Hassan Nasrallah
Hassan Nasrallah led Hezbollah for thirty-two years and was killed by an Israeli airstrike in September 2024. Born in Beirut in 1960, the eldest of nine children of a greengrocer, the family fled to southern Lebanon during the civil war. He studied at a seminary in Najaf in Iraq until Saddam Hussein expelled Lebanese students in 1978, and continued in Baalbek. He joined the Amal movement and left it in 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon, to help found Hezbollah with Iranian Revolutionary Guard support. He became secretary-general in February 1992 at thirty-one, after Israel killed his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi in a helicopter strike. He built Hezbollah into something without parallel — a guerrilla force with rockets and drones, a political party sitting in the Lebanese parliament and cabinet, and a network of schools, clinics, reconstruction agencies and a television station serving the Shia community that the Lebanese state had largely neglected. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000 after eighteen years, which he claimed as the first Arab military victory over Israel and which made him popular far beyond his own sect. His eldest son Hadi was killed in action in 1997. The 2006 war followed a cross-border raid; some 1,200 Lebanese and 165 Israelis died, and Lebanon's infrastructure was heavily damaged. He committed Hezbollah to fighting for Assad in Syria from 2013, which cost him support across the Arab world. He lived in hiding for two decades and was killed by bunker-busting bombs on a command centre in Beirut's southern suburbs.
- Lived: 1960 CE – 2024 CE
- Nationality: Lebanese
- Roles: Secretary-General of Hezbollah (1992-2024)
