Mahiyar Rohinton Patel, Pune
The supreme leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah was killed on Friday in an aerial bombing raid by the Israel Defence Forces ‘Air Force’ in an underground compound on the outskirts of Beirut city. Hassan Nasrallah was the Secretary General of Hezbollah and a very important leader of the Iran backed militia groups which formed the ‘axis of resistance’ to Israel and western influence in the region.
Nasrallah was attending a meeting in an underground bunker with several other prominent leaders of the Hezbollah group. According to the French newspaper ‘La Parisien’ the location of the leader was leaked to the Israeli armed forces by a mole in the Iranian administration.
The Israeli Air Force pounded the six building complex in Dahieh which is in the southern suburbs of Beirut with 80,000 tons of explosives in the form of BLU-109 bombs along with Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) GUIDANCE KITS made in the US. Several prominent leaders were also killed including the commander of Hezbollah forces in the southern front of Lebanon; Ali Karki, Abbas Nilfourshan; the deputy commander of the Quds force in Lebanon. The Quds force is a special forces group of the Iranian Army. Nasrallah‘s daughter Zeinab was also killed in the strike.
Hassan Nasrallah was born in suburban Beirut in 1960 as the ninth child born among 10 siblings. He was from a poor family, his parents were vegetable vendors in Beirut. He fled to Iran during the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 to 1990. He joined a Shia militant group and quickly rose up the ranks called the Amal Movement which later transformed into the Hezbollah Party; the term ‘Hezbollah’ literally translates to ‘Party of God’.Hassan Nasrallah became the leader of Hezbollah in 1992 at the young age of 32, when Israeli defense and intelligence agencies assassinated his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi.
His cousin, cleric and the current head of the Jihad Council of Hezbollah; Hashem Safieddine is slated to become the new head of Hezbollah. Through a stroke of luck or fate he was one of the very few to survive the air raid on the compound which killed Nasrallah.