Belén Fernández After assassinating Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah in a devastating air strike on Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighbourhood, the Israeli army took to the platform X to boast triumphantly that Nasrallah would “no longer be able to terrorize the world”. Granted, the objective observer would be forgiven for failing to detect how it is that Nasrallah is supposedly responsible for terrestrial terror when he is not the one who has been presiding over genocide in the Gaza Strip for nearly a year. Nor, obviously, is he the one who just killed more than 700 people in Lebanon in less than a week.
Israel takes the credit for all of that, just as it takes the credit for pulverising numerous residential buildings and their inhabitants in the quest to kill Nasrallah – as good an example as any of “terrorising the world”. And while Israel is marketing Nasrallah’s elimination as a decisive blow to the organisation, a brief glance at history reveals that such killings unsurprisingly do nothing to root out resistance and instead intensify it. Case in point: Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s co-founder and second secretary-general, was assassinated in 1992 in southern Lebanon by Israeli helicopter gunships, which also killed his wife and five-year-old son.
On this occasion, too, Israel was quick to congratulate itself on its bloody feat – yet the celebration was woefully premature. Following al-Musawi’s assassination, Nasrallah was elected secretary-general.