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 longtime 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.
For many in the Arab world, Nasrallah was seen in a heroic light after Hezbollah fought Israeli forces to a standstill in the July 2006 war sparked by a Hezbollah raid into Israel to kill and kidnap soldiers.
But that image was later tarnished in the eyes of many after he also sent Hezbollah fighters to help prop up the flailing regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was trying to brutally put down a massive uprising that had been sparked by the Arab Spring protests of 2011.
And around the world, Hezbollah has been blamed for a number of notorious bombings, attempted bombings and shootings that have killed scores of people, including a blast at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 that killed 29 people. Hezbollah was also suspected of involvement -- with Iran -- in the bombing of a Jewish community center in the Argentinian capital two years later that killed another 85 people.
But in Lebanon and across the region, Nasrallah still 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.
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