Who was Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader killed by Israel? : NPR

The Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah, confirmed that its secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed on Friday in Israeli airstrikes in the south of the capital Beirut.

In a statement released by the group, it said that Nasrallah “has joined his fellow martyrs.” The official Iranian news agency reported on Saturday that a commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards was also killed alongside Nasrallah.

The Israeli military said it had killed the 64-year-old leader of Hezbollah in what it called a “targeted strike” on the group’s headquarters on Friday in the southern Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyeh.

A long-time leader of the Iran-backed militia, Nasrallah was born in 1960 to an impoverished family in the north of Lebanon. He was the eldest of nine children and went on to briefly study theology in Iran in 1989.

Before co-founding Hezbollah, Nasrallah learned the ropes in the Amal movement, a Shiite political and paramilitary movement. He was chosen to be Hezbollah’s chief two days after its leader, Sayyed Abbas Musawi, was killed by the Israeli military in 1992.

Under Nasrallah’s leadership, Hezbollah became one of the most powerful militias in the Middle East, boasting a military force stronger even than the Lebanese army. Funded by Iran, Hezbollah trained troops from Hamas. His organization also provides social services

Nasrallah led his group into a war that pushed Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation. His son, Hadi, was killed in fighting with the Israeli army in 1997 — the same year the U.S designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

For much of the last two decades, Nasrallah was only ever seen on TV and never in public for fear of assassination attempts.

But in Lebanon and across the region, Nasrallah has had many admirers. A 2020 report by a London-based think tank, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, estimated that Hezbollah had up to 20,000 active fighters. They see him as someone who stood up to Israeli and Western forces that try to weaken the Middle East.