TEHRAN - Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, one of the most powerful Arab figures in the Middle East, has left a lasting mark on modern Lebanon, the Arab-Israel conflict and the wider region.

He was killed aged 64 in a series of powerful Israeli air strikes in south Beirut on September 27.

Under Nasrallah, whose surname translates as "victory through God", Hezbollah grew from a local armed movement to the largest political party in Lebanon’s recent history. 

In the 2018 parliamentary elections, Hezbollah won more than 340,000 preferential votes, the most for any party in Lebanon since independence. 

In October 2021, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah had 100,000 fighters, making it among the most powerful armed organizations worldwide.

Such power is backed by regional influence that has only enhanced Hezbollah’s reputation in the Arab world: to date, it is the only armed force, national or otherwise, to have forced Israel to retreat from an Arab country.

Nasrallah, whose speeches attracted attention from across the Middle East and beyond, was long prominent in the Axis of Resistance, which includes Hezbollah, the Palestinian movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Houthi movement in Yemen, and several Iraqi paramilitary groups. 

Nasrallah was born in 1960 to a poor Shia family in Sharshabouk, a deprived area of east Beirut's Karantina. Interested in religion while young, he was inspired by Sayyed Musa Sadr, an Iranian-born imam of Lebanese descent, who in the spring of 1974 launched the Movement of the Deprived, better known as Amal, to secure more power for Lebanon’s neglected Shia community, and improve conditions in east and south Lebanon.

Civil war broke out in Lebanon in April 1975; in July, Sadr launched the Lebanese Resistance Brigades, Amal’s armed wing, to protect south Lebanon from Israeli incursions.

Nasrallah joined Amal. As the civil war escalated, his family moved from predominantly Christian east Beirut to their ancestral village of Bazourieh in Tyre.

In December 1976, Nasrallah left for Najaf in Iraq to study at the city’s religious seminary (hawzah), which advocated a more active role for Shia religious scholars. There, he met Lebanese scholar Sayyed Abbas Mussawi, who was studying under Sayyed Mohammad Baqer Sadr, a cousin of Musa Sadr.

In early 1978, an Iraqi Baathist crackdown on Shia forced Nasrallah and Mussawi back to Lebanon. Mussawi founded a religious seminary in Baalbeck, where Nasrallah continued studying.

The next year, Nasrallah and Mussawi - now an Amal official - backed Iranian imam Ruhollah Khomeini, whose supporters had established the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, after an assassination attempt on Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to London by the Abu Nidal Organization, a splinter group of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization).

Israel besieged Beirut for 10 weeks before occupying it in September, intending to drive out the PLO and install a friendly puppet government. The assault killed at least 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, mainly civilians, and more than 370 Israelis, most of them military.

To deal with the repercussions of the invasion, Lebanese President Elias Sarkis formed a unifying National Salvation Committee, including Amal leader Nabih Berri and Lebanese Forces militia leader Bashir Gemayel, Israel’s main Christian ally in Lebanon.

But Mussawi, Nasrallah and others who backed Imam Khomeini defected from Amal, accusing it of betrayal by joining the committee; armed resistance, they said, was the only answer.

The defectors established Hezbollah during the summer of 1982. It supported Imam Khomeini’s Shia doctrine of velayat-e faqih (known in Arabic as wilayat al-faqih).

In 1982, Hezbollah launched a guerrilla warfare to drive Israel from Lebanon. It said this was a prelude to freeing historic Palestine, occupied by Zionist settlers, according to Middle East Eye.

The Multinational Force in Lebanon, a peace-keeping group that included troops from the US, UK and France, was set up and tasked with supervising the PLO withdrawal from Beirut and later backing Gemayel. But it eventually ended up fighting against opposition from the Druze, Sunni and Shia communities.

By the summer of 1985, Israel had left much of south Lebanon, amid ongoing attacks, and occupied a string of communities close to the border. But Hezbollah pushed on and hit Israeli outposts in the so-called Security Zone.

That summer, Shia groups hijacked TWA Flight 847 and forced it to land in Beirut. One hostage was killed; the remaining 152, more than half of whom were American, were freed after Israel released 700 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners.

How did Nasrallah become the leader of Hezbollah?

In 1985, Nasrallah became head of Hezbollah’s executive council and a member of its shura council. He often went to Iran to consult and receive updates on the ongoing Iran-Iraq war, which happened, he later said, because he spoke better Persian than his colleagues.

“They used to tell me: You like the Iranians and they like you, so you go to Iran. I would meet with his eminence the Imam [Khomeini]. I would sit down with him for one hour, two hours or even more.” 

In February 1992 Mussawi, by now Hezbollah’s secretary general, his wife and child were assassinated in an Israeli air strike.

Speaking at his funeral, Nasrallah said: “We will continue this path… even if we are martyred, all of us and our houses demolished over our heads, we will not abandon the choice of the Islamic Resistance.”

