive “cedar revolution” protests forced Syrian troops out of Lebanon after 29 years of domination.
Yet Nasrallah choreographed a pro-Syrian alliance with Michel Aoun, a Christian former renegade general newly returned from exile in France. Hezbollah scored well in June polls, and two members joined the cabinet for the first time.
When Lebanon’s pro-western prime minister, Fouad Siniora, rejected Nasrallah’s demand for a blocking veto, Hezbollah shut down parliament for 18 months. In May 2008 Hezbollah gunmen crushed opponents in Beirut, Sidon, Tripoli and Aley – contradicting Nasrallah’s promise never to attack fellow citizens. Still, many Lebanese adored him for defying Israel and affirming their dignity.
Others resented his outsized influence. They said he was an Iranian proxy who killed enemies, including Shia intellectuals, brought starvation to besieged Syrian towns, and recreated the schisms of Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war. That conflict, and especially the Israeli invasion and occupation of 1982, inspired the young cleric to choose a political path.
However, the greatest impetus was Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. As the Lebanese analyst Saleh el-Machnouk put it, by 2020 Lebanon had become a “mafia-militia nexus [where] Iran uses Hezbollah as a subcontractor”.
Born in Bourj Hammoud, then a mainly Christian Armenian town, Hassan was the eldest of nine children of Mahdiyya Safi al-Din and Abdul Karim Nasrallah, a grocer. Hassan devoured Islamic texts while his siblings played football. When war erupted in 1975, the family fled to their ancestral village of Bazourieh, near Tyre. Hassan joined Amal (“hope”), the mostly Shia movement that opposed traditional elites, whether Shia, Sunni or Christian.
In 1976 the penniless 16-year-old left for the famous Iraqi Shia seminary in Najaf. Al-Musawi, a fellow Lebanese exile, became his mentor. After Iraq expelled Lebanese students in 1978, Nasrallah studied with Al-Musawi in Baalbek, in the Beqaa Valley, and joined Amal’s politburo.
By 1982 younger Shias such as Nasrallah were deserting Amal for Khomeini’s camp.
Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards based in Lebanon turned these radicals into Hezbollah. Its affiliates conducted suicide attacks in 1983 that killed more than 300 US and French peacekeeping soldiers. They later fought Amal and kidnapped westerners such as Terry Waite for the benefit of Iran.
In 1989 Nasrallah moved to Iran to study at the seminary in Qom. Back in Lebanon, in 1991 he grudgingly accepted the Syrian-backed Taif power-sharing accord that formally ended the civil war. A month after he became secretary general of Hezbollah, it was accused of killing 29 people at the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires; in 1994 another assault on an Argentinian Jewish communal centre claimed 85 lives.
Hassan never stood for election; instead, the speaker of parliament and former rival, the Amal leader Nabih Berri, conveyed his views to the world. Nasrallah admitted Tehran was Hezbollah’s chief sponsor. Nonetheless, foreign intelligence claimed that the party benefited from narcotics traffic, an illicit diamond trade and millions more from expatriate tycoons.
Nasrallah cemented his image as a consensual national figure with Maronite Christian clergymen. He promised not to impose theocratic rule on a religiously diverse and often secular public and arranged for Hezbollah to contest elections between 1992 and 2022.
He displayed a dignified response when his son, Mohammed Hadi, died fighting Israelis in September 1997. Nasrallah helped Lebanon’s national army crush a revolt by Sobhi Tufaili, an anti-Iranian populist and first secretary general of Hezbollah, four months later. He tutored Al-Assad before the latter became Syria’s president in 2000. He also returned from Israel 29 Hezbollah captives and 400 Palestinian prisoners in 2004.
Often, however, the moderate facade would slip. Nasrallah praised Holocaust deniers and in 2001 reportedly called Jews “miserly and cowardly”.
In 2008 Nasrallah’s de facto deputy, Imad Mughniyeh, was blown up in Damascus. After that the leader avoided public appearances, and coordinated regional strategy with Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s external operations chief, himself killed by a US drone strike in 2020.
After another two-year shutdown of parliament, Hezbollah ensured that it elected Aoun as president in late October 2016. Following Lebanon’s economic meltdown, however, Nasrallah’s coalition lost its majority in assembly elections in 2022. That same year Hezbollah agreed a maritime and gas field demarcation agreement with Israel. But showing solidarity with Hamas after 7 October, and so displacing 65,000 Israelis in the north of the country, led to his death.
Nasrallah’s wife, Fatima Yassin, and their children Jawad, Ali and Mahdi, survive him; his daughter Zeinab died in the same blast as him.