Live Updates: Hezbollah Leader Killed in Israeli Airstrike
The assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, a towering figure in the Middle East, is a stunning escalation in Israel’s campaign against the Iran-backed group.
Hassan Nasrallah speaking onscreen in Baalbek, Lebanon, in 2018.
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
The smouldering rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike near Beirut, Lebanon.
Ibrahim Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A fire burns in Beirut early Saturday morning.
Associated Press
The moment an Israeli airstrike hit Choueifat in the southeast of Beirut.
Abbas Sharafeddine via Associated Press
An Israeli airstrike near Beirut.
Hussein Malla/Associated Press
Groups of people in Ain Anoub, Lebanon walk away from Israeli airstrikes.
Associated Press
Families seeking safety gathered on Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut.
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Sleeping in a car on Martyrs’ Square after fleeing Israeli airstrikes.
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Rockets fired from Lebanon being intercepted in northern Israel.
Atef Safadi/EPA, via Shutterstock
A house damaged by a rocket attack from Lebanon in Safed, in northern Israel.
Jim Urquhart/Reuters
Showing photos of Hassan Nasrallah at a rallyin Tehran.
Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Cars drive through destruction on the roads of Beirut.
Associated Press
A building hit in overnight Israeli airstrikes near Beirut.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Smoke rising from destroyed buildings near Beirut.
Hezbollah on Saturday confirmed that Hassan Nasrallah, its longtime leader, had been killed after Israeli airstrikes slammed into the area housing its underground headquarters near Beirut, Lebanon, a stunning escalation of Israel’s campaign against the Iranian-backed militia.
The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, a towering figure among anti-Israel forces across the Middle East and beyond, struck a tremendous blow to Hezbollah, ending an era in the Lebanese group’s decades-old fight with Israel and raising questions about its future. Mr. Nasrallah played multiple roles in the lives of Hezbollah’s members, serving at once as a religious guide, political strategist and commander in chief.
His death deprives the organization of his vast experience, personal relationships with other militia leaders and the unifying force of his rhetoric and personality. Israel had been tracking his movements for months and decided to strike because it believed it had only a short window before he moved to a different location, Israeli officials said.
The killing pushed Israel’s nearly yearlong war against Iran-backed forces — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen — into new territory. But the conflict in Lebanon did not seem poised to end. On Saturday, both Hezbollah and Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, vowed to continue their attacks.
Here’s what else to know:
Death toll: After two weeks of back-and-forth attacks with Hezbollah, Israel said its air force had targeted Mr. Nasrallah on Friday when it dropped more than 80 bombs on a group of residential buildings in the Hezbollah-dominated area known as the Dahiya. Lebanon’s health ministry said Saturday that at least 11 people had been killed and more than 100 injured by the strikes, and that the toll was expected to rise. Emergency workers were still searching the rubble even as Israel launched new air attacks on Saturday.
Iran’s response: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, issued a statement of condolences after Hezbollah confirmed its leader’s death and called on all Muslims to rise against Israel. “The fate of this region will be determined by the resistance with Hezbollah at the top,” Mr. Khamenei said.
Lebanese flee: Israel’s airstrikes in the Dahiya, and several evacuation orders it has issued for the area, have contributed to a deepening sense of dread in Lebanon. Residents of the neighborhood joined thousands of people from outside Beirut who have been camping on the streets and beaches of the city.
Mixed reactions: As the news spread of Nasrallah’s death among displaced people camping out on the steps of a large mosque in downtown Beirut, children and adults wiped away tears, and several women began wailing with grief. But in parts of Syria, where Hezbollah has played a key role in helping President Bashar al-Assad wage a brutal crackdown on opponents, some voiced cautious, and sometimes exuberant, celebration.
Israeli airstrikes continued to pound Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight following a massive bombing attack Friday evening that Israel said targeted Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and flattened at least four buildings.
Visual evidence analyzed by The New York Times showed the aftermath of several strikes stretching across at least three miles of the densely developed area.
Some of the strikes hit inside the areas that Israel’s military had warned residents to leave, some at 3 a.m. Some of the apparent attacks occurred outside of those areas. Israel said it was targeting anti-ship missiles in many of the strikes.
