Robert F. Worth
At the end of September, when Israel’s campaign to destroy Hezbollah was reaching its height, I met one of the group’s supporters in a seaside café in western Beirut. He was a middle-aged man with a thin white beard and the spent look of someone who had not slept for days. He was an academic of sorts, not a fighter, but his ties to Hezbollah were deep and long-standing.
“We’re in a big battle, like never before,” he said as soon as he sat down. “Hezbollah has not faced what Israel is now waging, not in 1982, not in 2006. It is a total war.”
He talked quickly, anxiously. Only a few days earlier, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, had been killed in a bombardment of the group’s south-Beirut stronghold, and my companion—he asked that I not name him, because he is not authorized to speak on the group’s behalf—made clear that he was still in a state of shock and grief. Israeli bombs were destroying houses and rocket-launch sites across southern Lebanon, in the Bekaa valley, and in Beirut; many of his friends had been killed or maimed. He had even heard talk of something that had seemed unthinkable until now: Iran, which created Hezbollah around 1982, might cut off support to the group, a decision that could reconfigure the politics of the Middle East.
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