Israeli attack to kill Nasrallah, who is the leader of Hezbollah

Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader whom Israel wanted to hit with the raid on Beirut today, was born on August 31, 1960 into a modest family of nine children in Beirut. His family came from the village of Bazouriyé in southern Lebanon.

As a teenager he studied theology in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Iraq, but had to leave during the crackdown on Shiites led by then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Returning to Lebanon, he joined the Shiite Amal movement, but separated from it during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 to become part of the founding nucleus of Hezbollah.

Married with five children, Hassan Nasrallah speaks fluent Farsi. He wears the black turban of the Sayyed, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. In a rare interview, he said he played football in his youth and still loves Maradona.

Although he is not technically an official public figure in Lebanon, Nasrallah is one of the country’s most prominent politicians. He decides on war or peace, is at the head of powerful institutions and a formidable, heavily armed militia. A sworn enemy of Israel, he has rarely appeared in public since the war that pitted his movement against the Israeli army in the summer of 2006, and his whereabouts are kept secret. But the whole country is tuned into his long speeches, broadcast live, in which he uses humor, but also does not hesitate to threaten his enemies. His followers call him “The Sayyed” or “Abu Hadi” – in Arabic the father of Hadi, the son killed in clashes with Israeli troops in 1997.

Hassan Nasrallah has been the charismatic leader of Hezbollah since 1992when he succeeded Abbas Moussaoui, who was assassinated by Israel. Since then, he has transformed Hezbollah, armed and financed by Iran, into a valued political force represented in parliament and government. At the same time, he has developed his group’s arsenal, which he says has 100,000 fighters and powerful weapons, including high-precision missiles.

Hezbollah – whose military wing is on the list of terrorist organizations of the EU and the United States – is the only group to have kept its weapons at the end of the Lebanese war (1975-1990) in the name of “resistance against Israel”, the whose army progressively withdrew from Lebanon until evacuating the south of the country in May 2000, after 22 years of occupation.

At the end of the 2006 war, Hassan Nasrallah proclaimed a “divine victory” and established himself as a true hero in the Arab world. But he alienated several factions in Lebanon when his party was accused of involvement in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 and then when his gunmen briefly took control of the capital in May 2008. Today Hezbollah it is chief among Iran’s allies in the region, grouped within an “axis of resistance” that includes armed groups in Iraq and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, as well as the Palestinian Hamas. Since the start of the war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel, Hassan Nasrallah has opened the southern Lebanese front to support his Palestinian ally, but has so far tried to avoid a full-scale war with Israel.