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

Helene weakened to a post-tropical cyclone on Friday evening but continued to unleash “catastrophic” flooding in the southeastern U.S. and southern Appalachians, forecasters said.

Life-threatening flooding and landslides in parts of southern Appalachia were expected to continue into the evening, the National Hurricane Center said.

Gusty winds were still lashing parts of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Kentucky.

Carving a northwest path, Helene was expected to slow and then stall over the Tennessee Valley late Friday, according to forecasters.

“The expected slow motion could result in significant flooding over the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, and over the southern Appalachians through the weekend,” the center said in a late morning update.

In an evening update from the National Hurricane Center, maximum sustained winds were moving at 25 mph. The storm made landfall Thursday night in Florida’s Big Bend region — the nexus of the Panhandle and peninsula in the state’s northwest — as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph.

Preliminary post-landfall modeling showed the storm surge reached 15 feet above ground level in the Big Bend area near Keaton Beach, Steinhatchee and Horseshoe Beach, the National Weather Service said.

Flooding concerns have shifted to western North Carolina, which was expected to receive up to 11 inches of rain.

Death toll across five states reaches 44 people

At least 44 people in five states have died as a result of the storm, the Associated Press reported. As emergency rescue crews comb through the wreckage, officials in several states said they expected the number of storm-related deaths to climb.

While the worst of the storm is over for many in the Southeast, officials are warning residents to stay vigilant in its aftermath amid hazardous conditions, such as flooded and debris-strewn roads.

The storm surge reached more than 5 feet along the Gulf Coast of Florida Thursday night. Andrew Swan, 31, rode out the storm in Madeira Beach, Fla., watching over a friend’s house. He told WUSF the water rushed into the house up to his chest, and he spent the night sleeping on a kitchen counter with his legs over the stove.

West of Tampa, officials in Pinellas County described the scenes of wreckage there as a “war zone.”

Five Floridians were confirmed dead in the county, at least two from drownings, the sheriff’s office said.

The high winds and tornadoes were also blamed for several deaths. Gov. Ron DeSantis said one person died on a highway in Tampa from a falling sign. Another person died after a tree fell on their home in Dixie County.

A downed tree is seen along Margret Mitchell Drive in the Buckhead area of Atlanta on Friday.

Jason Allen/AP/FR172026 AP

hide caption

Advertisement

toggle caption

Jason Allen/AP/FR172026 AP

The majority of deaths were in Georgia and the Carolinas, several of them the result of falling trees.

In South Carolina, 19 people died, including two firefighters who died when a tree struck their truck, local officials told the AP.

In Georgia, the death toll was 15, according to a spokesperson for Gov. Brian Kemp. At least two children were among the dead, reported local CBS station 13WMAZ. Two Georgians died in Wheeler County after their trailer was picked up by a tornado, an emergency management official said.

In North Carolina, Helene produced unusually heavy winds — up to 140 mph — on land, the strongest observed in coastal North Carolina since the start of modern meteorological recordkeeping in the 19th century.

Gov. Roy Cooper confirmed

left four people in critical condition

Virginia had one storm-related death after a tree fell and a building collapsed in Craig County, Gov. Glenn Youngkin said.

Record-breaking rainfall in southern Appalachians

Heavy rains from Helene set a record in Atlanta, which received its highest 48-hour rainfall on record over the past two days. The Georgia Climate Office tweeted on Friday that the area has already seen 11.12 inches of rain, beating a previous record of 9.59 set in 1886. Record keeping started in 1878.

In North Carolina, the rainfall totals Friday afternoon were staggering: 29.58 inches for Busick, N.C.; 24.20 for nearby Mount Mitchell State Park; about 13 inches in Boone, some 55 miles away.

The storm dumped more than 8 inches of rain in Wilmington and wrought serious damage to coastal homes and small buildings, as well as agricultural fields.

Along with floods, the persistent rains have created landslide conditions in western North Carolina, as member station WFAE reported. The National Weather Prediction Center has forecast 6 to 12 inches for the region, well above the landslide condition threshold for the area.

In Tennessee, over 50 patients and staff were stuck on the roof of Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin, as floodwaters rose on Friday morning. By the afternoon, they were finally rescued.

Heavy rains inundate western North Carolina

Rising lakes and rivers as well as flooding from rapid rainfall led officials to close all roads in western North Carolina Friday.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation warned drivers to stay off the roads except for emergencies or efforts to evacuate to higher ground.

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service released an urgent warning through Friday afternoon urging anyone below the Lake Lure Dam near Ashville to evacuate immediately to higher ground, after concerns that the nearly century-old dam could fail.

Brigadier General Daniel Hibner with the Army Corps of Engineers said dam failures are to be expected in flash flooding events like this one. “It’s not uncommon to see a dam failure in an event like this,” he said at a press briefing. “I would be surprised if there weren’t multiple (dam failures) throughout this area.”

Yet the dam remained intact as of Friday evening. In a 6 p.m. ET update on social media, Rutherford County officials said the lake’s water levels were beginning to recede.

Lake Lure is famous for serving as a backdrop to several scenes in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing.

Helene knocked out power to millions

More than 4 million homes and businesses were without power on Friday afternoon in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, according to poweroutage.us. By nightfall, that number had dipped to about 3.7 million.

Meanwhile, the NHC warned about the potential for long-lasting power outages in southeastern states.

For those relying on generators for power supply, the consumer safety officials advised people to keep them at least 20 feet away from the home to avoid deadly carbon monoxide poisoning. Improper portable generator use led to more deaths associated with 2020’s Hurricane Laura than the storm itself.

Unlock the US Election Countdown newsletter for free

The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

Kamala Harris promised a fresh clampdown on illegal immigration at the US’s southern frontier as she sought to present a tougher stance on border security with the presidential race entering its final stretch.

On her first campaign trip to the US-Mexico border the vice-president pledged to move beyond measures imposed by the Biden administration, promising “further action” to prevent illegal crossings, tighter asylum measures and “more severe criminal charges” for illegal entrants.

“While we understand that many people are desperate to migrate to the United States our system must be orderly and secure,” she told a crowd in the Arizona city of Douglas.

The tougher rhetoric comes as the vice-president seeks to shake perceptions of a lax approach to migration and narrow the polling gap with Donald Trump on a crucial electoral issue.

While polls put Harris neck and neck with Trump overall, the former president consistently leads her on the question of border security. A recent NBC News poll gave Trump a 21-point advantage among voters on the topic.

The number of people crossing the country’s southern frontier surged to record levels under Joe Biden, peaking last December. But apprehensions have since fallen sharply after the president introduced an executive order including emergency measures to shutter the frontier.

Trump has made immigration a focal point of his campaign, accusing new arrivals of “poisoning the blood of our country” and proposing a crackdown involving militarised mass deportations.

Harris on Friday sought to push back, repeatedly pointing to the former president’s efforts to scuttle a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year, accusing him of an “abdication of leadership” and of prioritising politics over real solutions.

“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said of the bill. “He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said stop the bill. He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Harris said that if elected she would work with Congress to pass the border security bill, as well as unspecified actions to keep the border closed between legal crossing points and barring some illegal entrants from being able to claim asylum.

Trump has sought to tie Harris to the surge in illegal border crossings during Biden’s term in office, dubbing her the president’s “border tsar”, a label her campaign has rejected.

A Trump campaign spokesperson on Friday dismissed Harris’s border visit as a “desperate attempt to fool Americans into forgetting the chaos and devastation she has unleashed over her four years as border tsar”.