The Israeli military just announced that its forces had carried out another strike in Beirut. It did not identify its target.
Iran announced that all flights to Beirut are canceled on its national carrier, Iran Air. The three-hour flight from Tehran served as a direct link between Iran and Hezbollah, shuffling officials, militants and cash, as well as civilian passengers. The land connection through Syria, which was a major route for supplying weapons to Hezbollah, remains compromised because of Israeli strikes on roads and bridges.
Lebanon’s former prime minister, Saad Hariri, condemned Israel’s killing of Nasrallah, saying it “plunges Lebanon and the region into a new phase of violence. It is a cowardly act condemned in its entirety by we who paid dearly for the lives of our loved ones when assassination became an alternative to politics.” Hariri's own father and former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, was killed in an assassination widely blamed on Hezbollah. His death sparked a protest movement that ultimately led to the withdrawal of Syrian forces that had occupied the country since the 1975-90 civil war.
The Israeli military said the air-raid sirens were the result of a missile launched from Yemen toward Israel. Houthi militants, who are backed by Iran and close allies of Hezbollah, have claimed similar missile attacks on central Israel in recent days.
Many displaced residents of southern Beirut who were gathered at the gates of the Mohammad al Amin Mosque received the announcement of Nasrallah’s death via their phones. As the news spread, some began to cry. A woman stood up from the crowd, weeping: “Sayyid doesn’t die,” a reference to his nickname and religious title.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has just returned to Israel, according to his office, after a brief trip to address the U.N. General Assembly on Friday in New York. Not long after his speech, the Israeli airstrikes killed Nasrallah.
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said that 11 people have been killed and more than 100 injured since Israel strikes on Firday on the Dahiya, a densely populated area south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway. He has previously cautioned that the figure was likely to rise, as most victims were still trapped under the rubble.
Speaking at a news conference, Abiad said that 1,640 people, nearly 300 of them women and children, had been killed and over 8,400 injured in Lebanon since the war in Gaza began last October. More than 1,000 of those deaths have been since nationwide attacks on pagers last week signalled the beginning of an Israeli escalation against Hezbollah.
Iranians gathered early on Saturday in Tehran to show their support for Hezbollah.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
The death of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike has dramatically weakened a key Iranian deterrent against its archenemy, Israel.
Iran has long sought to have the proxies it supports in the region — including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and forces in Syria, Yemen and Iraq — serve as the front line in its long-running fight with Israel. But if its most important military asset, Hezbollah, has been decimated, it may have no choice but to respond, experts said Saturday.
The decisions it makes will have a significant impact on the next stage of a growing conflict that now threatens to engulf the region.
“Iran’s choices really range from ugly to unpalatable,” said Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization.
Julien Barnes-Dacey, the Middle East and North Africa program director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Israel’s assassination of Mr. Nasrallah significantly raises the risk of a dangerous conflagration in the Middle East, and beyond.
“It really is a question of whether Hezbollah has the capacity to launch wide-ranging missile strikes on Israel at this point,” Mr. Barnes-Dacey said. If it does not, “this could now push Iran to make a dash for nuclear weapons because they see that as their only effective form of deterrence left standing.”
Mr. Nasrallah’s death is a significant loss for Iran. Not only was he a charismatic leader who has inspired generations of anti-Israeli sentiment, he was also very close to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was also his principal liaison to the Arabic-speaking world.
Mr. Khamenei issued a statement of condolences after Hezbollah confirmed its leader’s death, calling on all Muslims to rise against Israel with all their might and stand with Hezbollah and Lebanon. “All of the forces of the resistance are standing by and supporting Hezbollah,” Mr. Khameni said. “The fate of this region will be determined by the resistance with Hezbollah at the top.”
It is not the first time that Israel has decapitated Hezbollah.
In 1992, Israel killed Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi. “Israel has assassinated multiple Hamas leaders over recent decades, and on all occasions, these groups have come back — stronger, more radical, and posing an even graver threat to Israel,” Mr. Barnes-Dacey said.
