Hezbollah confirms leader Hassan Nasrallah’s death in Israeli strike
The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah confirmed Saturday that its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had been killed in an Israeli air raid the evening before, even as Israel pressed ahead with a new round of punishing airstrikes and the region appeared to reel closer to all-out war.
The announcement came hours after Israel’s military declared that it had killed the 64-year-old Nasrallah, who helped found Hezbollah and had led the Iranian-backed group for three decades, in a devastating strike Friday evening in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.
Overnight and into Saturday, Israeli warplanes continued to pummel Hezbollah-dominated neighborhoods on the city’s southern outskirts, leaving the Lebanese capital shrouded in choking smoke and lending apocalyptic air to the open-air encampments that sprang up overnight.
Thousands who fled devastated areas spent the night outdoors, huddling where they could in parks, squares and on walkways near the seafront promenade.
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The death of Nasrallah represents the most staggering blow yet dealt to the Iranian-backed group by Israel, which over a span of nearly two weeks turned a low-level campaign of retaliatory cross-border strikes into an all-out effort to decapitate the group.
The Israeli military initially disclosed the death in a terse statement posted on social media.
“Hassan Nasrallah will no longer be able to terrorize the world,” it declared.
Later, it posted a graphic depicting 11 high-ranking members of Hezbollah’s military chain of command. Ten had the word “eliminated” beside their picture, including Nasrallah.
Hezbollah responded with seeming defiance, sending a heavy barrage of rockets across the border into Israel.
The wave of Israeli strikes caused widespread panic, with thousands of people trudging with backpacks, duffel bags, roller suitcases and pet cages as they fled their homes in the the densely populated suburb of Dahieh and the nearby Burj Al-Barajneh refugee camp.
Khaled Mustafa, a 45-year-old Syrian tailor from Aleppo who lived with his family for the last nine years in Haret Hreik, a neighborhood with many Hezbollah administrative offices, sat cross-legged in the shade of a palm tree on a sidewalk overlooking the Mediterranean. After a large Israeli airstrike on the Dahieh on Friday evening, he left his apartment without taking any of his belongings.
“I sent my family to back to Syria last night. Eight people. I’m alone here,” Mustafa said. “I don’t know if I’ll go back to the apartment and pick stuff up. The Israelis say they want to hit the area again.”
Though he did not feel safe returning to Syria, a country embroiled in a civil war since 2011, it was still better than being in Dahieh, he said.
“Where can I go? What can I do? Sit on the streets here with no food, no water? Is this good?”
Hezbollah posted on its official social media channels a flyer with phone numbers that could facilitate transportation to Syria for those wanting to leave Lebanon.
A drive through Dahieh revealed a ghost town, with a few cars and scooters racing through abandoned thoroughfares, pausing at columns of smoke rising from the bowels of attack sites before they sped off.
Even Hezbollah security officials, normally a constant presence on the streets here, were scarce, with only a few stragglers posted near struck areas.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s health ministry said in an update on Saturday that Dahieh hospitals were to be evacuated. It added that medical facilities in other parts of the city would suspend non-urgent cases until the end of next week to deal with the flood of casualties.
Hezbollah, a paramilitary faction and political party long, has long been viewed as Israel’s top regional adversary.
Over the last 11 months, after Hezbollah launched cross-border attacks in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and Hamas, the two sides had engaged in an escalating series of strikes, but always falling short of full-scale conflict. On both sides of the border, tens of thousands fled their homes — some 90,000 Lebanese displaced from homes in the country’s south, and about 60,000 driven from northern Israeli communities.
But Israel’s calculation changed in recent weeks, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying his government would make the ability of northern residents to return home a formal war objective. In the days following, Israel staged a two-day wave of detonations with booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, followed by intensive airstrikes and targeted pursuit of the group’s top leadership.
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On Saturday, before Nasrallah’s death was confirmed by Hezbollah, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released a statement castigating Israel for “the massacre of the defenseless people of Lebanon.”
Denouncing the “Zionist entity” — a reference to Israel — the Iranian leader said that what he called the resistance, a coalition of Iranian regional proxies, would prevail. That encompasses forces including Hezbollah, the Palestinian groups Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthi rebels in Yemen, various Syrian and Iraqi militias, and the Syrian government.
“All the resistance forces in the region stand by Hezbollah and support it.” Khamenei said.
Bulos reported from Beirut, King from Washington.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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