On Saturday morning, the Israeli military said that it had killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, alongside other commanders in a strike on Beirut. A few hours later, Hezbollah confirmed the news. As Robin Wright noted in The New Yorker, the Israeli government “rarely acknowledges its military operations,” but this time distributed a photo that it said showed Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, authorizing the strike from a hotel room in New York last week, shortly before addressing the UN. The strike was massive, destroying at least four residential buildings; yesterday, reporters from the Associated Press went to the scene and reported that smoke was still rising from the rubble. It’s not clear how many people were killed. In the international press fears of a wider war in the Middle East reverberated. Again.
The killing of Nasrallah was the latest escalation in fighting that had until recently simmered, if that’s at all the right word, since Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel after its ally Hamas attacked the country on October 7. (Both Hezbollah and Hamas are aligned with Iran; I wrote about the recent escalation last week.) Of course, in a broader sense, conflict between Israel and Hezbollah—which views Israel as a cancer that must be eliminated—dates back decades, with Nasrallah long at the heart of it. In the world’s media, his death has been covered as a seismic development, not only for the trajectory of the current war, but due to his huge influence right across the region. This influence was built, in part, using the tools of mass media, even as Nasrallah himself typically stayed in the shadows.
Following an impoverished upbringing in Beirut and religious studies at a Shiite seminary in Iraq, Nasrallah was an early member of Hezbollah in Lebanon in the eighties. (In the years after its founding, the group would, among other things, kidnap various foreign journalists including Terry Anderson of the Associated Press, who was held in captivity for seven years. In Hezbollah’s view, “people who go around asking questions in awkward and dangerous places have to be spies,” Anderson recalled later; he died earlier this year.) Nasrallah ascended to the leadership of Hezbollah in 1992, after his predecessor was killed in an Israeli strike. He would later tell Wright that he had long envisioned taking such a role: “Ever since I was 9 years old, I had plans for the day when I would start doing this,” he said. “My grandmother had a scarf. It was black, but a long one. I used to wrap it around my head and say to them that I’m a cleric, you need to pray behind me.” Wright described Nasrallah in 2006 as “a man of God, gun and government, a cross between Ayatollah Khomeini and Che Guevara, an Islamic populist as well as a charismatic guerrilla tactician.”
After taking over Hezbollah, Nasrallah spoke with several other interlocutors from the Western media—including Anderson, who interviewed him in 1995. (Nasrallah denied to Anderson that it was Hezbollah that had kidnapped him, and suggested that his detention was a fact of the war in which Lebanon was embroiled at the time.) In 2003, Ed Bradley, of CBS, traveled to Beirut to interview Nasrallah on camera for 60 Minutes, after a senior State Department official described Hezbollah as “maybe the A-team of terrorists,” to Al Qaeda’s “B-team.” The official promised to “go after these problems just like a high school wrestler goes after a match—we’re gonna take ’em down one at a time”—but when Bradley put the official’s remarks to him, Nasrallah insisted that he was no threat to the US. “I consider this to be an Israeli accusation coming out of an American mouth,” he said, “and nothing more.”
Nasrallah greeted Bradley’s cameras with a warm smile; Neil MacFarquhar, who interviewed Nasrallah for the New York Times the year before, recalls that they sat on the floor in a small room, where Nasrallah told him, “If you’re expecting me to say ‘Death to America,’ it’s not going to happen here because I use that for my rallies.” MacFarquhar also recalled the “extraordinary” security surrounding the interview: before entering, he was driven around the southern suburbs of Beirut in a blindfold, after which guards inspected “absolutely everything” in his possession; the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who visited in 2003, similarly noted that his “wedding ring, ballpoint pen and credit cards” were examined. Over the years, militants associated with Hezbollah have intimidated and attacked journalists the organization doesn’t like. In 2006, a Lebanese satirical show broadcast a mock interview with Nasrallah; in response, supporters of Hezbollah blocked a road to Beirut’s airport with burning tires. Leaders of Hezbollah defended their reaction, in the words of the New York Times Magazine, as a “spontaneous emotional response to the mocking of a cleric.”
A month or so later, Hezbollah conducted a raid into Israeli territory and kidnapped two soldiers—sparking a brutal thirty-four-day war. In the aftermath, Nasrallah told a Lebanese TV station that he regretted the toll the war had taken, and said that Hezbollah wouldn’t have kidnapped the soldiers if it had foreseen it. Per the Times, in the years following the war, Nasrallah “largely avoided public appearances and eschewed using a telephone out of concern that he would be assassinated.” In 2009, he presented a manifesto at a press conference and took questions, including from some outlets hostile to Hezbollah (as Josh Hersh, now of CJR, reported from Beirut at the time); in 2012, he gave what was reported to be his first direct interview in six years—on the first episode of a talk show hosted by the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that was aired by the Russian state broadcaster RT. But he conducted both of these appearances from a distance. (In the latter instance, it didn’t help that Assange was under house arrest in the UK.) Since then, Nasrallah had appeared a handful of times in public, but mostly communicated with the public via TV addresses. Last year, following October 7, thousands of supporters gathered in Beirut to watch him speak via a big screen. He last spoke ten days ago, after Israel apparently detonated communications devices belonging to Hezbollah fighters. This time, per CNN, there was no big crowd.
