Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the longstanding leader of Hezbollah, has been martyred in a significant Israeli airstrike on Beirut, as confirmed by the Lebanon-based group. Earlier in the day, the Israeli military had claimed responsibility for his assassination.
Nasrallah, who rose to prominence following the war with Israel in 2006, was regarded as a hero not only in Lebanon but also across the region, known for his staunch resistance against Israeli oppression. However, his reputation shifted after Hezbollah intervened in Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad against the uprising, leading to increased criticism.
Born in 1960, Nasrallah’s early years in East Beirut are steeped in political narrative. As one of nine siblings, he exhibited piety from a young age, often walking to the city center to seek out second-hand books on Islam. Nasrallah has recounted how he spent much of his childhood gazing at a portrait of the Shia scholar Musa al-Sadr, a reflection of his future engagement in politics and dedication to the Shia community in Lebanon.
In 1974, Sadr founded an organisation – the Movement of the Deprived – that became the ideological kernel for the well-known Lebanese party and Hezbollah rival, Amal. In the 1980s, Amal mined support from middle-class Shia who had grown frustrated with the sect‘s historic marginalisation in Lebanon, to grow into a powerful political movement. Besides commandeering an anti-establishment message, Amal also provided stable income to many Shia families, unfurling a complex system of patronage across Lebanon‘s south.
After the outbreak of civil war between Lebanon‘s Christian Maronites and Muslims, Nasrallah joined Amal’s movement and fought with its militia. But as the conflict progressed, Amal adopted a staunchly unsympathetic stance towards the presence of Palestinian militias in Lebanon.
Disturbed by this stance, Nasrallah split from Amal in 1982, shortly after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, and formed a new group with Iranian support that would later become Hezbollah. By 1985, Hezbollah had crystallised its own worldview in a founding document, which addressed the “downtrodden of Lebanon“ and named the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran as its one true leader.
Throughout the civil war, Hezbollah and Amal evolved in bitter tandem, often jostling with each other for support among Lebanon‘s Shia constituents. By the 1990s, after numerous bloody clashes and with the civil war over, Hezbollah had largely trumped Amal for prominence among Lebanon‘s Shia supporters. Nasrallah became the group‘s third secretary-general in 1992, after his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, was killed by Israeli missiles.
Since early in his career, Nasrallah‘s speeches helped cement his persona as a wise, humble figure, deeply invested in the lives of everyday people – a leader who shunned formal Arabic in favour of the dialect spoken on the street, and who reportedly preferred to sleep, every night, on a simple foam mattress on the ground.
In the book The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication, scholar and co-author Dina Matar describes how Nasrallah‘s words have fused political claims and religious imagery, creating speeches with high emotional voltage that transformed Nasrallah into “the very embodiment of the group”.
Nasrallah’s charisma was far-reaching; his elegies on the history of oppression in the Middle East have made him an influential figure across sects and nations. That was helped by Hezbollah‘s sprawling media apparatus, which makes use of TV, print news and even musical theatre shows to spread its message.
When Nasrallah took on the position of secretary-general, he was charged with easing Hezbollah into the melee of Lebanon’s post-war political scene. Hezbollah went from working outside the official enclosure of state politics to becoming a national party asking for every citizen’s support by participating in democratic elections.
Presiding over this shift was Nasrallah, who put Hezbollah on the ballot for the first time in 1992 and appealed to the masses in rousing speeches. As he told Al Jazeera in 2006, “We, Shia and Sunnis, are fighting together against Israel,“ adding that he did not fear “any sedition, neither between Muslims and Christians, nor between Shia and Sunnis in Lebanon”.
Hezbollah faced one of its biggest challenges after the group opened up a front against Israel to help relieve pressure on its ally Hamas in Gaza, in October 2023. The group suffered losses after months of cross-border fighting and Israeli attacks that targeted significant figures in the movement. But Nasrallah remained defiant.
While Nasrallah has been described as the “personification of Hezbollah”, the group he built over more than three decades is highly organised and remains determined to continue standing up to Israel.
Hezbollah is unlikely to crumble under the weight of Nasrallah’s assassination, but in his death, the group has lost a leader who was charismatic and whose influence extended far beyond Lebanon. The group will now need to select a new leader, who in turn will need to decide what direction to take Hezbollah in. Whatever the group decides will affect more than Hezbollah: ripples will be felt across Lebanon and the wider region.
Source: Shafaqna India