BEIRUT, Lebanon –
Lebanon’s Hezbollah group confirmed on Saturday that its leader and one of its founding members, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in a southern suburb of Beirut.
The killing of the powerful militant group’s longtime leader sent shockwaves throughout Lebanon and the Middle East, where he has been a dominant political and military figure for more than three decades.
Nasrallah has been on Israel’s kill list for decades. His assassination is by far the biggest and most consequential of Israel’s targeted killings in years. The Israeli military said it carried out a precise airstrike on Friday while Hezbollah leaders were meeting at their headquarters in Dahiyeh, south of Beirut.
Immediately after the confirmation from Hezbollah, people starting firing in the air in Beirut and across Lebanon to mourn Nasrallah’s death.
“Wish it was our kids, not you, Sayyid!” said one woman, using an honourific title for Nasrallah, as she clutched her baby in the western city of Baabda.
“We don’t believe he is killed,” a woman draped in black, tearfully told al-Manar TV in Bekaa, western Lebanon. “We don’t. We left our homes and came here for him and for the resistance,”
People check a damaged building at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Choueifat, south east of Beirut, Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
In his first public remarks since the killing, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s targeting of Nasrallah was “an essential condition to achieving the goals we set.”
“He wasn’t another terrorist. He was the terrorist,” Netanyahu said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used similar language in a statement acknowledging Nasrallah’s death.
“He was the leader of a terrorist organization that attacked and killed innocent civilians, causing immense suffering across the region,” Trudeau posted on the social media platform X.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas sent condolences to its ally, Hezbollah, and said “assassinations will only increase the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine in determination and resolve.”
News of Nasrallah’s killing stunned travelers at Lebanon’s only international airport, where hundreds of people were scrambling to leave the country despite limited flights. Some cried. Others talked on their phones in disbelief. One woman screamed: “No! It was just an announcement! No, he didn’t die!”
Iran’s supreme leader announced five days of public mourning after Nasrallah’s death. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Nasrallah “the flag-bearer of resistance” in the region.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Tehran after Nasrallah’s killing was announced. Protesters chanted “Death to Israel” and “Death to Netanyahu the murderer” while waving Hezbollah flags.
In this Oct. 24, 2015 file photo, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah addresses a crowd during the holy day of Ashoura, in a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)
Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, said Iran will be under significant pressure to respond to Nasrallah’s killing without escalating violence in the region.
“Iran understands that its military options are limited, given the conventional military superiority of Israel and the U.S.” Juneau told The Associated Press.
Israel vows to keep up attacks on Hezbollah
Israel’s Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said Saturday that the elimination of Nasrallah was “not the end of our toolbox,” indicating that more strikes were planned. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called it “the most important targeted strike since the founding of the State of Israel.”
The military said Saturday it was mobilizing three more battalions of reserve soldiers to serve across the country. It already sent two brigades to northern Israel to prepare for a possible ground invasion.
Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said Israel has inflicted heavy damage on Hezbollah’s capabilities over the past week by targeting immediate threats and strategic weapons, such as larger, guided missiles. But he said much of Hezbollah’s arsenal remains intact and that Israel would continue to target the group.
Air raid sirens sounded across central Israel on Saturday afternoon, including at the Tel Aviv international airport, shortly after Netanyahu returned from a trip to the U.S.
Smoke rises as a building collapses in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
The Israeli military said it intercepted a missile launched from Yemen. Houthi rebels based in Yemen later said they were behind the attack targeting Ben Gurion Airport.
The Israeli military updated guidelines for Israeli citizens, canceling gatherings of more than 1,000 people due to the threat.
Approximately 60,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes along the Lebanese border for almost a year. This month, Israel’s government said halting Hezbollah’s attacks in the country’s north to allow residents to return to their homes is an official goal.
A window of opportunity for Israel and Lebanon
Orna Mizrahi, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based think tank Institute for National Security Studies and former intelligence analyst for the Israeli military and prime minister’s office, noted that Nasrallah was sometimes a “voice of reason,” interested in engaging Israel in a war of attrition and holding the militant group back from using the full force of their formidable arsenal against Israel.
Nasrallah’s death could prompt some less senior members of Hezbollah to unleash much stronger weapons than have been used in the nearly yearlong exchange of hostilities, Mizrahi said. The biggest question mark right now, though, is how Iran will respond.
She said Nasrallah’s death could provide a window of opportunity — while the organization is significantly weakened — for Lebanon to dilute Hezbollah’s influence, especially in the south, that threatens to drag Lebanon into a full-scale war with Israel.
Continuing strikes on both sides of the border
On Saturday morning, the Israeli military carried out more than 140 airstrikes in southern Beirut and eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, including targeting a storage facility for anti-ship missiles in Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh. Israel said the missiles were stored beneath civilian apartment buildings. Hezbollah launched dozens of projectiles across northern and central Israel and deep into the Israel-occupied West Bank, damaging some buildings in the northern town of Safed.
Rescuers arrive at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Sept. 27, 2024, in Lebanon. (Hassan Ammar / AP Photo)
In Beirut’s southern suburbs, smoke rose and the streets were empty after the area was pummeled overnight by heavy Israeli airstrikes. Shelters set up in the city center for displaced people were overflowing. Many families slept in public squares and on beaches or in their cars. On the roads leading to the mountains above the capital, hundreds of people could be seen fleeing on foot, holding infants and whatever belongings they could carry.
A total of 1,030 people — including 156 women and 87 children — have been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon in less than two weeks, the country’s health minister said Saturday.
Lidman reported from Tel Aviv. Associated Press writers Abby Sewell, Kareem Chehayeb and Ahmad Mousa in Beirut; Lujain Jo in Baabda, Lebanon; Nasser Karimi and Mehdi Fattahi in Tehran, Iran; and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.