Hassan Nasrallah’s death will reshape Lebanon and the Middle East

THE SILENCE was deafening. By mid-afternoon on September 28th it had been almost 24 hours since Israel tried to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia. The Israeli army declared him dead that morning. But Hizbullah said nothing, neither about his fate nor about the enormous strike on its headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Even its media outriders, usually a pugnacious bunch, were stunned speechless. The group finally confirmed his death at around 2.30pm.

By then, Israeli jets had already carried out waves of additional air strikes across Lebanon. It said these were aimed at destroying more of Hizbullah’s rocket-and-missile arsenal, including anti-ship missiles that could be fired at natural-gas platforms in the Mediterranean. Israel sees itself as being in a race against time to destroy what it can before its enemy can regroup.

Hizbullah fired dozens of rockets at northern Israel the morning after Mr Nasrallah was killed, but that was no different from its tactics in previous days. The group is in disarray. It is premature to speculate about how it might try to retaliate, because even its surviving leaders probably do not know the answer yet. But it is not too early to conclude that Mr Nasrallah’s death will reshape Lebanon, and the region, in ways that would have been unthinkable a year ago.

Since October 8th, when Hizbullah started firing rockets at northern Israel in solidarity with Gaza, Mr Nasrallah thought he could sustain an open-ended but limited border conflict. The unwritten rules of engagement lasted until July 27th, when a Hizbullah rocket, aimed at an Israeli army base, overshot its target and killed 12 children on a football pitch.

By then Israel’s operations in Gaza were winding down, and Binyamin Netanyahu’s government took the opportunity to change the rules with Hizbullah. It assassinated Fuad Shukr, the group’s military chief, three days later. The strike was not a one-off, but rather the prelude to a series of attacks in September, including the detonation of thousands of booby-trapped pagers and a campaign of air strikes against Hizbullah’s rocket-and-missile arsenal.

The Israeli army began preparing for the strike that killed Mr Nasrallah two days prior. When it learned that the Hizbullah leader had arrived at his headquarters for a meeting, the strike was approved. It was the result of 18 years of planning. Israel had tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him during the war in 2006, and afterwards devoted much of its intelligence-gathering resources to penetrating Hizbullah and its communications with Iran.

His possible successors include Naim Qassem, his deputy, and Hashem Safieddine, who heads the group’s executive council. The former is a 71-year-old functionary, hardly an inspiring choice. Mr Safieddine seems the likelier candidate. A decade younger than Mr Qassem, he is a cousin of Mr Nasrallah and has close ties to Iran: his son is married to the daughter of Qassem Suleimani, a storied Iranian general assassinated by America in 2020.

Whoever takes the reins will face the most precarious moment in Hizbullah’s four-decade history. It is not just that Israel has wiped out almost its entire military leadership, erasing centuries of experience in a matter of two months. It is also that the group stands humiliated in front of a Lebanese public that had already come to resent Hizbullah for its heavy-handed domination of politics.

The “Party of God” is the chief guardian of Lebanon’s grubby political order: its thugs helped to quash a popular pro-reform uprising in 2019, and two years later it strong-armed the state into halting an investigation of a massive explosion at Beirut’s port. Few will cheer Mr Nasrallah’s death when Israeli jets are killing scores of civilians across the country, but many will feel a touch of Schadenfreude. There may be an opportunity now to loosen Hizbullah’s stranglehold—although, as ever in Lebanon, that will raise fears of sectarian strife.

For years Hizbullah has been a loyal servant of Iran. The group played a crucial role in propping up Bashar al-Assad’s bloody regime in Syria, and it provides training and guidance to other Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Yemen. No surprise, then, that some Arabs reacted with glee to Mr Nasrallah’s death. In Idlib, a rebel-held pocket of Syria, people handed out sweets to celebrate: Syrians will remember Mr Nasrallah as a butcher whose men starved and killed them. The Gulf states have kept mum, but it is a safe bet that champagne corks popped in palaces in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

That service gave Mr Nasrallah every reason to expect that Iran would come to his aid, especially after Israel carried out the astonishing assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas. That has not happened, in part because Iran’s leaders fear that they too have been infiltrated by Israel. They also worry about how a public show of support for groups like Hizbullah might affect their standing at home. Faced with growing discontent over a moribund economy, the regime does not want to be seen investing more resources in a proxy that seems to be losing its war against Israel.

On September 28th Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, announced that he would make an “important statement” on developments in Lebanon. When the statement came, it was hollow. Israel’s attacks would not hurt Hizbullah’s “solid structure”, Mr Khamenei opined, and the group would continue to lead the fight against Israel.

In the longer term, though, the events of the past two weeks could reshape Iran’s security policy. For decades it saw militias as its chief deterrent against Israeli or American attack; now it is watching its most powerful militia being eradicated. Some Iranians have already begun to argue that their country should build and test a nuclear bomb: if conventional deterrence has failed, only nuclear deterrence remains.

Mr Khamenei has long preferred to stay just below the nuclear threshold. Recent events may change his mind. Even if they do not, he is 85; the decision will not always be his to make. Yet such a move would put Iran in something of a catch-22. It once relied on Hizbullah to shield its nuclear facilities from attack; if it dashes for a bomb because it can no longer rely on Hizbullah, those facilities will be exposed.

Watching the news in the wee hours of Saturday morning, one Arab official saw a parallel with the Six Day War in 1967. It was not just because Israel had dealt Hizbullah a fast, fierce blow, but also because both conflicts seemed to shatter illusions that had long governed the region.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic ruler of mid-century Egypt, cultivated a myth of martial prowess. The swift Israeli victory in 1967 put paid to that illusion (it did not help that half of Egypt’s army was tied down in a futile war in Yemen). That was the beginning of the end of conflicts between Israel and Arab states, and of the Arab-nationalist ideology that Nasser championed. Egypt’s prestige never recovered.

Mr Nasrallah spent years talking up the “axis of resistance”, a constellation of Iran-backed militias committed to fighting Israel and America. He said they were strong and united. Then Israel decapitated the most powerful militia in a matter of weeks, while Iran sat idle. Hizbullah is not about to disappear: it has thousands of armed partisans, an arsenal of long-range missiles and a base of popular support. But the militia that emerges from this war will be very different from the one that entered it.

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