Israel has killed Hizbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in a massive strike on Beirut, in the latest in a series of devastating blows to the Lebanese militant group.

The strike in a densely populated residential neighbourhood in southern Beirut was part of an intense bombardment carried out by Israeli forces on Friday and marked a dramatic escalation of Israel’s offensive against Hizbollah.

The Lebanese group confirmed Nasrallah’s death in a statement on Saturday, saying he had joined the group’s long list of “martyrs”. It said its leadership would continue to battle against Israel “in support of Gaza and Palestine, and in defence of Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people”.

Speaking late on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “Nasrallah’s killing was a necessary step toward achieving the goals we have set,” including “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come”.

He added that the “work is not yet done”, warning Israelis that they “will face significant challenges in the days ahead”.

He also issued a warning to Israel’s adversaries. “There is nowhere in Iran or the Middle East beyond the reach of the long arm of Israel, and today you know how true that is,” Netanyahu said.

Herzi Halevi, chief of the general staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said the strike did not mark the conclusion of Israel’s operations. “This is not the end of our toolbox,” he said. “The message is simple: anyone who threatens the citizens of Israel — we will know how to reach them.”

US President Joe Biden said Nasrallah’s death was “a measure of justice for his many victims”.

“The United States fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Hizbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups,” he said in a statement released on Saturday. “Ultimately, our aim is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means.”

It was time to conclude deals to end the conflict in both Gaza and Lebanon, Biden added.

Israel claimed the strike had also killed the head of Hizbollah’s southern front, Ali Karaki, and other senior commanders. It was the latest in a succession of debilitating Israeli attacks on Iranian-backed Hizbollah’s chain of command.

A senior commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, Abbas Nilforoushan, who was in a meeting with Nasrallah was also killed, an Iranian official told the Financial Times. The death of the commander and Nasrallah, one of Iran’s closest allies, raised the risk of retaliation by the Islamic republic.

On Friday, Lebanese officials warned an Iranian cargo plane to leave the country’s airspace because of the risk Israel could target it, the Iranian official said. The Israeli military had said Israeli air force planes were “patrolling the area of Beirut airport” and would not allow “hostile flights with weapons to land” there.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the fate of the Middle East “will be determined by resistance forces, the foremost of which is Hizbollah”.

He added that the group’s “solid structure cannot be significantly damaged” by “Zionist criminals” who he said had demonstrated their “short-minded and stupid policies”.

He urged all Muslims to stand by Hizbollah in its fight against “an occupying and vicious regime”.

At least 11 people were killed and 108 injured in the strike that killed Nasrallah, Lebanon’s health ministry said. That figure was expected to rise as rescue workers continued searching for survivors.

On Saturday, explosions were heard in Beirut as Israel continued to strike Hizbollah targets and announced it had killed a top member of the group’s intelligence department responsible for selecting targets in Israel.

The Israeli military also posted warnings on social media telling Lebanese to evacuate the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

The IDF said it had intercepted a missile fired from Yemen that set off air raid sirens across central Israel. Late on Saturday, sirens also sounded in parts of Jerusalem, as the IDF reported a rocket incoming from Lebanon.

Lebanese leaders from across the political spectrum called for unity, reflecting concerns that the fragile nation could slide into civil strife in the wake of Nasrallah’s assassination.

“We differed a great deal with the deceased and his party and we rarely found common ground, but Lebanon was a tent for all, and in this deeply difficult time our unity and solidarity is fundamental,” Saad Hariri, former prime minister, said in a statement.

Nasrallah’s death capped a disastrous two weeks for Hizbollah during which it has sustained the heaviest succession of blows in its four decades of existence.

Residents of Beirut said the Israeli bombing raids on Friday night and during the early hours of Saturday had been some of the most intense in the city since Israel and Hizbollah fought a 34-day war in 2006.

Explosions lit up the sky throughout the night and threw huge clouds of dust into the air. Hundreds of people fled the south of the city, where Hizbollah is entrenched, to seek shelter on beaches and in public squares.

