It could be an explosion in the Middle East. The Israeli army announced this Saturday morning the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the bombing of the movement’s headquarters this Friday in the southern suburbs of Beirut in Lebanon. He “will no longer be able to terrorize the world”, writes the IDF on X. Confirmation by the pro-Iranian armed movement came a few hours later, at the beginning of the afternoon. Nasrallah “joined his fellow martyrs (…) whose march he led for nearly thirty years,” announced a press release from the group.
“Hassan Nasrallah is dead,” an army spokesperson, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said on the social network AFP that the leader of Hezbollah had been “eliminated”. “Yesterday (Friday), the IDF killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and one of its founders, as well as Ali Karaki, the commander of Hezbollah’s southern front, and other Hezbollah commanders,” the statement also said. Israeli army in a statement.
On her account that they were “engaged in coordinating terrorist activities against citizens of the State of Israel.” This Israeli raid destroyed dozens of buildings, forced hundreds of people to flee and left at least six dead.
Israel promises to “reach” all those who threaten it
Hassan Nasrallah, “main decision-maker” of Hezbollah, which he led for “32 years”, “was responsible for the murder of numerous Israeli citizens and soldiers, as well as the planning and execution of thousands of terrorist acts against the State of Israel and its surroundings,” accuses the IDF. She also asserts that the Lebanese Islamist movement, by supporting Palestinian Hamas in the war against Israel, is “driving the State of Lebanon and the entire region into escalation.”
“The IDF will continue to target anyone who encourages and participates in terrorism against the citizens of the State of Israel,” she concluded. “We have not exhausted all the means at our disposal. The message is simple: whoever threatens the citizens of Israel, we will know how to reach them,” added his chief of staff, General Herzi Halevi.
“Israeli red lines may have been blown”
Shortly after this strike, a source close to the Shiite movement announced that he was “fine”, without specifying whether he was indeed present in the building at the time of the bombing. But Hezbollah has still not made an official announcement on the fate of its leader more than 15 hours after the devastating Israeli raid. A source close to the pro-Iranian movement finally admitted this Saturday that “contact has been lost” with it since Friday evening.
VideoLebanon: Israeli strike flattens several buildings in Beirut, at least two dead and 76 injured
Hassan Nasrallah, 64, is a man of religion who is the subject of a veritable cult of personality in Lebanon, where he is the most powerful man. For years he has lived in hiding and has rarely appeared in public. During its last intervention, after the simultaneous explosion of transmission devices across Lebanon, attributed to Israel, the IDF caused a fighter plane to break the sound barrier, causing a “boom” which could be heard during of his speech.
Hassan Nasrallah was a prime target for Israel, whose army has worked in recent months to eliminate Hezbollah leaders. “Nasrallah embodies Hezbollah both politically and religiously. It is a tutelary figure, the statue of the commander,” recalls David Rigoulet-Roze, associate researcher at Iris specializing in the Middle East, to Le Parisien, emphasizing the “sacred dimension of the character” who inevitably wears the black turban of the Sayyed, the descendants of the prophet.
Until this Friday evening, Hassan Nasrallah had never been directly targeted by Israel. “The fact of targeting him shows that the Israeli red lines are likely to have been breached,” continues David Rigoulet-Roze, recalling that the man of religion is “more or less a fils of Iran”. According to the researcher, “touching Nasrallah’s person could provoke a response from Tehran.” The leader of Hezbollah has “a very important role with the Iranian proxy,” adds David Khalfa, co-director of the North Africa and Middle East Observatory at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation.
The Israeli army continued to shell the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout the night, and also indicated that it had carried out “major strikes” on “dozens of Hezbollah targets” in the south and east of Lebanon. She earlier claimed to have killed the commander of a missile unit of the movement and his deputy in a strike in southern Lebanon.
Since Monday, the IDF has launched a campaign of violent and deadly bombings against Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon, after a year of cross-border firefights with the Lebanese formation. In six days, Israeli bombings left more than 700 dead, mostly civilians according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health.
Hezbollah opened a front against Israel at the start of the war in Gaza, triggered by an attack on October 7, 2023 against Israel led by Palestinian Hamas, its ally. In one year, the number of people killed rose to more than 1,500, a death toll higher than that of the 33 days of war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
