Who was Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah?

Hezbollah has confirmed the death of its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah after Israel said it killed the 64-year-old in an airstrike on Beirut.

Nasrallah, the former leader of Lebanon's militant Shiite Islamist movement, was one of the best-known and most influential figures in the Middle East.

Before his death, Nasrallah had not been seen in public for years because he feared he would be assassinated by Israel.

And on Saturday, the Israeli military said it had killed Nasrallah in an attack on the Lebanese capital.

Nasrallah was a shadowy figure with close personal ties to Iran who played a key role in making Hezbollah the political and military force it is today. He was revered by the group's followers.

Under Nasrallah's leadership, Hezbollah helped train fighters from the Palestinian armed group Hamas and militias in Iraq and Yemen, and procured missiles and missiles from Iran for use against Israel.

He steered Hezbollah's evolution from a militia formed to fight the Israeli troops occupying Lebanon into a military force stronger than the Lebanese army, into a power broker in Lebanese politics, a major provider of Health, education and social services and an important part of the support of their supporter Iran's pursuit of regional supremacy.

Hassan Nasrallah was born in 1960 and grew up in the eastern Beirut neighborhood of Bourj Hammoud, where his father, Abdul Karim, ran a small greengrocer. He was the oldest of nine children.

He joined the Amal Movement, then a Shiite militia, after Lebanon descended into civil war in 1975. After a brief stay in the holy Iraqi city of Najaf to attend a Shiite seminary, he rejoined Amal in Lebanon before he and others split from the group in 1975. In 1982, shortly after Israel moved in response to attacks by Palestinian militants in the Lebanon was invaded.

The new group, Islamic Amal, received significant military and organizational support from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard stationed in the Bekaa Valley and proved to be the most prominent and effective of the Shia militias that would later form Hezbollah.

In 1985, Hezbollah officially announced its creation by publishing an “open letter” in which it identified the United States and the Soviet Union as the main enemies of Islam and called for the “extinction” of Israel, which supposedly occupied Muslim territories.

Nasrallah worked his way up the ranks of Hezbollah as the organization grew. He said that after serving as a fighter, he became its director in Baalbek, then throughout the Bekaa region and then in Beirut.

He became leader of Hezbollah in 1992 at the age of 32 after his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi was assassinated in an Israeli helicopter attack.

One of his first actions was to retaliate for the assassination of Musawi. He ordered rocket attacks in northern Israel that killed a girl, an Israeli security guard at the Israeli embassy in Turkey was killed by a car bomb, and a suicide bomber attacked the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 29 people.

Nasrallah also managed a low-intensity war with the Israeli forces, which ended with their withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. However, he suffered a personal loss when his eldest son Hadi was killed in a firefight with Israeli troops.

After the withdrawal, Nasrallah announced that Hezbollah had won the first Arab victory against Israel. He also promised that Hezbollah would not disarm and said it believed that “all Lebanese territory must be restored,” including the Shebaa Farms area.

Relative calm reigned until 2006, when Hezbollah militants launched a cross-border attack that killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others, triggering a massive Israeli response.

Israeli warplanes bombed Hezbollah strongholds in the south and southern suburbs of Beirut, while Hezbollah fired about 4,000 rockets into Israel. During the 34-day conflict, more than 1,125 Lebanese died, most of them civilians, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 45 civilians.

Nasrallah's home and offices were attacked by Israeli warplanes, but he survived unhurt.

In 2009, Nasrallah released a new political manifesto designed to highlight Hezbollah's “political vision.” It dropped references to an Islamic republic in the 1985 document, but maintained a hard line against Israel and the United States and reiterated that Hezbollah must keep its weapons despite a U.N. resolution banning them in southern Lebanon.

“People evolve. The whole world has changed in the last 24 years. Lebanon has changed. The world order has changed,” Nasrallah said.

Four years later, Nasrallah declared that Hezbollah was entering a “completely new phase” of its existence by sending fighters to Syria to help its Iranian-backed ally, President Bashar al-Assad, crush an uprising. “It is our fight and we are up to it,” he said.

Lebanese Sunni leaders accused Hezbollah of dragging the country into the war in Syria, and sectarian tensions worsened dramatically.

In 2019, a deep economic crisis in Lebanon sparked mass protests against a political elite long accused of corruption, waste, mismanagement and negligence. Nasrallah initially expressed sympathy for calls for reform, but his stance changed when protesters began demanding a complete overhaul of the political system.

On October 8, 2023 – the day after the unprecedented attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen that sparked the war in Gaza – previously sporadic fighting between Hezbollah and Israel escalated.

Hezbollah fired on Israeli positions in solidarity with the Palestinians.

In a speech in November, Nasrallah said the Hamas attack was “100% Palestinian, both in decision and execution,” but that the shootout between his group and Israel was “very important and significant.”

The group fired more than 8,000 rockets into northern Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. It also fired anti-tank missiles at armored vehicles and attacked military targets with explosive drones.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) responded with air strikes and tank and artillery fire on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon.

In his recent speech, Nasrallah accused Israel of detonating thousands of Hezbollah members' pagers and radios, killing 39 people and injuring thousands more, and said it had “crossed all red lines.” He acknowledged that the group had suffered an “unprecedented blow.”

Shortly thereafter, Israel dramatically escalated attacks on Hezbollah, launching waves of bombs that killed nearly 800 people.