Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, was killed in a massive Israeli air attack on Beirut on Friday evening, the Lebanon-based group has confirmed.
Nasrallah, who rose to prominence following the 2006 conflict with Israel, was seen as a hero by many people not only in Lebanon but throughout the region. Standing up to Israel has defined him and his Iranian-backed militia, Hezbollah, for many years.
But all changed when Hezbollah sent fighters to Syria to quell the revolt that threatened President Bashar al-Assad’s power. Many Arab countries criticized Nasrallah for leading a Shia party fighting for Iranian interests rather than a resistance movement.
Even before Hezbollah’s involvement in the war in Syria, Nasrallah had failed to convince many in the Sunni Muslim Arab world that his movement was not behind the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. An international tribunal indicted four members of the group for the murder and one was later convicted.
Despite this, Nasrallah continued to enjoy support from his loyal base – mainly Lebanon’s Shia Muslims – who revered him as a leader and religious figurehead
Nasrallah was born in 1960 in East Beirut, and his early youth is shrouded in political mythology. He was one of nine siblings and is claimed to have been religious from a young age, frequently taking long journeys to the city center to find second-hand Islamic books.
Nasrallah himself has detailed how he would spend his free time as a boy staring intently at a painting of the Shia scholar Musa al-Sadr—a pastime that predicted his future preoccupation with politics and Shia communities in Lebanon.