Mr. Nasrallah’s death was the culmination of a multiweek assault that started with an attack on a Syrian weapons facility supplying arms to Hezbollah, and was followed by a sophisticated sabotage operation on Hezbollah pagers and radios that killed or incapacitated scores of commanders and damaged the militia’s ability to communicate.
Subsequent airstrikes took out even more commanders. But other than denouncing the attacks in speeches and statements, Iran has largely stood by the sidelines. Mr. Nasrallah’s assassination could be the blow that finally forces Iran to react.
It is not yet clear how much damage the Israeli attacks have done to Hezbollah’s substantial arsenal of weapons, but if the militia has been significantly incapacitated, Iran may not have many options for retaliation.
Iran certainly has the capabilities to attack Israel itself, as it proved in April when it launched a drone and missile attack. But Israel could also deal a very severe setback to Iran both militarily and economically, and that is something that the Iranian government does not want, Mr. Vaez said. “They know that any attack by Iran would then allow Israel to further expand the war and drag Iran into a direct military confrontation with the United States,” he added.
If Hezbollah still has capabilities that it can deploy, Mr. Vaez said, that’s probably the likeliest response. “Iran wants to stay out of this as long as it can.”
Iran is good at playing a long game, said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Instead of reacting with an immediate barrage against Israel, Iran could instead pull back, quietly help Hezbollah repair the damage to its weapons stores and its leadership, and start rebuilding what’s left.
Unlike Hamas, Hezbollah is not encircled by Israel. The militia has access to weapons supplies from Iranian allies in Syria and Iraq via the relatively porous Lebanese border.
“Hezbollah will, over time, find new leaders,” Mr. Salem said. “Those leaders can be trained and armed and given a new set of tactics and strategy. They have suffered a tremendous loss. But it’s not the end of Hezbollah.”
Leily Nikounazar and Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.
A senior Iranian commander of the Quds Forces, Brig. Gen. Abbas Nilforoushan, was also killed in the Israeli strikes that killed Hezbollah's leader, Iran’s state news agency reported. Gen. Nilforoushan, the commander of operations for Lebanon and Syria, is among the most senior Iranian officials killed by Israel.
In a video recording, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, said its forces were determined to continue to destroy Hezbollah.
Iranians mourning Nasrallah have gathered in several places, including Tehran’s Palestine square, to carry out Shia mourning rituals. They are waving the Hezbollah flag and beating their chests as religious ballads are broadcast.
In central Beirut, Lebanese army tanks were deployed near the Burj Al Ghazal bridge late Saturday afternoon in anticipation of possible clashes in the wake of Mr. Nasrallah’s death. The bridge divides a Shia neighborhood, Khandaa Al-Ghami, and a Christian neighborhood, Achrafieh. Protests have previously broken out between residents on either side.
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CreditCredit...Christina Goldbaum/The New York Times
Hamas mourned the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s death in a statement, vowing that Israeli assassinations “will only make the resistance in Palestine and in Lebanon more determined and persistent.” The Palestinian group said Nasrallah had died “in the battle to support our people.”
Some residents of east Beirut, an area dominated by Hezbollah’s political rivals, have welcomed the news of Nasrallah’s death with a mixture of shock and elation. “This is history,” an elderly corner store owner said. “Lebanon will never be the same again,” he said.
The Israeli military has ordered new restrictions on mass gatheringsin parts of central Israel, including the greater Tel Aviv area, in the wake of Nasrallah’s killing, in anticipation of a potential response by Hezbollah. Gatherings of over 1,000 people will be banned, Hagari said.
Israeli warplanes are continuing to strike Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, including in the southern suburbs of Beirut, said Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman. “We are continuing, in these very hours, to strike, eliminate and kill the commanders of Hezbollah,” Hagari told reporters at a televised briefing.
As the news spread of Nasrallah’s death among displaced people camping out on the steps of a large mosque in downtown Beirut, children and adults wiped away tears, and several woman began wailing with grief. “He’s gone! Sayyid, he’s gone!” one woman shouted, using a common honorific for Hassan Nasrallah. Another woman, Jamila Ghaith, 53, was shaking her head. “We’ll keep following his path,” she cried out. “Even if he died, he’ll win.”