Over the past two weeks, Israel has escalated its offensive against the militant group, killing a string of its senior commanders. This week it embarked on an intense bombardment of sites across Lebanon that killed more than 600 people and displaced more than 90,000.

On Wednesday, Israel called up two reserve brigades for “operational missions” in the north of the country, with Halevi telling troops to prepare for a possible ground offensive in Lebanon.

The Israeli military said it was continuing its bombardment on Saturday, carrying out “extensive” bombing raids in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon as well as striking more targets in Beirut, after warning civilians in some densely populated neighbourhoods to evacuate.

Additional reporting by Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran and Andrew England in London

After a string of blunders, misrepresentations and outright fabrications that have dogged embattled vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance on the campaign as Donald Trump’s running mate, the Ohio Republican is deploying his MAGA fans to run interference for him when confronted with reporters’ questions.

According to a report from Politico’s Adam Wren, there has been a noticeable change at “historically unpopular” Vance’s sparsely-attended rallies where the candidate picks out a reporter to ask him a question and then the pro-Vance crowd surrounding him proceeds to boo and drown out his inquisitor.

Case in point, Wren wrote, “Inside an open-air barn at the Northwest Michigan Fairgrounds, Vance, who favors questions from local reporters before national ones at his events, called on the Traverse City Record-Eagle reporter, who identified himself as the ‘hometown’ scribe. Before he even got his question out — a relatively anodyne one about housing costs — the reporter endured a hail of boos as the Republican vice presidential nominee smiled” and then commented, “You’re allowed to ask your question; they’re allowed to tell you how they think about it. That’s OK. This is America.”

ALSO READ: ‘I want Vance to apologize’: We went to Springfield and found community hurt — and divided

According to the reporter in that instance, 65-year-old Peter Kobs, Vance has his own Greek chorus doing his bidding.

“The Greek chorus is there to amplify and, you know, put emotion in it. But hating the media is a juvenile approach to politics,” he stated.

According to Jeff Timmer of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, Vance is insulating himself after a series of mistakes and awkward encounters – such as a disastrous visit to a donut shop that went viral — in front of the press.

“He was so bad without a supporting cast, they had to kind of wrap him in this bubble wrap. That’s what the people backing him there are doing. It’s bubble wrap to protect them from smashing his head,” he colorfully explained.

According to Robert Schwartz, a “Haley Voters for Harris” Republican, Vance’s latest tactic “feels a little hostile.”

“I would say it’s important for the candidates to be able to answer questions. So I think that’s a good thing. But using our independent media as a prop to get boo lines? Most Americans rely on the media to ask these questions,” he suggested.

You can read more here.

For more than three decades, Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whom Israel killed in an air strike, oversaw the Shia Islamist movement’s transformation from a guerrilla group into the Middle East’s most powerful transnational paramilitary force. 

In his 32 years at the helm of Hizbollah, the 64-year-old cleric was credited with making it the pre-eminent force in Iran’s regional network of proxies known as the axis of resistance. 

This gave Nasrallah an unrivalled position as both a public face and crucial strategist in the network — “more junior partner than proxy” in the axis, according to Hizbollah expert Amal Saad.

Rarely seen without his clerical garb, Nasrallah was viewed as one of the most important figures in the axis, second only to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, following the US assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020.  

Nasrallah’s forces helped train fighters from Hamas, as well as other members of the Iran axis, including Iraq’s Shia militias and Yemen’s Houthis.

He will be remembered among his supporters for standing up to Israel and the US, and restoring Arab might. His enemies will point out that he was the leader of what they consider a terrorist organisation, which furthered Iran’s geopolitical agenda and was accused of widespread atrocities, both at home and abroad.

In Lebanon, Hizbollah is referred to as “a state within a state”, with a parallel network of social services that rival those of the government it has worked for decades to undermine. 

Nasrallah was reviled by many in Lebanon’s Christian and Sunni communities, who blamed him for eroding the nation’s state institutions, putting Iran’s interests ahead of the country’s and turning his movement’s weapons inwards to quash dissent and opposition.

He was also loathed by many Syrians, after Hizbollah fighters helped president Bashar al-Assad’s regime brutally crush the opposition after civil war erupted in Syria in the wake of a 2011 popular uprising.

