Robin Wright
Hassan Nasrallah, the iconic leader of Hezbollah who captivated many in the Arab world with his charismatic oratory, was killed on Friday in an Israeli attack on Beirut. At the apex of his career, the cleric was so popular that shops sold DVDs of his speeches, and many Lebanese used lines from them as ringtones. But he was also loathed or feared by rivals for the formidable power he wielded, both politically and militarily, well beyond Lebanon’s borders. Nasrallah’s death will be a political earthquake for Hezbollah, a Shiite movement that he built from clandestine terrorist cells thirty-two years ago into a powerful political party, network of social services, and the most heavily armed non-state militia in the world today. It could have a rippling impact across the volatile Middle East, with implications for the United States, too. The Biden Administration, which had already sent more troops in response to increasing violence between Israel and Hezbollah, moved quickly to assess the safety of U.S. military personnel and diplomats in the region.
The bombings, which killed other top Hezbollah officials, and civilians, in the Lebanese capital, “crossed the threshold of all-out war” and sought “to deliver a mortal blow,” Firas Maksad, a Lebanese American who is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, told me. Hezbollah is “reeling” from the wave of Israeli military and intelligence operations conducted in the past two weeks, he added. Its military wing has been decapitated in the targeted assassinations of top commanders. Israel has also carried out extensive air strikes on what it has said were weapons caches and other military infrastructure, and has also been blamed for sabotage of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah fighters and followers that injured thousands.
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