Supporters of Lebanese Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah carry his pictures as they gather in Sidon, Lebanon, after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 28, 2024.

The death of Hassan Nasrallah marks an important moment in the recent history of the Middle East, but the long-term consequences are uncertain. It raises a key question: Do “beheading attacks” that kill the leaders of terrorist groups cripple them? The short answer is not really.

Israel should know from its own history that such attacks do not always result in the disabling of a militant group. In 2008, Israel killed Hezbollah military leader Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, Syria, but the group only gained strength in the following years.

Four years earlier, Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in an airstrike. Yet the group did not collapse and, nearly two decades later, still carried out the October 7 attacks in Israel, which killed about 1,200 Israelis in a single day.

The United States has a history of killing terrorist leaders in the hope of crippling their enemies. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a US bombing raid in 2006, it was considered a major breakthrough because al-Qaeda in Iraq contributed significantly to the civil war that was then shaking the country apart.

But eight years later, al-Qaeda in Iraq eventually morphed into ISIS, which occupied an area the size of Portugal and ruled over a population of about eight million people in Iraq and Syria.

What actually ended ISIS’s geographical “caliphate” was not an attack on its leadership, but a ground campaign against the terrorist army from 2014 to 2019, led by the Iraqi military and Syrian Kurdish forces, and by thousands of US troops and significant American air assets was supported.

The killing of Nasrallah is a major prize for Israel as part of its larger wave of attacks on Hezbollah, which began earlier this month with the covert operation in which thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded, followed by massive airstrikes, damaging infrastructure and other high-profile targets Leaders destroyed, aggravated .

But it is still too early to dismiss the militant group, although it is clearly in disarray. History suggests that it will reorganize and appoint other leaders to continue its long struggle against Israel.

Read the full analysis here.