A source close to said Hezbollah Nasrallah is still alive, after the attack on the southern suburb of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, on Friday evening, while a senior Iranian security official said that Tehran is checking Nasrallah’s status.
Replacing Nasrallah will be more challenging now than at any time in years, after a series of recent Israeli attacks killed senior Hezbollah leaders and raised questions about its internal security.
New scene
“The entire landscape will change dramatically,” said Muhannad Haj Ali, deputy director of research at the Carnegie Middle East Institute in Beirut.
Haj Ali added: “It was (Nasrallah) like the glue that held an expanding organization together.”
Hezbollah, which was founded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the early 1980s to fight Israel, is also a major social, religious and political movement in Lebanon, with Nasrallah at its heart.
Nasrallah himself became Secretary General of Hezbollah when Israel killed his predecessor, and he has been at constant risk of assassination ever since.
“If you kill one, they get a new one,” a European diplomat said, speaking about the group’s approach.
But amid a series of Israeli strikes that have achieved their goals in the war against Hezbollah, the potential killing of Nasrallah would exacerbate an already difficult time for the group.
Lina Al-Khatib of the Chatham House Policy Institute in London said: “Hezbollah will not collapse if Nasrallah is killed or becomes incapacitated, but this will be a strong blow to its morale, and will also confirm Israel’s security and military superiority and its ability to penetrate.”
The potential impact of Nasrallah’s killing, if confirmed, on Hezbollah’s military capabilities is also unclear, as they have been exchanged Israel Hezbollah and Hezbollah have been fighting for a year across the Lebanese border, in their worst conflict since the 2006 war.
Al-Khatib said, “Israel will want to translate this pressure into a new situation in which its north is safe, but this will not happen quickly even if Nasrallah is eliminated.”
Hezbollah claimed responsibility for several missile attacks on Israel, in the hours following the strike on BeirutWhile analysts said it was an attempt to demonstrate its ability to carry out such operations, after Israel said it targeted the group’s leadership center.
Fawaz Girgis, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said: “Israel has declared war. It is an all-out war, and Israel is exploiting this opportunity to eliminate the leadership structure and destroy Hezbollah’s infrastructure.”
Girgis added: “They (the Israelis) are breaking Hezbollah’s power. There is no need to kill every member of Hezbollah, but if you destroy its fighting structure and force it to surrender, that will make it lose its credibility.”
Who will succeed Nasrallah?
According to the opinion of expert on Shiite armed groups, Philip Smith, any new leader must be acceptable within the group in Lebanon, as well as among its supporters in Iran.
Smith believes that Hashem Safi Al-Dinwidely considered Nasrallah’s successor, is still alive after Friday’s attack.
Wasfi al-Din, who oversees Hezbollah’s political affairs and is a member of the group’s Jihad Council, is a relative of Nasrallah.
The US State Department classified him as a terrorist in 2017, and last June he threatened a major escalation against Israel after the killing of another Hezbollah commander.
He said during the funeral: “Let (the enemy) prepare himself to weep and wail.”
Smith said that Nasrallah “began to be allocated positions on a variety of different councils within Hezbollah, some of which were more ambiguous than others.”
He added that the family connection between Safi al-Din and Nasrallah, as well as the similarity between them, are all factors in his favor.
