Hezbollah's Nasrallah: Lebanon's most powerful man killed by Israel

Slain Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, whose death was confirmed Saturday by his Iran-backed movement, wielded great power in Lebanon but led a life in hiding to avoid assassination by his group's arch-enemy, Israel.

Lebanon's most powerful man and the only one in the tiny Mediterranean country with the power to wage war, Nasrallah was killed aged 64 in a wave of Israeli strikes on Friday on Hezbollah's main bastion in south Beirut.

With Nasrallah's cult status among his Shiite Muslim supporters, the influence he had over Lebanon's institutions and Hezbollah's formidable arsenal, his death is bound to have ripple effects across the country and the wider region.

Nasrallah was rarely seen in public since his movement fought a devastating 2006 war with Israel.

In 2011, he showed up at a religious procession in Beirut's southern suburbs and briefly greeted supporters before addressing the crowd on video from an undisclosed location.

In a 2014 interview with Lebanon's pro-Hezbollah newspaper Al-Akhbar, Nasrallah said that "the Israelis are pushing the idea... that I live far from people, that I don't see them or communicate with them."

"The point of security measures is that movement be kept secret, but that doesn't stop me from moving around and seeing what is happening."

Very few people were believed to know where Nasrallah lived, and the vast majority of his speeches over the past two decades were pre-recorded before being broadcast from a secret location.

A gifted public speaker, Nasrallah was a master of cadence, swinging from humour to belittle his enemies to rage to fire up his 100,000-man militia.

The bearded, bespectacled cleric was never seen without traditional robes and the black turban that marked him out as a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed.

He was elected secretary-general of Hezbollah in 1992, aged just 32, after an Israeli helicopter gunship killed his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi.

Hezbollah is the only group that refused to give up its weapons after Lebanon's 15-year civil war ended in 1990, and Nasrallah had insisted that Israel remains an existential threat.

Since Hezbollah's Palestinian ally Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Hezbollah has exchanged fire with Israeli forces almost daily across the Lebanon-Israel border.

- Political force -

Born in Beirut's impoverished northern suburb of Burj Hammud on August 31, 1960, Nasrallah was one of nine children of a poor grocer hailing from the tiny southern village of Bazuriyeh.

He studied politics and the Koran for three years at a seminary in Iraq's Shiite holy city of Najaf, before being expelled in 1978 when the Sunni-dominated government turned on Shiite activists.

He then became heavily involved in Lebanese politics and gained much of his early experience in the Shiite Amal militia during the civil war.

But he broke away from Amal when Israeli troops marched on Beirut in 1982 to become one of the founders of Hezbollah.

He acquired his cult status in Lebanon and across the Arab world after Israel withdrew its troops from south Lebanon under relentless Hezbollah attack in May 2000, ending 22 years of occupation of the border strip.

Nasrallah's years at the helm of Hezbollah -- or Party of God -- saw the group expand from guerrilla faction into the most powerful political force in Lebanon.

Hezbollah is admired by many Shiites in the country for supporting local charities, building up health and education services in its strongholds and assisting the needy among its supporters.

But in divided Lebanon, the movement is also widely hated, including by those who dream of a nation free from sectarianism and in which the rule of law prevails.

Nasrallah's personal popularity soared across the Arab world after a UN-brokered ceasefire ended Hezbollah's 2006 conflict with Israel.

But it suffered a blow later when he sent fighters into neighbouring Syria to prop up President Bashar al-Assad's regime after civil war broke out there in 2011.