Peter Beaumont
In 1992, Israeli media celebrated an assassination. The man killed then was Abbas al-Musawi, the secretary general of Hezbollah, whose convoy was struck by Israeli helicopters.
Then, as now, Israeli analysts speculated that Musawi’s death might possibly portend the end of Hezbollah, which had been founded 10 years earlier, after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
The opposite would turn out to be true. Musawi was succeeded by his 31-year-old protege, Hassan Nasrallah, who went on to lead and build Hezbollah for three decades, right until his own assassination by Israel on Friday.
Nasrallah’s killing, in a subterranean Hezbollah headquarters in a southern suburb of Beirut, has inevitably focused attention on two questions: whether Israel’s long-term policy of assassinations is effective, and what the killing of Nasrallah and other senior Hezbollah commanders means for the group.
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