The night the leader fell

On the evening of 27 September, the bunker under a residential district of Beirut’s southern suburbs received the bombs that Israel had been preparing for months. The strike, delivered in a few minutes by fighter jets using, according to Israeli officials, more than eighty bombs, flattened the building where the leadership of Hezbollah was meeting, and on the following day both sides confirmed what the scale of the attack had made probable: Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader for thirty-two years, was dead. The assassination removed the conflict’s single most consequential figure, at the end of a fortnight in which Israel had already dismantled the organisation’s command layer, one strike at a time.

The man was the institution. Nasrallah had led Hezbollah since 1992, when he succeeded the assassinated Abbas al-Musawi at the age of thirty-two, and the organisation’s rise, from a guerrilla force in the south to the dominant power in Lebanese politics and Iran’s regional lynchpin, was inseparable from his tenure. He was the voice of victory in 2006, the strategist of the missile arsenal that has kept Israel’s north in fear, the figure whose televised speeches were events across the Arab world. His removal, after three decades in which Israel repeatedly failed to kill him, goes beyond the operational: the organisation will survive, its weapons remain, but the era that Nasrallah defined ended in the dust of the southern suburbs.

The timing of the assassination was the point of it. It came after weeks of deliberate escalation: the exploding pagers, the air campaign against the south and the Bekaa, the killing of commanders who replaced each other in days, and finally the strike on the leadership’s own headquarters. The strategy, which the Israeli prime minister described as ‘changing the balance of power in the north’, has been to demonstrate that the organisation’s entire structure is within reach. The question is what the demonstration was for: the return of the residents of northern Israel to their homes, the opening of a diplomatic path, or the beginning of a ground war the Israeli leadership has been preparing in public for weeks.

The region’s reaction has been as dangerous as the strike itself. Iran, whose supreme leader declared that Nasrallah’s death would bring the ‘resistance axis’ to avenge him, has been forced, as every escalation since April has forced it, to weigh the prestige of retaliation against the cost of a direct war; Lebanon has declared three days of mourning; and the United States, whose president spoke of the strike as ‘justice’ while ordering additional forces to the region, finds itself bound to an ally whose actions it has repeatedly sought to restrain. The war that Nasrallah built, the war of rockets and tunnels, has entered the phase for which he spent thirty years preparing, and it will now be fought without the strategist who understood it best.

The assassination will be judged by what it achieves. Israel’s position is that the removal of the region’s most dangerous figure is legitimate self-defence, aimed at an organisation that has fired at its territory for a year; the position of Hezbollah and its allies is that the killing of a leader in a residential neighbourhood, in a war that has already displaced a million people in Lebanon, is an escalation that will be answered. Both positions are consistent with the facts, and the facts are the problem: the region has been brought to the brink of the wider war everyone has been predicting for a year, and the man who made the predictions seem inevitable is gone, leaving the predictions themselves to play out. The night was quiet in Beirut, after the bombs; the quiet is not peace. It is the pause before the next blow, and the war, without its architect, is now in the hands of the men he trained and the enemies he chose.