Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah killed in Beirut strike, Israel says

The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, dealing what would be a crippling blow to a movement already reeling from Israel’s ferocious 12-day assault on Lebanon.

A devastating round of airstrikes on Friday evening targeted what Israel said was Hezbollah’s secret underground headquarters, hidden beneath high-rise buildings in the Shia Muslim suburbs of southern Beirut.

If Israel’s account is to be believed, Nasrallah was at the site.

“Hassan Nasrallah will no longer be able to terrorise the world,” the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said in a brief statement posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Hezbollah has yet to comment publicly on whether its leader has survived unscathed, with sources initially offering contradictory information – itself an indication of the turmoil within the group.

Lebanese supporters of the Iran-backed movement, which draws fanatical support from much of the country’s long-marginalised Shia minority, refused to believe the Israeli claims.

“Israel failed to kill him and so they are trying to lure him into a trap,” one man said. “They want to force him to appear on television so they can try again to assassinate him.”

The killing of Nasrallah would provide Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, with a moment of triumph after a torrid 11 months of attritional warfare against Hamas in Gaza.

While Nasrallah’s death would cause grief across the Shia Muslim parts of the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon and Iran, there is little doubt it would be welcome elsewhere.

Even before the IDF gave its first assessment that Nasrallah was dead, there were celebrations taking place in Tel Aviv nightclubs and on the streets of northwest Syria, where flag-waving residents were filmed singing and clapping as news of the strike emerged.

Hezbollah, whose intervention in the Syrian civil war helped ensure the survival of Bashar al-Assad, the country’s president, is widely loathed in Sunni Muslim regions.

The targeting of Nasrallah appeared to signal a new phase of Israel’s “Operation Northern Arrows” campaign, at least as far as the capital is concerned.

Defying mounting international pressure for a ceasefire, Israel escalated its assault on Hezbollah’s strongholds in the south of Beirut. It launched dozens of airstrikes against the city’s Dahiyeh district on Saturday morning, in the wake of the attempt to kill Nasrallah.

Thousands of terrified civilians have been pouring out of the area as a result.

While Israeli forces have this week unleashed some of the most devastating air attacks on Lebanon since 2006, Beirut itself has mostly been spared.

Most of the attacks on its southern districts had been targeted assassinations, which succeeded in killing many of Nasrallah’s top lieutenants, and which may now have eliminated Nasrallah himself.

Killing the man who has led Hezbollah since 1992 would strike the biggest symbolic blow yet against a movement that is still reeling from a sustained series of attacks on its leadership and its rank and file.

Over the past 12 days, Israel has killed many of the movement’s senior leaders, building on an assassination strategy that has gathered pace since late last year.

Last week, the synchronised sabotage of the movement’s pagers and walkie-talkie radios wounded thousands of its mid-ranking members, incapacitating a large number of important battlefield fighters and severely disrupting its ability to communicate as well.

This week, Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon have killed at least 800 people, civilians and fighters alike, destroying some of Hezbollah’s vast rocket arsenal in the process.

The group has been tepid in response, although it remains unclear whether this is because it is unwilling to be sucked into a war, as its leaders claim, or that it has been so effectively weakened that it cannot mount a significant counterattack.

Amid the escalation, civilians are again paying the price.

Within minutes of the attempt to kill Nasrallah on Friday evening, thousands of people began walking out of Dahiyeh, making their way through the darkened streets with their children at their side and whatever they could stuff into the rucksacks they wore on their backs.

Few had any idea where they were heading or where they would sleep.

“We just had to get to safety,” said Fatima, sitting on a mat with her two young children on a street off Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut. “If we stayed we would be dead now, I feel sure.”