BEIRUT (AP) — Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who transformed the Lebanese militant group into a potent paramilitary and political force in the Middle East, was killed in an Israeli airstrike, the group said. He was 64.
Nasrallah, who spearheaded Hezbollah’s war against Israel in 2006 and got the group heavily involved in neighboring Syria’s brutal conflict, was killed in a massive Israeli airstrike on the Beirut southern suburb of Haret Hreik Friday evening that knocked down several multistory apartment buildings.
“His eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, had joined his fellow great martyrs whom he had led for 30 years from one victory to another,” Hezbollah said in a statement. It added that Nasrallah “fell as a martyr on the road to Jerusalem.”
Fears of a regional war
Nasrallah’s death comes amid a dizzying escalation in the nearly yearlong conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, since the war in Gaza started, and more than three decades after he took leadership of the Iranian-backed militant group following the killing of his predecessor by an Israeli missile in 1992. Five years later, the United States designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets, missiles and drones into northern Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and Hamas, an allied Iran-backed militant group. Israel has responded with increasingly heavy airstrikes and the targeted killing of Hezbollah commanders while threatening a wider operation.
This week has been the deadliest in Lebanon since the bruising 2006 monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah.
First, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used mainly by Hezbollah members exploded in different parts of Lebanon, killing 39 people and wounding nearly 3,000, many of them civilians. Lebanon blamed Israel, but Israel did not confirm or deny responsibility. Nasrallah had promised to retaliate.
Then, Israeli strikes on Lebanon killed more than 700 people in five days, including at least 150 women and children, according to Lebanese authorities.
Nasrallah had said the barrages would continue — and Israelis wouldn’t be able to return to their homes in the north — until Israel’s campaign in Gaza ended.
Seen by his supporters as a charismatic and shrewd strategist, Nasrallah had reshaped Hezbollah into an archenemy of Israel, cementing alliances with the ayatollahs in Tehran and…