Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel has claimed was killed in a strike on southern Beirut, turned Hezbollah into one of the most powerful paramilitary forces in the Middle East.
One of the founding members of the group formed four decades ago with the aid of Iran, Nasrallah ascended to the top of Hezbollah in 1992.
Born in 1960, Hassan Nasrallah grew up in Beirut’s eastern Bourj Hammoud neighborhood, where his father Abdul Karim ran a small greengrocer. He was the eldest of nine children.
Nasrallah spent his early adolescence under the shadow of Lebanon’s civil war.
He replaced his predecessor and mentor, Abbas Musawi, as secretary-general of Hezbollah, after he was killed by an Israeli helicopter strike.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Nasrallah rallied a group of fighters to resist the occupation – which would evolve into Hezbollah.
He joined the Amal movement, then a Shia militia, after Lebanon descended into civil war in 1975.
During Hassan Nasrallah’s 32-year reign as the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, he was responsible for the murder of many Israeli civilians and soldiers, and the planning and execution of thousands of terrorist activities.
One of his first actions was to retaliate to the killing of Musawi. He ordered rocket attacks into northern Israel that killed a girl, an Israeli security officer at the Israeli embassy in Turkey was killed by a car bomb and a suicide bomber struck the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 29 people.
Nasrallah also managed a low-intensity war with Israeli forces that ended with their withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, though he suffered a personal loss when his eldest son Hadi was killed in a firefight with Israeli troops.
There was relative calm until 2006, when Hezbollah militants launched a cross-border attack in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two others kidnapped, triggering a massive Israeli response.
Israeli warplanes bombed Hezbollah strongholds in the South and Beirut’s southern suburbs, while Hezbollah fired about 4,000 rockets at Israel. More than 1,125 Lebanese, most of them civilians, died during the 34-day conflict, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 45 civilians.
Nasrallah’s home and offices were targeted by Israeli warplanes, but he survived unscathed.
In 2009, Nasrallah issued a new political manifesto that sought to highlight Hezbollah’s “political vision”. It dropped the reference to an Islamic republic found in the 1985 document but maintained a tough line against Israel and the US and reiterated that Hezbollah needed to keep its weapons despite a UN resolution banning them in southern Lebanon.
Lebanese Sunni leaders accused Hezbollah of dragging the country into Syria’s war and sectarian tensions worsened dramatically.
