Nasrallah’s death stuns Lebanon, as Israel pummels Beirut (original) (raw)

BEIRUT — Israel’s assassination of Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader, left a shaken Lebanon on Saturday, a void the militant group might struggle to fill, and its battle with Israel on an uncertain and possibly more violent path.

Hezbollah announced the death in a statement Saturday, confirming Nasrallah was killed in a massive Israeli strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs that flattened residential buildings a day earlier. He had “joined his great, immortal martyr comrades whose path he led for nearly 30 years,” it said.

Hezbollah tried to project continuity of leadership and mission Saturday — saying it would continue “confronting the enemy” — as Iran’s supreme leader called on followers to support the Lebanese militant group, the linchpin of Tehran’s regional “axis of resistance.” Israel cast Nasrallah’s killing as a mortal blow to Hezbollah and a lesson to other militant groups in the region.

As the news circulated Saturday afternoon, groups of grieving citizens gathered on the streets of Beirut, the shock afflicting Nasrallah’s critics, his supporters and the indifferent alike. “The Sayyid was martyred,” men screamed, using an honorific, in an area of the capital filled with those recently displaced by Israel’s bombing raids.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech late Saturday, said the “elimination of Nasrallah is a necessary condition for achieving the goals we have set: Returning the residents of the north safely to their homes, and changing the balance of power in the region over the years,” referring to Israelis displaced by Hezbollah’s attacks over the last year.

“As long as Nasrallah lives, he would quickly restore the capabilities we took away from Hezbollah,” Netanyahu said.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a video message Saturday that the operation targeting Nasrallah was “one of the most important countermeasures in the history of the state of Israel.”

Nasrallah’s killing, Gallant said, “joins the sequence of recent actions echoing all over the Middle East and sends a clear message to those who acted against us and to those who are thinking of doing so now: Whoever starts a war against the state of Israel and tries to harm its citizens will pay a very heavy price.”

The war, he added, “does not stop.”

Columns of smoke rose from Beirut’s southern suburbs Saturday, as Israeli strikes there, in southern Lebanon and in the Bekaa Valley continued. It was part of an escalated assault on Hezbollah that began last week with suspected Israeli attacks using exploding pagers.

Since Sept. 16, more than 1,000 people in Lebanon have been killed, including at least 87 children, the health ministry said Saturday. As Israel has touted a pinpoint campaign on Hezbollah assets, witnesses have spoken of strikes that have killed entire extended families.

The attack that killed Nasrallah also killed Ali Karki, a Hezbollah commander, Israel said — bringing to at least six the number of senior leaders of the militant group killed by Israel in the space of just weeks. Hezbollah has not confirmed Karki’s death.

The killings, along with the intense bombardment across Lebanon, suggested an all-out Israeli effort to dismantle Hezbollah — part of “a bulldozing strategy aimed at extinguishing” threats from Hezbollah and the Palestinian militant group Hamas and “breaking” the Iran-backed axis, wrote Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, in an analysis of Nasrallah’s killing.

Israel was “certainly closer to achieving those goals and have checkmated their opponents. History, however, has shown that a military victory has never provided Israel with the security it seeks,” she wrote.

During nearly a year of war with Israel, Nasrallah had repeatedly stated a limited objective: the securing of a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.

Now, “should Hezbollah not respond to Nasrallah’s death, its morale and legitimacy will be further weakened,” Vakil said. “What should be heeded though is that both groups while down, are not out. This fight will certainly mobilize if not radicalize another generation of fighters.”

Hezbollah did not immediately announce Nasrallah’s successor Saturday. The fact that the group has already weathered significant damage before his assassination makes it more likely its new leadership will make some adjustments to the movement, said Afshon Ostovar, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in California.

“If you are inheriting something that has just been gutted, you are going to have to do things differently to put things back on track,” he said. Ostovar said the leadership losses that Hezbollah has sustained, combined with the volume of strikes on the group that have claimed to degrade its munitions stockpiles, puts the organization in a very precarious position.

“Hezbollah will reconstitute, but the longer Israel keeps the pressure on, the harder it will be to do that,” he said. “This moment is an unpredictable one. Hezbollah is at a crossroads,” he said.

The killing of another prominent leader of Iran-backed groups — that of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike four years ago — caused Iraqi militia forces under his command to fragment as Soleimani’s personal connections to the groups vanished and competition between them increased, according to Sajad Jiyad, an expert on Iraq and Shiite politics and fellow with the U.S.-based Century Foundation think tank.

Hezbollah was different though — a stronger group with a longer history. “It still receives assistance, including weapons, from Iran but it is much more self-reliant and has a deeper institutional capacity,” than the Iraq groups that Soleimani oversaw, he said.

Predictions of Hezbollah’s survival did little to calm the fears of the group’s supporters Saturday, including Shiite Muslims, in Lebanon and beyond, who viewed Nasrallah as their champion.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the preeminent religious figure for Iraqi Shiites, called Nasrallah “an exemplary leader” in a statement and hailed his role in liberating Lebanese territory from Israel as well as Iraqi land from the Islamic State militant group.

In Beirut, the long silence from Hezbollah in the hours following the strike over Nasrallah’s fate had left 26-year old Sahar and her younger sister Zahra, 22, bracing for the worst.

The sisters, who spoke on the condition that they be identified by only their first names for security reasons, were displaced from Beirut’s southern suburbs to a shelter in the Hamra district, where streets are overflowing with people Saturday. The pair were stunned when they looked at their phones and saw a message: “Sayyed is martyred.”

Sahar looked around as everyone around her began screaming, some dropping to their knees and crying, she said. But within a matter of hours, they — and everyone else on the streets — had composed themselves.

After 30 years of leadership, in which Nasrallah built Hezbollah into the most powerful non-state actor in the world as well as Lebanon’s most powerful political player, his death has struck at the heart of the social fabric of Shiism in Lebanon. For Zahra and Sahar, he had been at the center of their world.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, declared three days of official mourning in Lebanon. The U.S. State Department ordered family members of embassy workers to leave Beirut. It also authorized nonessential employees to depart, citing “increased volatility” and the “unpredictable security situation throughout Lebanon.”

Rachel Chason in Tel Aviv and Mustafa Salim in Baghdad contributed to this report.