Terror’s Shadow Lifts: A Sudden Fall from Power

B EIRUT, Lebanon (AP).— The Lebanese political-paramilitary group Hezbollah confirmed yesterday that its leader and one of its founders, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in a suburb in the south of the Lebanese capital, Beirut. .

The death of the leader of the powerful political-paramilitary group shocked Lebanon and the Middle East, where he was a dominant political and military figure for more than three decades.

Nasrallah, linked by Israel to numerous deadly attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets, had been on Israel’s blacklist for decades.

His death is undoubtedly the largest and most significant targeted assassination carried out by Israel in years, and marks a significant escalation of the war in the Middle East.

Hezbollah is backed by Iran, Israel’s main enemy in the region.

Israeli military forces said they carried out a precise airstrike the day before yesterday while Hezbollah leaders were meeting at their headquarters in Dahiyeh, south of Beirut.

Immediately after Hezbollah’s confirmation, people began shooting in the air in Beirut and throughout Lebanon to mourn Nasrallah’s death.

“I wish they were our children and not you, Sayyid!” said one woman, using an honorific for Nasrallah, as she hugged her baby in the western city of Baabda.

“We don’t believe they killed him,” a woman dressed in black exclaimed through tears to al-Manar television in Bekaa, western Lebanon. “We don’t believe it. “We left our homes and came here for him and for the resistance.”

In his first public statements since the assassination, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s attack on Nasrallah was “an essential condition for achieving the objectives we have set for ourselves.”

“He was not just another terrorist. He was the number one terrorist,” he added.

Netanyahu noted that Nasrallah’s assassination would help displaced Israelis return to their homes in the north and put pressure on Hamas to release Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip. But given the threat of retaliation, he stressed that they would soon bring “significant challenges” and warned Iran not to try to attack.

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