Hassan Nasrallah, Who Led Hezbollah for Decades, Killed at 64

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Hezbollah organization in Lebanon for more than three decades, building it into a domestic political force and a potent regional military power with ballistic missiles that could threaten Tel Aviv, was killed on Friday in heavy Israeli airstrikes near Beirut. He was 64.

Both Hezbollah and Israel announced his death on Saturday. Israeli officials had said that Mr. Nasrallah was the target of the attack, which rocked the area known as the Dahiya, a dense urban area south of Beirut, with such violent force that residents fled in fear as a giant mushroom cloud rose over the city.

For almost two decades, since Hezbollah fought a monthlong war against Israel in 2006, Mr. Nasrallah had largely avoided public appearances and eschewed using a telephone out of concern that he would be assassinated.

In recent weeks, Israel had carried out repeated airstrikes in the same area to kill other top Hezbollah commanders, including some founding members who had been with the organization since it was established in the early 1980s to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

Mr. Nasrallah took over the group in 1992, at 32, after an Israeli rocket killed his predecessor. Over the years, his black beard turned white beneath the black turban that marked him as a revered Shiite Muslim cleric and a sayyid, a man who can trace his ancestry back to the Prophet Muhammad.

Mr. Nasrallah developed a force of thousands of grass-roots fighters — schoolteachers and butchers and truck drivers — and used religion to inspire them to fight until death, analysts say, telling them they would have a guaranteed spot in heaven.

As the head of the strongest militia that Iran helped build in the region — and one of the most heavily armed nonstate forces in the world — Mr. Nasrallah extended the group’s reach well beyond Lebanon. Hezbollah fighters were instrumental in shoring up the government of another ally, President Bashar al-Assad, next door in Syria when it was threatened by a popular uprising that started in 2011. Designated a terrorist organization by the United States, Hezbollah has helped to train Hamas fighters, as well as militias in Iraq and Yemen.

In Lebanon, Mr. Nasrallah enjoyed tremendous devotion from Hezbollah’s Shiite Muslim base, who saw in him a charismatic religious and political leader and military strategist who had dedicated his life to “resistance,” or the fight against Israel.

For the Israelis, however, he was a hated terrorist who represented a perpetual threat on their northern border, and over the years, he displayed a ruthlessness in pursuing his goals.

Mr. Nasrallah played a peripheral role in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 U.S. servicemen; ordered his fighters to fire on fellow Lebanese in Beirut, the capital, in a dispute with the government in 2008; and backed the Syrian government in its vicious civil war in 2011, deploying his militia against fellow Muslims.

But he also garnered a grudging respect from Israel’s military and security services, who followed his speeches closely for indications of what Hezbollah might do next.

It was the central theme of in his speeches and infrequent interviews. “We face a plan by the United States and the Zionists to control the region, to redraw the political map of the region!” Mr. Nasrallah, the party’s secretary general, thundered in a speech in the months before the United States invaded Iraq in early 2003. “We should realize the extent of the dangerous and satanic goals these people have.”

He was known, according to Arab tradition, as Abu Hadi or father of Hadi. His eldest son, Hadi, was 18 when he died in September 1997 in a firefight with the Israelis. The moniker was a reminder of Mr. Nasrallah’s personal credibility and commitment to the fight. He is believed to be survived by his wife and four other children, including one daughter.

“He is sort of the physical embodiment of this cause. He sacrificed his son, his whole life,” said Amal Saad, a Hezbollah expert and lecturer in political science and international relations at Cardiff University. “People see him as this heroic, almost mythical figure who embodies all the attributes of justice and liberation.”

Yoel Guzansky, who served on Israel’s National Security Council and is now a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, described Mr. Nasrallah as both “a horrific killer” and “very intelligent.”

“He’s a strategist,” Mr. Guzansky said, before Mr. Nasrallah’s death was announced, adding that he had a deep understanding of Israeli politics that he used to try to sway the Israeli public to pressure their government. “He’s a master in what he’s doing.”

In his broadcasts, Mr. Nasrallah always appeared tranquil, assured, sincere and well informed, in command of both the facts and the situation, utterly dedicated to his cause and to his men. He was aloof yet tried to lend his secretive, heavily armed organization an air of transparency by sharing battlefield details.

He was known to have read the autobiographies of Israel’s prime ministers. He had long called for the liberation of Jerusalem and referred to Israel as “the Zionist entity,” maintaining that all Jewish immigrants should return to their countries of origin and that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians.

In the hierarchical rankings of Shiite Muslim clergy, Mr. Nasrallah was a rather ordinary hojatolislam, one step below an ayatollah, and far below a mujtahid, or “source of emulation,” to be followed as a guide. He was believed to live modestly and rarely socialized outside Hezbollah’s ruling circles.

Mr. Nasrallah was one of the Arab world’s most distinctive orators, with a robust command of classical Arabic that he spiced with common Lebanese phrases. He laced his speeches with references to restoring lost Arab virility, a message that resonated across a region long suffering from a sense of impotence in the face of Israel and its powerful Western backers.

He came across as less dour than most Shiite clerics, partly because of his roly-poly figure, a slight lisp and a propensity to crack jokes. He never pushed hard-line Islamic rules, like veils for women in the neighborhoods that Hezbollah controls. Analysts attributed that to his exposure in his youth to many of Lebanon’s 17 religious sects and his desire not to isolate Lebanese outside of Hezbollah’s religious Shiite base.

He could be by turns avuncular and menacing.

Walid Jumblatt, the chieftain of the Druse sect and at times an outspoken critic of Mr. Nasrallah, once said he found the combination unsettling. “Sometimes the eyes of people betray them,” he said. “When he’s calm, he’s laughing. He’s very nice. But when he’s a little bit squeezed, he looks at you in the eyes fiercely with fiery eyes.”

