The Israeli military has said it has killed Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in a series of strikes on a southern suburb of Beirut. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had targeted Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in the Lebanese capital.
The announcement on Saturday morning came after overnight speculation about the fate of Nasrallah, who has led Hezbollah for three decades.
According to sources in Israel, the Israeli security cabinet had previously pulled back from plans to kill Nasrallah, but having established that he was due to attend a meeting at the command complex, approved a plan to kill him.
Reports in the Israeli media said the assassination had been carried out by a squadron of F15I jets equipped with bunker-busting bombs.
The news was initially broken by the military spokesperson Lt Col Nadav Shoshani in a brief post on X saying: “Hassan Nasrallah is dead.”
In a statement issued shortly afterwards, the IDF said Nasrallah had been killed along with Hezbollah’s southern front commander, Ali Karki, and other commanders attending the meeting.
“Following precise intelligence from the IDF and the Israeli security establishment, IAF [Israeli air force] fighter jets conducted a targeted strike on the central headquarters of the Hezbollah terrorist organisation which was located underground, embedded under a residential building in the Dahieh area of Beirut,” the statement said.
“The strike was conducted while Hezbollah’s senior chain of command was operating from the headquarters and advancing terrorist activities against citizens of the state of Israel.”
The Israeli military said it was on “high alert” and prepared for a wider escalation.
Hezbollah has yet to make a statement on Israel’s claim that it had killed Nasrallah.
In Lebanon, residents reacted to the news of the assassination with shock, unwilling to believe Israel’s claims.
In reports of the killing, one resident from Dahieh said: “I’m in despair, I don’t know what to feel.” Other supporters of the group struck a braver tone. “The group will go on, it’s not just centred around one leader,” Fatimah, a resident of Dahieh, said from her car in downtown Beirut where she has been sleeping with her husband and son since the strikes on Dahieh started last week.
The second in command in the organisation, Hashem Safieddine, who could succeed Nasrallah, was reportedly also targeted in Israel’s airstrike on Beirut on Friday. It is not known how the next leader of Hezbollah might govern the group and how they will choose to retaliate for Nasrallah’s killing.
The IDF’s chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, said on Saturday that the elimination of Nasrallah was “not the end of our toolbox”, indicating that more strikes were planned. He said the strike targeting the Hezbollah leadership was the result of a long period of preparation.
The military said it was mobilising additional reserve soldiers as tensions escalated with Lebanon, activating three battalions of reserve soldiers to serve across Israel. It sent two brigades to northern Israel earlier in the week to train for a possible ground invasion.
The killing threatens to involve Iran, Hezbollah’s principal backer, which thus far has been reluctant to involve itself in the fighting with Israel. Iran’s embassy in Beirut said on X that the strike on Dahieh was a “dangerous game changing escalation that changes the rules of the game” and warned that its perpetrator would be “punished appropriately”.
Shortly before the strike, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed during a speech at the UN general assembly to keep fighting in Lebanon, crushing hopes that Israel would agree to a 21-day truce proposed by the US and France.
“There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach, and that is true of the entire Middle East,” Netanyahu said in New York.
Among Hezbollah’s constituents, Nasrallah was viewed with a prophet-like fervour, seen as the liberator of south Lebanon from Israel’s 18-year occupation. At Hezbollah rallies, supporters chant “Labaik ya Hussein and Labaik ya Nasrallah” – “O Hussein, O Nasrallah, I am here for you” – shouting their devotion to Hussein, a key figure in Shia Islam, and Nasrallah.
When Nasrallah spoke in televised addresses, supporters would tune in for guidance on political, spiritual and cultural issues. Many Lebanese attribute the failure of the 2019 revolution to a speech by Nasrallah, when he told his supporters it was time to get off the streets, depriving the protest movement of its non-sectarian character.
Whoever replaces the enigmatic former secretary general will have to deal with an organisation that over the last year, has lost almost every senior military leader and is on the back foot from the Israeli bombing campaign.
The death also throws the fate of the Lebanese state into question. Hezbollah is deeply embedded in the state, controlling a key share of parliament and exercising influence over several ministries, such as the directorate of general security. Lebanon’s foreign policy is largely dictated by the group, particularly when it comes to neighbouring states such as Israel.
Hezbollah began firing into Israel one day after Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.
Israel has in recent days shifted the focus of its operation from Gaza to Lebanon, where heavy bombing has killed more than 700 people and displaced about 118,000.
