Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, was killed in a massive Israeli airstrike on Beirut on Friday evening, the Lebanon-based group confirmed.

The Israeli army had already claimed responsibility for the attack earlier in the day.

Nasrallah, who reached the peak of his popularity after the 2006 war with Israel, was seen by many as a hero, not just in Lebanon but beyond. Resistance to Israel is what distinguished him and his Iranian-backed group Hezbollah for years. But that changed when Hezbollah sent fighters to Syria to crush the insurgency that threatened President Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

Nasrallah was no longer seen as the leader of a resistance movement but as the leader of a Shiite party fighting for Iranian interests and was criticized by many Arab countries.

Even before Hezbollah’s involvement in the war in Syria, Nasrallah had failed to convince many in the Sunni Muslim Arab world that his movement was not behind the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. An international tribunal charged four members of the group with murder, and one was later convicted.

Nevertheless, Nasrallah continued to enjoy the support of his loyal base – especially Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims – who revered him as a leader and religious figurehead.

Born in 1960, Nasrallah’s early childhood in East Beirut is shrouded in political myths. As one of nine siblings, he is said to have been pious from a young age and often took long walks downtown to find used books about Islam. Nasrallah himself has described spending his free time as a child gazing in awe at a portrait of the Shiite scholar Musa al-Sadr – a pastime that foreshadowed his future involvement with politics and Shiite communities in Lebanon.

In 1974, Sadr founded an organization – the Movement of the Disadvantaged – which became the ideological core of the well-known Lebanese party and Hezbollah rival Amal. In the 1980s, Amal secured the support of the Shiite middle class, frustrated by the sect’s historical marginalization in Lebanon, and emerged as a powerful political movement. In addition to spreading an anti-establishment message, Amal provided many Shiite families with stable incomes and developed a complex patronage system in southern Lebanon.

After the civil war broke out between Christian Maronites and Muslims in Lebanon, Nasrallah joined the Amal movement and fought with its militias. But as the conflict progressed, Amal took a decidedly unsympathetic stance toward the presence of Palestinian militias in Lebanon.

Disturbed by this attitude, Nasrallah broke away from Amal in 1982, shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and founded a new group with Iranian support that would later become Hezbollah. By 1985, Hezbollah had crystallized its own worldview in a founding document that addressed the “oppressed of Lebanon” and described Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini as its only true leader.

Throughout the civil war, Hezbollah and Amal grew bitter and often fought with each other for the support of Lebanon’s Shiite voters. By the 1990s, after numerous bloody clashes and the end of the civil war, Hezbollah had largely trumped Amal for prominence among Lebanon’s Shiite supporters. Nasrallah became the group’s third general secretary in 1992 after his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi was killed by Israeli missiles.

Early in his career, Nasrallah’s speeches helped cement his persona as a wise, humble figure deeply involved in the lives of ordinary people – a leader who eschewed formal Arabic and instead turned to the dialect spoken on the streets, and who reportedly preferred to sleep every night on a simple foam mattress on the floor.

In the book “The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication,” scholar and co-author Dina Matar describes how Nasrallah’s words fused political claims and religious images, producing speeches with high emotional tension that transformed Nasrallah into “the embodiment of the group itself.” transformed.

Nasrallah’s charisma was far-reaching; His elegies on the history of oppression in the Middle East have made him an influential figure across sects and nations. This was also helped by Hezbollah’s extensive media apparatus, which uses television, print news and even musical theater performances to spread its message.

When Nasrallah took office as secretary general, he was given the task of pushing Hezbollah into the hustle and bustle of Lebanon’s postwar political scene. Hezbollah has evolved from working outside the official framework of state politics to a national party that demands the support of every citizen through participation in democratic elections.

Presiding over this change was Nasrallah, who put Hezbollah on the ballot for the first time in 1992 and appealed to the masses with stirring speeches. As he told Al Jazeera in 2006, “We, Shiites and Sunnis, are fighting together against Israel,” adding that he “does not fear turmoil, neither between Muslims and Christians nor between Shiites and Sunnis in Lebanon.”

Nasrallah was head of Hezbollah for more than 30 years and was often described as the most powerful figure in Lebanon, although he never personally held public office. His critics said his political strength came from the weapons Hezbollah had and that it had also used them against domestic opponents. Nasrallah repeatedly rejected calls for his group to disarm, saying: “Hezbollah would give up its weapons … would leave Lebanon unprotected from Israel.”

In 2019, he criticized nationwide protests calling for a new political order in Lebanon, and clashes broke out between Hezbollah members and some protesters. This has damaged his image among many in Lebanon.

But Nasrallah’s supporters still saw him as a defender of the rights of Shiite Muslims, while his critics accused him of showing loyalty to Tehran and its religious authority when their interests conflicted with those of the Lebanese people.

Hezbollah faced one of its biggest challenges after the group opened a front against Israel in October 2023 to ease pressure on its ally Hamas in Gaza. The group suffered casualties after months of cross-border fighting and Israeli attacks that targeted major figures in the movement. But Nasrallah remained defiant.

While Nasrallah has been described as the “personification of Hezbollah,” the group he built over more than three decades is highly organized and remains committed to continuing to defy Israel.

Hezbollah is unlikely to collapse under the weight of Nasrallah’s assassination, but with his death the group has lost a leader who was charismatic and whose influence reached far beyond Lebanon. The group must now select a new leader, who in turn must decide in which direction Hezbollah should be led. Whatever the group decides will not only impact Hezbollah: impacts will ripple throughout Lebanon and the entire region.