Supporters attending the funeral of Hezbollah fighters in the souther suburbs of Beirut last week.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Weeks after Hamas launched the surprise attack on Israel that started the Gaza war last October, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, laid out his group’s approach to the war.
Speaking by video link from a secret location, he said that Hezbollah sought to strike a balance between launching cross-border attacks on Israel in support of Hamas and avoiding an all-out war.
“Some in Lebanon say that we are taking a risk,” he said. “But this risk is part of a beneficial, correct calculation.”
That calculation has failed dramatically over the last two weeks, as Israel has launched an escalating series of attacks on the group. The campaign has already incapacitated thousands of rank-and-file Hezbollah members by blowing up their electronic devices and killed many of the group’s senior leaders in airstrikes.
On Friday, Israel’s military targeted Mr. Nasrallah himself, dropping powerful bombs on what it said was the group’s headquarters near Beirut. Both Israel and Hezbollah confirmed his death on Saturday.
“Hezbollah believed that the deterrence game with Israel was essentially even,” said Michael Young, senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “And the Israelis have shown that it was not.”
Mr. Nasrallah led Hezbollah for more than three decades, and his death deprives it of an experienced leader who enjoyed nearly mythical status among the group’s Shiite Muslim base.
In deciding to lead Hezbollah into a new battle with Israel, Mr. Nasrallah appears to have assumed that the fighting could be contained, and that Israel’s exhaustion from its war in Gaza and fear of the damage that Hezbollah’s missiles and commandos could cause in Israel would keep it from responding with too much force.
That strategy largely worked for many months, as Israel and Hezbollah bombed and shelled each other across the Lebanon-Israel border but largely avoided larger attacks.
But in recent weeks, Israeli leaders, facing domestic pressure to find a way for tens of thousands of Israelis who had fled the country’s north to return home, swiftly escalated their attacks. The sustained effort has sown disarray inside Hezbollah and hobbled its ability to respond.
Israel had two advantages against Hezbollah. First, its intelligence services deeply penetrated the group, allowing it to track and kill a large number of mid- and high-level commanders.
“They managed to infiltrate Hezbollah very deeply so that they seem to have known everything, where the leaders are and where and when they are meeting,” Mr. Young said.
Even after Israel’s assassinations made clear that it was tracking the group’s leaders, Hezbollah does not appear to have adjusted its security protocols to avoid further targeting. Last week, Israel killed Ibrahim Aqeel, who headed Hezbollah’s elite commando force, while he met with other military commanders. Mr. Nasrallah appears to have been targeted inside Hezbollah’s headquarters during another meeting with other Hezbollah officials.
Israel’s second advantage was that Mr. Nasrallah’s actions showed that he was reluctant to respond to Israel’s attacks in ways that most likely would have expanded the war.
After Israel killed the head of Hezbollah’s military operations in an airstrike near Beirut in July, Hezbollah did not mount a significant response.
The group had long boasted that it had powerful missiles that could hit cities deep inside of Israel, and Israeli leaders worried that Hezbollah could hit sensitive infrastructure with precision-guided missiles or send commandos to storm Israeli communities. But those capabilities, if they had not been disabled by Israel’s attacks, remained largely unused.
“At every level of escalation, Hezbollah was not able to keep up with the Israelis,” Mr. Young said.
So Israel swiftly escalated, stepping up the targeted killings of Hezbollah leaders and intensively bombing Hezbollah strongholds in southern and eastern Lebanon, attacks that have killed more than 700 people over the past week, many of them civilians. Israeli officials have said that they are seeking to avoid a ground invasion of Lebanon by significantly degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities and eliminating its leadership.
By going after and killing Mr. Nasrallah himself on Friday, Israel may be hoping that taking out the group’s revered leader would serve as a kind of knockout blow.
Smoke billowing over Beirut early Saturday.Credit...Mohamed Azakir/Reuters
Israeli leaders had been aware of Hassan Nasrallah’s whereabouts for months and decided to strike him this past week because they believed they had only a short window of opportunity before the Hezbollah leader would disappear to a different location, according to three senior Israeli defense officials.