Nasrallah took over Hezbollah, and under his leadership, the group acquired longer-range rockets, allowing it to target more areas in northern Israel. 

Nasrallah said that an Islamic republic was best for Lebanon but Hezbollah would never propose this option in Lebanon unless it had the backing of the majority of the Lebanese. 

During the summer of 1992, he fielded candidates for the first post-civil war parliamentary elections, when Hezbollah won 12 seats. It has since participated in every parliamentary election.

Hezbollah mired Israel in unwinnable guerrilla warfare

Of all the armed groups which have opposed Israel, Hezbollah has caused the Israeli armed forces the most difficulty.

Since the founding of Hezbollah in 1982, there has not been a year when there have not been exchanges of fire or rocket fire between the two sides.

During the mid-1990s, Hezbollah expanded military operations in the Israeli-occupied zone, miring Israel in an unwinnable guerrilla warfare and arguing it was doing so to recover the region and “allow its displaced people to return to their homes”.

In May 2000, Israel withdrew from south Lebanon, the first time it had ended the occupation of an Arab territory without a treaty or security arrangement. The move validated Nasrallah’s long-standing argument that only armed resistance could recover Arab land.

In July 2006, Israel launched an incursion into Lebanon after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border attack. Hezbollah said the kidnappings were to gain leverage for the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israel.

Cross-border exchanges escalated, as Hezbollah fired more than 4,000 rockets at northern Israel. By the end of the 33-day war, more than 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis were dead - and Hezbollah’s reputation was further enhanced.

On 14 July 2006, during a speech, Nasrallah urged people in Beirut to look west to the Mediterranean coast. As they did so, Hezbollah fired a surface-to-sea missile against the Israeli naval ship Hanit, killing and wounding several crew.

The conflict ended on 14 August with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which stipulated that a beefed-up UN Interim Force, along with Lebanese army units, would be solely responsible for security in the southern border region.

Nasrallah’s popularity soared, but his public appearances became rarer, amid fear of assassination by Israel.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian groups based in Gaza mounted a surprise attack on southern Israel, killing more than 1,100 people. Israel declared war that day. More than 41,600 Palestinians have been killed since.

In a 3 November 2023 speech, Nasrallah praised the Hamas-led attack, known as Al-Aqsa Flood, saying: “It was a heroic, courageous, creative, perfectly done and great act to which all salutes should be raised.”

He said it had revealed Israel’s weakness and vulnerability, but stressed that neither Hezbollah nor any of the Axis of Resistance member groups were aware of the attack in advance.

On October 8, Hezbollah began firing on Israeli positions along the 120km Lebanese-Israeli border “in solidarity” with the Palestinians. The two sides have since been engaged in daily cross-border strikes. The increasing range and frequency of the attacks on both sides has raised fears of a wider regional conflict.

In the last week of September, more than 700 people were killed in Israeli attacks across Lebanon, with over 550 deaths reported on 23 September alone. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), hundreds of thousands have been displaced.

Hezbollah’s efforts have been aligned with those of other members of the Axis of Resistance, including the Ansarallah (Houthi) movement in Yemen, which has attacked ships to and from Israel in the Red Sea and used drones against targets in Israel. Iraqi armed movements have also used drones against Israel.

The strategy is intended to ease pressure on Hamas by tying up Israeli forces elsewhere and eventually forcing a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. 

Given Nasrallah’s stature in the axis, it is highly likely that he played a major role in the direction and scope of the strategy.

Nasrallah enjoyed wide support among many Lebanese, especially Shia and those in south Lebanon. 

Much of this relates to how Hezbollah has become a major regional military force, driving Israel out of south Lebanon. Supporters say Lebanon’s south has been able to enjoy two decades of unprecedented peace.

Many respected his humble lifestyle, in contrast to many Lebanese leaders and politicians; Nasrallah divulged in one interview that his monthly salary was not more than $1,300.

Nor had he expressed fear as to how he is regarded. “I don’t wait for history to absolve me…what matters is that God absolves us and we satisfy him,” Nasrallah said in an interview in 2016. 

Nasrallah repeatedly warned that foreign powers were trying to foment civil strife by exploiting protests in Lebanon.

Hezbollah is an institutionalized party with a clear hierarchy

Under Nasrallah’s leadership of Hezbollah, modern Lebanon was able to militarily defend itself against Israel, not least in the south.

Its political wing has become one of the most powerful parties of modern political Islam, with allies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran and Palestine.

Any successor to Nasrallah will come from within the ranks of Hezbollah, an institutionalized party with a clear hierarchy.

With many Hezbollah figures killed during Israeli attacks in September 2024, one name frequently coming to the fore is Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, the head of Hezbollah’s executive council, although the movement has denied the reports.