All the while, Nasrallah crafted his public image, weaponising his charisma and his battlefield victories to hone a cult of personality that led his supporters to revere him as near-omnipotent.

His face appears on billboards and key chains, mugs and candlelit shrines. Lebanese routinely trade Nasrallah stickers on WhatsApp while snippets of his speeches are often turned into memes. 

The portrait painted by people who knew Nasrallah or met him over the past 40 years is of a strategic thinker with a commanding presence, a man feared and admired in equal measure, revered by Islamist militants and Middle Eastern tyrants.

Very few people met him in person in recent decades. Those who have described Nasrallah as courteous, perceptive and funny.

A powerful orator, he spoke colloquial Arabic — not classical — while a life-long speech impediment, which left him unable to pronounce his Rs, was widely viewed as disarming.

Nasrallah was born on August 31, 1960 in an impoverished Beirut neighbourhood that was home to Christian Armenians, Druze, Shia and Palestinians. He said he was “an observant Muslim at the age of nine”, more preoccupied with his prayers than helping his father in his vegetable shop.

When Nasrallah was 16, he sent himself to a seminary for aspiring Shia clerics in the Iraqi city of Najaf. He left less than two years later, fixated on resistance to Israel.

While in Najaf, he came under the influence of Abbas Mussawi, a Lebanese cleric just a few years older than him, with whom he would eventually found Hizbollah in the early 1980s. 

He climbed quickly up the ranks, forging close ties with the men suspected of plotting some of the group’s earliest terror attacks — including the 1983 bombing of the Beirut barracks housing US and French peacekeepers, which killed at least 360 people.

“After 1982, our youth, years, life and time became part of Hizbollah,” Nasrallah told a Lebanese newspaper in 1993, a few months after he was appointed leader of the militant group following Mussawi’s assassination by Israel. 

Unlike other paramilitary leaders, Nasrallah was not known to have personally fought. But his leadership earned him respect among Hizbollah’s ranks as a battlefield commander, particularly after his 18-year-old son Hadi was killed by Israeli commandos in 1997.  

“We, Hizbollah’s leadership, do not jealously guard our children,” Nasrallah said the day after Hadi’s death, cementing his reputation as a wartime leader who was willing to make sacrifice for their cause. Nasrallah shared at least three other children with his wife Fatima. 

Nasrallah’s reputation grew regionally when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. “He achieved what few if any Arab states and armies had done fighting Israel,” Saad said. His reputation was enhanced after Hizbollah fought Israel in a 34-day war in 2006.

This also made him one of Israel’s prime targets. He lived largely underground, “somewhere between southern Lebanon, Beirut and Syria”, to evade assassination attempts.

When thousands of Hizbollah’s electronic devices detonated this month killing dozens and maiming thousands more in attacks widely blamed on Israel, Nasrallah was said to be unharmed. He never handled electronic devices, which were always heavily screened before being allowed in his vicinity.

He was also rarely known to answer his own phone after Israel was allegedly able to reach him on his personal landline, which exists only on Hizbollah’s parallel telecommunications network. 

His frequent speeches were delivered via secure live feed to his legions of followers, broadcast from unknown locations and he sent emissaries to meet his political allies and foes. This helped him deepen his enigmatic aura and the reverence his public had for him. 

As Israel has stepped up its attacks on Hizbollah over the past year, it has killed many of the group’s leadership, targeting its field officers before taking aim its senior most command. 

Almost none of the original members of the group’s jihad council, Hizbollah’s top military body that Nasrallah oversaw, is left alive, according to people familiar with the group’s operations.   

Many Lebanese remember the destruction wrought the last time Hizbollah went to war with Israel in 2006. In the final hours before the ceasefire took hold, waves of Israeli bombs rained down over Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh. It was considered a last-ditch attempt to kill Nasrallah. 

When that war ended, Nasrallah said he would “absolutely not” have launched the attack that triggered the conflict “if I had known . . . that the operation would lead to such a war”.

It was in Dahiyeh where Friday’s strike killed Nasrallah.

Additional reporting by James Shotter in Jerusalem