Two of the officials said that more than 80 bombs were dropped over a period of several minutes to kill him. They did not confirm the weight or make of the bombs.
Hezbollah operatives found and identified Mr. Nasrallah’s body early Saturday, along with that of a top Hezbollah military commander, Ali Karaki, according to the officials, who cited intelligence obtained from inside Lebanon. All three officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
Hezbollah confirmed on Saturday that Mr. Nasrallah was killed in the Israeli strikes.
The operation had been planned since earlier in the week, as Israeli political leaders spoke with their American counterparts about the possibility of a cease-fire in Lebanon, and before Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, left Israel to give a speech at the United Nations, according to two of the officials.
All three officials said that Hashem Safieddine, a cousin of Mr. Nasrallah who is a key player in the movement’s political and social work, was one of the few remaining senior Hezbollah leaders not present at the site of the strike. They said that Mr. Safieddine, who has long been considered a potential successor to Mr. Nasrallah, could be announced shortly as Hezbollah’s new secretary-general.
Syrians gathered in the rebel stronghold of Idlib on Saturday celebrated news of the death of Hassan Nasrallah.Credit...Omar Haj Kadour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Even as most of the Middle East is overtaken by outrage at weeks of destructive Israeli strikes against Hezbollah and its leaders, some communities are celebrating the disarray of the powerful militia that persecuted them.
Nowhere is that sentiment as strong as in parts of Syria, where Hezbollah has played a key role in helping President Bashar al-Assad wage a brutal crackdown on opponents of his family’s decades-long rule, and where news of Israeli strikes on Hezbollah neighborhoods prompted singing in the streets of rebel strongholds.
Hezbollah’s origin story is in fighting Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000, and fighting Israel is the mission central to its followers’ identity. But one of its biggest military roles over the past decade had actually been in Syria, helping its patron, Iran, keep Mr. Assad in power.
Hezbollah forces played a part in some of the most brutal chapters of the Syrian civil war, including sieges that starved encircled communities for months, as well as operations that expelled many Sunni Muslims, who were the backbone of the anti-Assad revolt, from neighborhoods and towns.
As Israel launched strike after successful strike against Hezbollah in the past two weeks — starting with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, and culminating in the airstrikes on Friday that killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah — many Syrians from the opposition have posted celebratory messages on social media. Some used the hashtag “ana shamtan,” which translates roughly into, “I have schadenfreude.”
Unlike Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which most of the Arab world strongly condemns and often describes as genocidal, its strikes on Hezbollah have exposed the fractures within the region’s political landscape.
Many Arab communities, including some Christian groups and many from the Sunni Muslim world, are wary of if not hostile to the network of Shiite Muslim militias backed and fostered by their regional patron, Iran, which they believe aim to uphold sectarian dominance.
Similar sentiments have been expressed by some from Iraq’s Sunni community, a population embittered not only by what they see as retributive and repressive treatment by the country’s Iran-backed Shiite majority government, but also the growing power of their country’s powerful Shiite militias.
Some who greeted the news of the debilitating attacks on Hezbollah cautioned that the schadenfreude many were feeling should not be mistaken as approval of Israel, or support of its bombardment of Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 people.
“There is no problem with some people rejoicing over the death of Hassan Nasrallah. This does not mean that they are with the other party,” Youssif Tamimi, an Iraqi journalist, wrote on the social media platform X. “Many Shiites were happy with Saddam’s execution after American forces captured him, at a time when some of them were against the American presence in Iraq. Did their happiness mean that they were with America? Slow down, please.”
As a reminder of the reason for their celebration, Syrian opponents of Mr. Assad’s rule have been reposting decade-old videos of Hezbollah militants beating and humiliating people as they handed out bread in a district of the capital that they and Assad forces had besieged. Others reposted past videos of a well-known pro-Hezbollah media personality, who sometimes filmed himself mocking the Syrian opposition — including a video of himself eating as he reported on a besieged area, and another of him smiling and walking through streets reduced to rubble.
In Syria’s northern rebel stronghold of Idlib, devastated by years of bombardment that continues even now by Assad-backed forces, communities that only weeks and months earlier had gathered to protest the bombings in Gaza are now posting videos of people beating drums and singing in the streets, some of them distributing sweets.
