In the beginning he was never alone. Living with eight siblings in East Beirut, it was hard to find silence. Yet he always searched for solace, travelling to neighbouring areas to find religious books to read. In them he found God and the teachings of Shia Islamists. And Israeli attacks on Lebanon were common. All this would shape Hassan Nasrallah, for more than 30 years the leader of Hizbullah, and a sworn enemy of Israel. Quite possibly to the end: on September 28th, the day after Israel struck what it said was the militant group’s “central headquarters” in Beirut, it claimed to have killed him.
Born in 1960, Mr Nasrallah claims to have been an observant Muslim from the age of nine; he admired the teachings of Musa al-Sadr, the founder of Amal, a Shia political party. When civil war broke out in 1975, Mr Nasrallah joined Amal and at just 15 was given responsibility for organising members in his village. A year later he left for a seminary in Najaf, in Iraq, where he met Abbas Musawi, a cleric. They returned to Lebanon in 1978. Mr Nasrallah helped run “awareness-raising” seminars and lectures for Amal. But when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982—which left thousands dead—he left the movement, which he felt was “no longer up to the task” of resisting Israel.
He joined the paramilitary group, co-founded by Musawi, that would become Hizbullah. In 1983 its bombs killed hundreds of American and French soldiers, and it soon became a coherent organisation determined to fight Israel and Western powers in Lebanon. After Musawi was killed by an Israeli strike in 1992, Mr Nasrallah succeeded him as its leader. He blamed Israel for the “blood-soaked carnage” and its “protector” America. 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 has also ruled over the expansion of its military arsenal, with continued help from its sponsor, Iran. In 2006 Hizbullah went to war with Israel in support of Hamas. After pushing the Israeli army to a standstill, Mr Nasrallah claimed a
“strategic, historic victory”. His speech was lapped up across the Middle East. After the assassination in 2020 of Qassem Suleimani, an Iranian general co-ordinating foreign militias, Mr Nasrallah increasingly appeared as his own man. Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th, Mr Nasrallah has tried to avoid all-out war with Israel. But things may be sliding out of his control. On September 17th the pagers of thousands of Hizbullah’s members exploded
; the next day walkie-talkies blew up. At least 37 people were killed. Mr Nasrallah vowed “a reckoning”. Hizbullah fired more than 100 projectiles towards Israel; subsequent Israeli strikes on Lebanon killed more than 700. On September 26th Israel said it was preparing to put boots on the ground in Lebanon. And on September 27th Israeli missiles struck residential buildings in Beirut; Israel insists that Hizbullah’s headquarters were beneath the buildings—and that Mr Nasrallah was among the dead.
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