Many people considered the 64-year-old to be the “personification” of the armed group he spent 32 years leading.
Hezbollah, an organization based in Lebanon, has acknowledged that its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, died on Friday night in a significant Israeli airstrike on Beirut.
Earlier in the day, the assassination was claimed by the Israeli army.After the war with Israel in 2006, Nasrallah’s popularity peaked, and many people in Lebanon and worldwide viewed him as a hero. For years, what set him and his Iranian-backed organization, Hezbollah, apart was their refusal to bow to Israel. However, that changed when Hezbollah dispatched forces to put an end to the rebellion that was posing a threat to President Bashar al-Assad’s authority in Syria.
Many Arab nations criticized Nasrallah because he was no longer viewed as the head of a resistance movement but rather as the head of a Shia party defending Iranian interests.
Nasrallah had not been able to persuade many in the Sunni Muslim Arab world that his movement was not responsible for the 2005 death of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, even prior to Hezbollah’s entry into the Syrian conflict. Four members of the group were charged with murder by an international tribunal, and one of them was found guilty later.In spite of this, Nasrallah was still backed by his devoted followers, who were primarily Shia Muslims in Lebanon and looked up to him as a religious leader.
Political mythology surrounds Nasrallah’s early years in East Beirut, where he was born in 1960. He was one of nine siblings and is reported to have been devout from a young age, frequently going on lengthy journeys to the city center to look for used Islamic books. Nasrallah has personally talked about how, as a boy, he would respectfully spend his leisure time staring at a photograph of the Shia scholar Musa al-Sadr; this activity hinted at his future involvement in politics and with the Shia populations in Lebanon.
Sadr established the Movement of the Deprived in 1974, and it served as the intellectual foundation for Amal, a well-known Lebanese party that opposes Hezbollah. Amal grew become a strong political force in the 1980s by gaining the support of middle-class Shia who were fed up with their historical marginalization in Lebanon. In addition to appropriating an anti-establishment message, Amal gave many Shia households a steady source of money, which led to the development of a convoluted patronage network throughout the south of Lebanon.
Following the start of the civil war between the Christian Maronites and Muslims in Lebanon, Nasrallah sided with Amal’s organization and engaged in combat with its militia. However, as the crisis dragged on, Amal came to hold a resolutely insensitive position about the existence of Palestinian militias in Lebanon.
This position infuriated Nasrallah, who broke away from Amal immediately after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and, with Iranian assistance, founded a new organization that would subsequently become Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s philosophy was crystallized by 1985 in a foundation declaration that addressed the “downtrodden of Lebanon” and identified Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini as the organization’s only legitimate leader.
During the civil war, Hezbollah and Amal developed in sharp parallel, frequently
