All posts tagged: Nasrallahs

How Beirut Is Responding to Nasrallah’s Death

How Beirut Is Responding to Nasrallah’s Death

As word spread on Saturday that Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah had been killed in his underground Beirut bunker by an Israeli airstrike, people began quietly reckoning with the possibility that Lebanon’s political architecture might be about to shift for the first time in more than three decades. And that, in turn, raised the prospect that locked doors might soon open across the Middle East. Those who have fought against Hezbollah—not just Israelis but also Lebanese from across the nation’s confessional divides, as well as Syrians and Yemenis—could see the tantalizing possibility that the Shiite movement’s dominance might be at an end. Many others worried that a sudden power vacuum might lead Lebanon back to the kind of civil war that tortured its people for 15 years before Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s. Nasrallah was more than a political leader. After 32 years in power, he had become synonymous with Hezbollah, the most well-armed non-state actor in the world and the linchpin of Iran’s tentacular “axis of resistance” to Israel and the United States. You …

Israel strikes Beirut suburb, Nasrallah’s fate unclear after Friday’s massive attack

Israel strikes Beirut suburb, Nasrallah’s fate unclear after Friday’s massive attack

Residents check the damaged in the aftermath of overnight Israeli bombardment in Beirut’s southern suburbs, on September 28, 2024. Anwar Amro | Afp | Getty Images Israel launched airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs and other areas of Lebanon on Saturday, a day after carrying out a massive attack on Hezbollah’s headquarters that appeared to be aimed at killing its leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. The fate of Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed group for 32 years, remains unclear, with Hezbollah yet to issue any statement on his status. Reuters journalists heard more than 20 airstrikes in Beirut before dawn on Saturday and more after sunrise. Smoke could be seen rising over the city’s Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs, known as the Dahiyeh. Thousands of people have fled the area since Friday’s attack, congregating in squares, parks and sidewalks in downtown Beirut and seaside areas. “They want to destroy Dahiyeh, they want to destroy all of us,” said Sari, a man in his 30s who gave only his first name, referring to the suburb he had fled after an …