Who is Hassan Nasrallah, the likely target of Israel’s strike on Hezbollah HQs?

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is ‘fine,’ a source close to him said, and denied reports he was the target of the strike on the militant group’s headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, by the Israeli military on Friday.

“The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out a precise strike on the Central headquarters of the Hezbollah terror organisation…taking the necessary action to protect our people so that Israeli families can live in their homes, safely and securely,” IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, declared in a televised statement shortly after the military action in the Dahiyeh suburb in Lebanon’s Capital.

Who is Hassan Nasrallah?

(1.) He was born on August 31, 1960, in the northern Burj Hammud suburb of Beirut. The son of a poor grocer, he had eight siblings.

(2.) Since February 1992, Nasrallah has led Hezbollah as the group’s secretary-general, the third in its history. Now 64, the cleric succeeded Abbas al-Musawi, who was killed by Israel.

(3.) In a 2014 interview, he denied living in a bunker but admitted to ‘regularly switching sleeping places.’

“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,” Nasrallah told Al-Akhbar, a Lebanese newspaper sympathetic to Hezbollah.

(4.) Officials and journalists who met him in recent years, described ‘tight security measures’ that prevented them from knowing where they were being taken. Most of his speeches in the past two decades have been recorded and broadcast from a secret location.

(5.) Said to be a ‘gifted’ public speaker, Nasrallah is married and has four surviving children. His eldest son, a Hezbollah fighter, was killed in an ambush by Israel in September 1997.

(With AFP inputs)