One chant amid the celebrations made their underlying wish clear: “We wish the same for you, Bashar.”
A correction was made on
Sept. 28, 2024
:
An earlier version of this article misidentified a man who had posted a video of black smoke rising from the Dahiya area. He is Shiite Muslim, not Sunni.
Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran — Hezbollah’s patron — released a statement condemning the Israeli strikes targeting Nasrallah. He did not specifically mention the Hezbollah leader or Israel's claim that he had died in the attack. “All the resistance forces in the region stand with and support Hezbollah,” he vowed.
Just a few days earlier, Khamenei wrote on social media that “Hezbollah is the victor” in its war against Israel. At that point, the Lebanese armed group was already reeling from repeated Israeli blows to its leadership.
Hundreds of families seeking safety gathered on Martyrs’ Square in Beirut, Lebanon, on Saturday. Some had spent the night there.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
The streets of Beirut, Lebanon, were eerily empty on Saturday morning. Most stores were shuttered, and few cars passed along the usually bustling streets. Drones buzzed overhead.
After a barrage of Israeli airstrikes overnight, the city was coming to terms with a startling new reality: The simmering conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, once mostly contained to southern Lebanon, had firmly reached the capital. Now, many people said, even Beirut was not safe.
Amid that ghostliness, thousands of residents from the Dahiya, the crowded area south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway, were scattered across the city after fleeing their homes as the Israeli strikes rained down.
They found refuge on sidewalks, on the beachfront and in small parks downtown — areas that they hoped were far enough from the Dahiya to be safe. Some had suitcases and backpacks, hastily packed the night before. Others had rushed out with nothing but their cellphones and the clothes they were wearing.
“Nobody has any idea what to do,” said Zakiya Khattab, 67, who had spent the night with her son and grandchildren in Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut. “We would love to go back, but we can’t — it’s not safe.”
The family fled their home in the Dahiya around 1 a.m. on Saturday, she said, after their house began shaking from the Israeli airstrikes. The tremors were so strong that four of her grandchildren leaped out of bed, terrified.
Ayoub Merhe, 45, her son, said: “I told them, ‘Don’t be afraid, stay calm. They are just shooting in the street.’” But after leaving his children’s room, Mr. Merhe said, he immediately packed a bag with a blanket, bread and a change of clothes, and brought his family to Martyrs’ Square. They had spent the night trying to sleep on the sidewalk, his 10 children shivering from the sea breeze, he said.
“We’ve lived our whole life through wars,” Mr. Merhe said. “We’re accustomed to it.”
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Families from the area where recent Israeli strikes hit sat together on the sidewalk.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
With most residents evacuated, the Dahiya was like a ghost town on Saturday. Glass and debris from the overnight strikes littered the street, and the sidewalks were empty. On the edges of the neighborhood, families who had not yet fled were loading up cars with bags of their belongings.
Others sat on the curb, unsure of where to go.
Hassan Jibaie stood outside his banged-up apartment building. Across the street, the ground floor of a building had been blown out by an airstrike a day earlier.
He had seen messages from the Israeli military warning people to evacuate, he said, but the order had used outdated descriptors for his street — it had mentioned a “Cafe Rony,” apparently referring to a building that had not housed a cafe for years — so he and his neighbors had no idea that their street would be targeted.
“We didn’t even know it was called that,” he said, laughing incredulously.
A man on a motorbike pulled up. “Whatever they do to us, we’re not scared,” the man said, waving at the damage. “It can all be rebuilt.”
Across the neighborhood, posters and banners of slain Hezbollah fighters were strung across the street and plastered on the sides of buildings.
There are also many images of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, in the neighborhood. Now he, too, is among those whom the group and its allies call “martyrs.”
“It’s not going to stop,” said Hassan Darchichi, 60, who was born and raised in the Dahiya. “This is just the beginning.”
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A family from the Dahiya. “We would love to go back,” one resident said, “but we can’t — it’s not safe.”Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
As he spoke, a piece of a nearby building that was damaged in the Israeli strikes crashed onto the street. Mr. Darchichi said he had never left the neighborhood in previous rounds of conflict, and he did not plan to now.
