President Joe Biden stood behind Israel after it killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, calling his death a “measure of justice” and pledging renewed work toward peace in a region straining under the threat of wider war.
“Ultimately, our aim is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means,” Biden said in a statement on Saturday. “It is time for these deals to close, for the threats to Israel to be removed, and for the broader Middle East region to gain greater stability.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ordered the strike on Hezbollah’s main compound in Beirut after a defiant speech to the United Nations on Friday, said it was part of a strategy to allow Israelis to return to areas near the Lebanese border and to pressure Hamas into releasing hostages.
“Eliminating Nasrallah is a necessary condition for achieving the goals we have set: returning the residents of the north safely to their homes, and changing the balance of power in the region for years,” Netanyahu said Saturday in a televised statement after he returned to Israel from New York. “In the coming days, we will face significant challenges.”
Biden’s statement recalled that Americans were among those killed in Hezbollah’s “four-decade reign of terror,” a reference to a 1983 suicide attack on a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in which almost 250 service members died, most of them Marines.
It’s far from clear Biden’s calls for more talks will bear fruit — and the region braced for a new round in the violence that began last Oct. 7, when Hamas militants stormed from Gaza into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people. Israeli attacks have killed some 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza since, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between fighters and civilians.
Hezbollah vowed to maintain the fight against Israel. Iran, which sponsors the group and supplies its vast arsenal, said Hezbollah would be “leading the way” in determining the “fate of this region,” suggesting that Tehran may not be planning to respond directly.
Hezbollah began striking Israel from Lebanon the day after the Israel-Hamas war erupted in Gaza. A near-daily exchange of cross-border missile and drone strikes was largely contained until almost a week ago, when Israel began a massive bombardment of large parts of Lebanon. More than 700 people, including 50 children, were killed, according to Lebanese authorities, along with some of Hezbollah’s most senior commanders.
Hezbollah diminished
The attack that killed Nasrallah was “another political assassination” by Israel, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters Saturday at the United Nations in New York. Asked about the risk of Iranian retaliation, he said Iran’s leadership is “behaving extremely responsibly.” The Pentagon has said the U.S. had no advance warning of the attack.
Several regional experts called the attack, along with Israel’s methodical elimination of much of Hezbollah’s hierarchy, devastating for a group that dominated and divided Lebanon for decades.
“Hezbollah has a hard choice ahead of it,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “How does it recover from the humiliation of the last 10 days and not invite even more damage to its interests?”
Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it was “firstly a tremendous setback for Hezbollah, probably an even more serious one for Iran, because its most reliable and most powerful proxy is basically rendered inert.”
As much as Biden expressed support for Israel, the violence has strained relations as the U.S. has tried for months to persuade Israel to agree to a cease-fire with Hamas. Hamas also hasn’t signed on to any of the U.S. proposals.
Israel is prepared to send troops into Lebanon — and has amassed many on the border — but has yet to make that decision. If it does launch a ground attack, it will aim to make it as short as possible, an Israeli security official said.
Many analysts have warned Israel of the risk of getting forces bogged down in Lebanon and suffering high losses. The war in Gaza and the Hezbollah conflict are starting to take a heavy economic toll on the country, while Lebanon has been mired in crisis for decades. The United Nations said more than 50,000 people have fled to Syria as a result of the Israeli strikes.
Nasrallah’s most likely successor is widely viewed as Hashem Safieddine, a cousin of the former leader who has been head of Hezbollah’s executive council since 1992.
Born in Lebanon in 1964, Safieddine has been part of Hezbollah since it was founded in 1982, according to the Counter Extremism Project, an advocacy group based in Washington. The U.S. designated Safieddine a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2017.
Nasrallah, who was 64, started leading Hezbollah in the early 1990s and was close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, becoming integral to Tehran’s network of proxy forces in the Middle East.
Hezbollah is considered the crown jewel in what’s often referred to as Iran’s “axis of resistance” against Israel and US forces in the region, which also includes Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen.
Nasrallah had been living in hiding since 2006, when Israel and Hezbollah fought a devastating 34-day war. He last appeared in public years ago, though he did several televised speeches. He faced opposition among Lebanese who accused him of tying their country’s fate to Iran, which supplies Hezbollah — also a political party — with funding, training and weaponry.
Hezbollah, like Hamas, is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and has vowed to destroy Israel.
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(With assistance from Dana Khraiche, Paul Wallace, Galit Altstein and Augusta Saraiva.)
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