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 could feel the moment’s gravity almost as soon as the bombs struck on Friday evening—the biggest bombardment Israel has unleashed on Beirut since Hezbollah attacked Israel last October 8. I heard and felt the attack miles away from where they struck in the city’s southern suburbs. The deep sound like rippling thunder that shook the ground lasted several seconds. People on the street glanced anxiously skyward and clutched their phones, calling to check on their loved ones. Car alarms went off.
The rumors began almost instantly: that Nasrallah was dead, that he was in hiding, that a civil war was brewing. The same TV clips of the bomb site ran throughout the night and the next morning, showing a mound of flaming rubble and twisted steel. If Israel had, as it claimed, scored a direct hit on Hezbollah’s underground command center, believing that anyone inside could have survived seemed impossible.
Beirut was a city transformed on Saturday, the main squares full of dazed people who had fled all of the places Israel had bombed overnight, from Beirut to the Bekaa valley to southern Lebanon. Families huddled together, their eyes hollow and fearful. No safe places were left, it seemed. Some of the displaced were Syrians, who had fled the horror of their own country’s civil war a decade ago and were now left homeless again.
Nasrallah was such a central figure for so long—the most powerful man in Lebanon and Israel’s greatest foe; loved, hated, and imitated by anti-Western insurgent leaders across the Middle East—that his absence left many Lebanese feeling profoundly rudderless. There were occasional bursts of gunfire throughout the day. Whether it came from mourners or celebrators was impossible to say.
Just after Nasrallah’s death was announced by Hezbollah on Saturday afternoon, impromptu rallies broke out, with people chanting in unison Labayka, ya Nasrallah—“We are at your service, Nasrallah.” Ordinarily, any Hezbollah activity is carefully organized by the party itself, a strict and hierarchical organization. But with the group leaderless and in disarray, no one seemed to know where to turn for guidance.
Some Hezbollah loyalists directed their anger at Iran, the group’s patron and arms supplier, which has not come to their aid after weeks of punishing airstrikes. “Iran sold us out,” I heard one man say in a Beirut café Saturday afternoon, a phrase that was widely repeated on social media among Hezbollah sympathizers. Other supporters of Hezbollah appeared to be lashing out at Syrian refugees, whom they suspect of providing targeting information to Israel. Videos circulated online, claiming to show Shiite men brutally beating Syrians with truncheons.
“It’s an earthquake that has restructured power perceptions,” Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute, told me. Those who might benefit from Nasrallah’s death include Nabih Berri, the leader of the rival Shiite party known as Amal, and former Christian warlords such as Samir Geagea, Salem said.
Outside of Lebanon, some of Hezbollah’s enemies openly celebrated. In Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province, people danced in the streets and handed out sweets on Friday night as rumors of Nasrallah’s death spread. Hezbollah helped prop up Bashar al-Assad’s regime during the Syrian civil war and killed many opposition fighters. Some Iranians who oppose their country’s Islamist government posted derisive comments online, as did members of the Iranian diaspora. Iran has diverted enormous amounts of its own people’s money to support Hezbollah, Hamas, and other groups around the Middle East that oppose Israel.
Most of Hezbollah’s domestic enemies maintained a wary silence on Saturday. But in Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut, a young man walked past a group of displaced people—many of them Hezbollah loyalists—and shouted “Ya Sayyid, Qus Ummak,” an obscene insult that translates roughly to “Nasrallah, fuck your mother.” Instantly, angry shouts rang out in response, and someone burst from the crowd by a nearby mosque and shot the young man in the leg.
This episode—relayed to me by several witnesses—frightened the displaced people in the square, though the dominant emotion was still shock and sorrow.
Nasrallah “was a great man; there was no one like him,” a 41-year-old woman named Zahra told me. “We are afraid of where things will go now. And we could be bombed in the streets.”
Zahra’s face was wet with tears. Dressed in a black-and-white track suit and a headscarf, she sat alongside her two sisters. They had come from the Dahieh—the southern suburb where Hezbollah is based and where the bombs had struck—early that morning. No one was willing to give them a ride, and they ended up paying 4 million Lebanese lire—more than $44—to a taxi driver for the 15-minute drive to Martyr’s Square. Petty war profiteering is rampant in Lebanon.
As Zahra spoke, her sister Munayda interrupted periodically to repeat: “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he’s dead.”
Many other people said the same thing, on the streets and on social media. One insidious consequence of Israel’s year-long campaign of technology-enabled strikes on Lebanon—including the detonation of thousands of booby-trapped electronic pagers earlier this month—is that no one trusts their phones. People have become less connected, more suspicious, more fearful.
The bomb that killed Nasrallah also destroyed half a dozen residential towers, and appears likely to have killed large numbers of people. But information trickled out slowly over the weekend because Hezbollah blocked off the area for security reasons.
One of the displaced people in Martyr’s Square, a 39-year-old Palestinian woman named Najah who had been living in the Dahieh, told me she had narrowly survived the bombing. She was at home with her three children when the series of bombs struck just before sunset, and “it felt like the missiles were right over our heads,” she said. She crumpled to the floor, she said, expecting another bomb to kill her and her children. When that didn’t happen, she gathered up the kids and ran outside. “It was chaos. The streets were full of people; we were running,” she said. “The sounds of the bombs were still in my head.”
Like many others, Najah wept openly as she spoke of Nasrallah. “He’s defending us as Palestinians,” she said. “He didn’t accept injustice.”
Nasrallah may have presented himself as a champion of the Palestinian cause, but he also made large swaths of his country into a forward base for Iran’s Islamic republic. And he was willing to sacrifice anyone who got in his way, including a string of prominent Lebanese politicians and journalists. In 2005, an enormous car bomb on Beirut’s seafront killed Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 other people. A team of international investigators concluded that Hezbollah members were responsible for the bombing.
Yet Nasrallah was admired even by some who resented the way he held the Lebanese state hostage for decades. He had charm, unlike so many other leaders in a region full of potbellied Islamist prigs and brutal dictators. He was recognized across the Arab world for delivering elegantly composed speeches, starting out calmly and moving toward a finger-wagging vehemence. Along the way he could be funny, even impish, as he relentlessly promoted hatred and violence. And he had an instinct for the dramatic.
During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the movement timed the release of one of his prerecorded statements to coincide with a missile attack on one of Israel’s vessels. “The surprises that I have promised you will start now,” Nasrallah told his audience. “Now in the middle of the sea, facing Beirut, the Israeli warship … look at it burning.”
Everyone conceded the sincerity of Nasrallah’s zeal, even if its results—a long series of destructive wars and terrorist bombings—was appalling. In 1997, Nasrallah gave a speech just hours after his eldest son was killed in a clash with Israeli soldiers. He did not dwell on his son’s death, but his face registered a battle to conceal his emotions as he spoke. “My son the martyr chose this road by his own will,” he said.
Whether or not that was true of his son, it was certainly true of Nasrallah.