At Bahman Hospital, a nearby Hezbollah hospital, a wounded patient was being wheeled out on a stretcher, headed for another hospital. Lebanon’s health ministry has ordered hospitals in the area evacuated, and the Dahiya facility was busy as its staff members rushed to go.
“They told us to leave,” said a nurse, Maryam Chahine, who was standing outside, looking disoriented. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”
Overhead, they could hear the whine of a drone. People looked up, panicking: What did it mean? Would it strike?
A few miles away, other Dahiya residents who had fled were debating whether it was safe enough to go home — and if not, where they could find shelter.
In Horsh Beirut, a park packed with pine trees on the outskirts of the Dahiya, Ali Jaber, 29, was sitting in the shade with his mother, father and siblings. Two backpacks, a pile of blankets and a bag of bread were propped against a nearby tree, along with a white bird cage, the family’s yellow canary flitting around inside.
“We have no idea what we’re supposed to do, where we’re supposed to go,” Mr. Jaber said. “Our house is in a relatively safe area — it hasn’t been targeted — but, of course, it could be, and we have to stay safe.”
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Sleeping in a car on Martyrs’ Square after fleeing Israeli airstrikes.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
As word spread on Saturday that the Israeli assault had killed Mr. Nasrallah, it added to the sense of unease.
“If Hassan Nasrallah doesn’t exist anymore, we don’t exist anymore,” said Samar Hussam, a Dahiya resident.
Ms. Hussam said she had panicked on Friday night as word spread that the Israeli airstrikes were targeting Mr. Nasrallah. She and her husband and children fled to a small park in downtown Beirut and spent the night there.
Early Saturday, her husband returned to collect a few supplies from their home: a blanket, changes of clothes, some food. He found their apartment building still standing, but piles of rubble filled the streets around it. Dust and black smoke hung in the air.
“We are loyal to the resistance,” Ms. Hussam said. “We are willing to sacrifice our lives and do whatever it takes for the resistance to survive.”
The Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appearing on a screen at a rally in Beirut in 2017. Wary of Israeli attacks, he rarely appeared in public.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
The Israeli military said on Saturday that it killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, in an airstrike on the organization’s underground headquarters near Beirut on Friday. Hezbollah has not commented on the Israeli claim.
If confirmed, the death of Mr. Nasrallah, 64, would be a major escalation in Israel’s rapidly expanding campaign against the Iran-backed group, back-and-forth attacks over the last two weeks that have threatened to spiral into an all-out regional war.
In the statement announcing Mr. Nasrallah’s death, the Israeli military said Friday’s strike had also killed Ali Karaki, the commander of the southern front in Hezbollah, along with several other leaders. Mr. Karaki survived a previous attempt on his life earlier this week.
“Anyone who threatens the state of Israel, we will know how to reach them — whether in the north, in the south, or even in more distant places,” Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the military’s chief of staff, said in a recorded statement broadcast on Israeli television. “This is not the end of our tool kit. There are more tools to move forward.”
Mr. Nasrallah has for decades led Hezbollah, the most powerful Iran-backed militant in the region, and the announcement of his killing threatened to push Israel’s almost yearlong conflict with Iran-backed forces — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and other forces — into new territory.
In a statement on Friday night, Iran’s embassy in Beirut warned that there would be consequences for the attack.
“There is no doubt that this reprehensible crime and reckless behavior represent a serious escalation that changes the rules of the game, that its perpetrator will be punished appropriately and disciplined,” the statement said.
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People and rescuers gather near the smoldering rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in the Haret Hreik neighborhood south of Beirut on Friday.Credit...Ibrahim Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Security around Mr. Nasrallah has long been extraordinary. The buildings targeted on Friday were residential apartments destroyed in a deafening blast that sent a plume of black smoke rising into the sky and left rescuers digging through piles of jagged concrete and twisted metal. The Israeli military said Hezbollah’s headquarters was located in a subterranean complex beneath the buildings.