As the Associated Press noted following Nasrallah’s death, he long ago rose to “iconic status” in much of the Middle East, with Hezbollah building its own media apparatus to distribute his messages; as the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient–Le Jour put it over the weekend, he became “the voice and the face” of an Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance” to Israel and US influence in the region. MacFarquhar and Ben Hubbard wrote in the Times that he was “one of the Arab world’s most distinctive orators,” presenting “as less dour than most Shiite clerics, partly because of his roly-poly figure, a slight lisp and a propensity to crack jokes”; Wright noted in The New Yorker that he was once so popular that “shops sold DVDs of his speeches, and many Lebanese used lines from them as ringtones”; Ignatius reported in the Post, citing a Nasrallah biographer, that “as far away as Damascus you could buy key rings, shirts, buttons, bumper stickers and posters bearing Nasrallah’s face.” His death was met with mourning, in Lebanon and further afield. In Iran, newspaper front pages referred to him as a “great fighter” and “martyr of the Holy War.”
Not that Nasrallah was universally popular or revered—far from it. His popularity in the region waxed and waned over time, not least after Hezbollah backed up the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in that country’s civil war. In Iran, the security services warned certain journalists not to comment on Nasrallah’s death, according to one exiled news site; in Lebanon, he was the “most loved” personality, in the words of L’Orient–Le Jour—but also the “most hated.” The polarized response to his death played out on social media, where supporters posted clips from his speeches and opponents posted images of Hezbollah’s alleged victims, including the former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005. As Hassan Hassan and Kareem Shaheen put it in New Lines magazine, a “duality will likely surround Nasrallah’s memory.”
For Hassan and Shaheen, the significance of Nasrallah’s death surpasses that of other regional leaders, up to and including Osama bin Laden; Nasrallah’s “charisma and his ability to fuse the roles of military commander, political leader and cultural icon,” they argue, “placed him in a different league.” It’s not yet clear where Hezbollah will go from here, or how the group might fight back, but Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told The New Yorker’s Wright that Israel’s bombings of Beirut have “crossed the threshold of all-out war” and sought “to deliver a mortal blow” to Hezbollah, and that the group might respond “as if this war had no limit, no ceiling and no redlines.”
Today, Israeli strikes in Lebanon continued—including, for the first time since 2006, in the center of Beirut—and Israeli officials briefed the press that commando units have been making brief incursions into Lebanese territory in preparation for a possible broader ground offensive. Meanwhile, Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy leader, addressed Nasrallah’s killing publicly for the first time. He spoke via video, from an unknown location.
Other notable stories:
- The devastation wreaked by Hurricane Helene—which made landfall in Florida late last week before ripping across much of the Southeast—is coming into focus; at least ninety-five people have been killed across six states, a total that seems sure to rise, while thousands still lack access to power and clean drinking water. Politico notes “that some of the most shocking images of destruction have been captured” in Asheville, North Carolina—and that “that’s just one well-populated area with a robust media presence and some working communications links.” Some critics suggested over the weekend that the damage from the storm has not been adequately covered, but others noted that reporters on the ground are facing the same challenges as their communities—and have, in many places, already done indispensable work.
- As anticipation builds for tomorrow’s vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz on CBS, the AP’s David Bauder reports that the moderators will not fact-check the candidates’ claims and that their mics will likely remain live the whole time—both departures from the recent presidential debate on ABC. In other TV-news news, Amazon’s Prime Video service is reportedly nearing a deal with Brian Williams, the former MSNBC anchor, to host coverage on election night—the streamer’s first foray into live news. And, if Amazon is getting into the TV news business (at least for one night), Scripps is going the other way: the company announced that it will shutter its eponymous twenty-four-hour news channel, costing more than two hundred jobs.
- Last week, a federal bankruptcy judge ruled that the assets of Alex Jones’s InfoWars conspiracy empire can be auctioned off—the latest result of litigation holding Jones accountable for his repeated false claims that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. Now Semafor’s Max Tani reports that progressive critics of Jones and groups dedicated to fighting misinformation are interested in buying the platform, spying “an opportunity to transform an infamous source of online hatred, conspiracies, and oddities into something quite different”—though Tani notes that liberal bidders will “likely have to overcome efforts by Jones himself to maintain control of his site.”
- In an op-ed for the New York Times, Lilia Yapparova, a journalist with the independent Russian news site Meduza (which is based in exile in Latvia), writes about the cases of “low-profile dissenters” against the war in Ukraine who have been “subjected to surveillance and kidnappings” despite moving abroad. “Their repression happens in silence, away from the spotlight and often with the tacit consent or inadequate prevention” of their host countries, Yapparova writes. “The Kremlin is hunting down ordinary people across the world, and nobody seems to care.”
- And in recent days, two news stories have explored how empty old newspaper boxes are being used in new ways. The Washington Post’s Sydney Page reports on a movement, known as “Free Blockbuster,” that is filling such boxes with DVDs and VHS tapes that people are free to take. And for the Associated Press, Leah Willingham writes that boxes are also being filled with Narcan—a drug used to treat opioid overdoses, which the Food and Drug Administration approved for distribution without a prescription last year.
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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.