Hundreds of thousands of people packed into a stadium in Beirut and the streets outside yesterday for the funeral of Hezbollah’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah, nearly five months after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Nasrallah died after Israel’s air force dropped more than 80 bombs on the militant group’s main operations room in a southern suburb of the Lebanese capital. His death was a major blow for the Iran-backed militant group and political party that he had transformed into a potent force in the Middle East.
He was one of the group’s founders and led it for more than 30 years, enjoying wide influence among Iran-backed groups in the region. He was widely respected in the so-called Iran-led axis of resistance that included Iraqi, Yemeni and Palestinian factions.
Nasrallah also became an iconic figure in other parts of the Arab world after Hezbollah fought Israel to a draw in a brutal month-long war in 2006, but the group’s image in much of the region suffered after it intervened on the side of former President Bashar Assad in Syria’s civil war.
Hezbollah had called on its supporters to attend the funeral in large numbers in what appears to be a move to show that the group remains powerful after suffering major blows during a 14-month war with Israel that left many of its senior political and military officials dead.
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A Lebanese official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment estimated the crowd size at 450,000.
“This massive crowd confirms that Hezbollah is still the most popular party at the Lebanese level, and as a result, all the talk that Hezbollah is weak or degraded is out of place,” said Ali Fayyad, a lawmaker with the group’s political wing, who attended the funeral.
Sahar al-Attar, a mourner who travelled from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley for the funeral said,“We would have come even under bullets” to attend Nasrallah’s burial.
Nasrallah shared the funeral with his cousin and successor, Hashem Safieddine, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb a few days later. Nasrallah will be laid to rest later yesterday in Beirut while Safieddine will be buried in his hometown in southern Lebanon. Both had temporarily been buried in secret locations.