Mr. Nasrallah, a Shiite cleric who has led Hezbollah since 1992, guided the group through decades of conflict with Israel and, more recently, participation in Syria’s civil war. Hezbollah was long ago designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
More than just a militia, Mr. Nasrallah also oversaw the growth of Hezbollah into an influential political party with seats in the Lebanese Parliament. The group has often been referred to as “a state within a state,” owing both to its extensive arsenal of missiles, rockets and drones and the social services it provided in areas where it holds sway.
But he also expanded the group’s influence outside Lebanon. It played a key role in supporting the government of President Bashar al-Assad next door in Syria after a popular uprising in 2011 that quickly dissolved into more than a decade of civil war. Under his watch, Hezbollah also helped to train Hamas fighters, as well as militias in Iraq and Yemen.
He has long referred to Israel as “the Zionist entity,” maintaining that all Jews whose ancestors moved to Israel from elsewhere should return to their countries of origin. He said there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians.
Mr. Nasrallah rarely appeared in public, part of a multilayered security plan that appeared to fail in spectacular fashion on Friday. In his most recent televised remarks earlier this month, he blamed Israel for an audacious attack that used booby-trapped pagers to kill dozens of his supporters. The attack, and a similar one involving walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members a day later, injured thousands of people.
In that speech, Mr. Nasrallah said Hezbollah’s “retribution will come.”
“Its manner, size, how and where — these are things we will certainly keep to ourselves, in the narrowest circles even among us,” he said.
Israel’s military issued expanded, middle-of-the-night warnings to residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs to evacuate early Saturday, just hours after earlier orders were followed by a series of airstrikes.
The new warnings, issued at 3 a.m. local time on the social media site X, identified three additional buildings in south Beirut that the military said were related to the militant group Hezbollah, urging residents to get at least 500 meters away from them.
Earlier in the night, Israel’s military had pointed to three other buildings in the Dahiya, a densely packed civilian area near Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway. Soon after, explosions rocked the general area, lighting up the night sky with fiery flashes.
Those strikes were in addition to earlier blasts that Israel’s military said had targeted Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, believed to be in a leadership meeting in the group’s underground headquarters.
Image
Smoke rising in neighborhoods to the south of Beirut after Israeli airstrikes overnight Saturday.Credit...Mohamed Azakir/Reuters
Some of the evacuation warnings were confusing, because the maps accompanying social media posts showed a much smaller area than the 500-meter radius specified by the military surrounding the buildings they said housed Hezbollah interests.
Earlier this week, the Israeli military sent out messages to Beirut radio stations and some cellphones, warning of coming attacks in Arabic-language messages. Those alerts were followed by more than 1,000 Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon, in the deadliest single day of attacks in decades.
“The I.D.F. don’t want to hurt you. If you are present in a building used by Hezbollah, you should leave,” the automated messages said, using the acronym for the Israel Defense Forces.
A New York Times analysis of verified videos, photos and satellite imagery shows that at least four residential buildings on one street were destroyed Friday night when Israel struck part of southern Beirut, targeting Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Three of the buildings were completely flattened, while another collapsed, with the upper floors partly intact.
Video
All four of the destroyed structures were residential buildings along the same street. Two neighboring apartment buildings that were at least seven stories tall were hit. About 100 yards away, two neighboring buildings that were also at least seven stories were also hit.
Footage recorded on top of the debris of a flattened building also shows significant damage to several surrounding buildings. The blasts tore the facades off the lower floors and blew out many of the windows. The strikes destroyed nearby vehicles and left craters in the streets about 700 feet away.
A video filmed during the strikes and posted on the social media app Telegram showed several distinct smoke plumes. An enormous cloud of smoke rose from the area of the four destroyed buildings identified by The Times, and one large plume of smoke rose from areas slightly to the east of the buildings. Multiple additional explosions can be heard and seen in the video.
The extent of the damage from the strikes was not yet clear.
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/09/28/multimedia/28mideast-crisis-carousel-02-lbfw/28mideast-crisis-carousel-02-lbfw-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Hassan Nasrallah speaking onscreen in Baalbek, Lebanon, in 2018.![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/09/28/multimedia/28mideast-crisis-carousel-02-lbfw/28mideast-crisis-carousel-02-lbfw-threeByTwoMediumAt2X.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
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