The state within a state that Mr. Nasrallah helped to build with Iranian and expatriate financing as Lebanon struggled to emerge from a long civil war that ended in 1990 included hospitals, schools and other social services. In a country where the government struggled to keep the lights on and to collect the garbage, Hezbollah’s ability to organize accounted for a great deal of its efficacy and helped build its popularity.

In 2000, he gained new respect in Lebanon and beyond after years of guerrilla warfare forced the Israeli military to withdraw from a strip of southern Lebanon that it had controlled since it invaded the country in 1982.

In 2005, Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a huge suicide truck bomb in downtown Beirut. An international tribunal later indicted four members of Hezbollah, although ultimately only one was convicted in absentia. The killing was believed to have been organized by the Syrian government, which had been determined to thwart Mr. Hariri’s attempts to loosen the grip of Syria’s security forces on the country. Mr. Nasrallah warned Lebanese against cooperating with the tribunal.

The 2006 war, which Hezbollah set off by capturing two Israeli soldiers during a cross-border raid, raged for 34 days and caused widespread destruction and more than 1,100 deaths in Lebanon and 150 in Israel, but ended up bolstering Hezbollah’s regional standing.

The war ended with both sides declaring victory, and Hezbollah was lauded across the Arab world for fighting Israel head on and not losing. After the war, fans in Cairo, Damascus and other Arab capitals publicly displayed his photograph, and Mr. Nasrallah apologized to the Lebanese, saying that he would have avoided the war if he had known how destructive it would be. It was a rare statement of contrition for an Arab leader.

The war ended with a United Nations Security Council resolution that called for Hezbollah to disarm and for only a United Nations force and the Lebanese Army to deploy in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah rejected both demands, arguing that its arms were necessary to defend Lebanon against Israel. Critics called that stance a pretext for Hezbollah to keep the weapons that gave the group an outsize role in Lebanese politics.

In 2008, the Lebanese government moved to dismantle Hezbollah’s private communications network, a move that Mr. Nasrallah called a declaration of war on the group. Hezbollah fighters stormed West Beirut, routing fighters that backed the government in deadly street battles. Hezbollah’s turning its guns on other Lebanese was seen as a betrayal by the group’s critics and taken as proof that its purpose was not solely to fight Israel.

In sending fighters to defend Mr. Assad, a fellow ally of Iran, Mr. Nasrallah framed the conflict as part of the fight against Israel, even once claiming that “the road to Jerusalem” ran through Aleppo, a Syrian city 180 miles in the other direction. Arab critics blasted Hezbollah for fighting and imposing painful sieges on fellow Muslims while keeping Lebanon’s border with Israel calm.

Mr. Nasrallah initially tried to keep himself above Lebanon’s messy domestic politics, but that proved impossible as members of his party accepted cabinet positions and won more and more seats in Parliament. His standing took another blow in Lebanon in 2019, when protesters took to the streets to decry the country’s notoriously corrupt ruling class amid a painful economic collapse. Some demonstrators hung effigies of Mr. Nasrallah alongside those of other political figures, considering him part of the group whose selfish policies had ruined the country.

After a large stockpile of ammonium nitrate stored in a hangar in the port of Beirut blew up in August 2020, killing more than 120 people and damaging nearby neighborhoods, Mr. Nasrallah worked with Lebanon’s politicians to freeze the official investigation as the inquiry focused on some of Hezbollah’s political allies. The inquiry was never completed.

Born in 1960 in Beirut, Mr. Nasrallah grew up in a mixed neighborhood of impoverished Christian Armenians, Druse, Palestinians and Shiites where his father had a vegetable stand. The eruption of the civil war in 1975 forced the family to flee to their native village in the south.

The oldest of nine children and deeply devout from a young age, he decamped for the most famous Shiite hawza, or seminary, in Najaf, Iraq. He fled in 1978 one step ahead of Saddam Hussein’s secret police, returning to Lebanon to join Amal, then a new Shiite militia. He became its Bekaa Valley commander in his early 20s.

In 1983, suicide bombing attacks against first the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, then the barracks of American and French peacekeepers, killed at least 360 people, including 241 American service members. The attacks were claimed by the Islamic Jihad Organization, considered a precursor to Hezbollah, and some of those suspected in its planning later became top commanders under Mr. Nasrallah.

He studied briefly at a seminary in Qum, Iran, in 1989, and considered Iran’s Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 to be the best model for Shiites to end their historic second-class status in the Muslim world.

Security around Mr. Nasrallah has long been extraordinary. When he granted a rare interview to The New York Times in 2002, the reporter and photographer were blindfolded and driven around the southern suburbs of Beirut for a short time before the meeting. His security team then inspected absolutely everything that would enter the room, even unscrewing the pens to make sure that they contained only ink.

Hezbollah began firing into Israel on Oct. 8 last year, a day after the war in Gaza started, and the two sides had engaged in tit-for-tat exchanges ever since. Despite the constant threat of a full-scale war, Mr. Nasrallah appeared reluctant to unleash Hezbollah’s full arsenal, estimated at tens of thousands of missiles, given that many Lebanese, weary of grinding economic problems and general chaos, might have penalized the party for dragging them into an unwanted war. It also seemed that Iran hoped to avoid expending an arsenal devised as its forward line of defense against any Israeli attack.

On Sept. 19, in his last televised remarks, he blamed Israel for the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies that killed dozens of his foot soldiers and wounded several thousand more in the days before. “This retribution will come,” he said. “Its manner, size, how and where — these are things we will certainly keep to ourselves, in the narrowest circles even among us.”