Israel Strikes Lebanon Again After Killing Hezbollah Leader: Live Updates

Israel’s killing of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has created a sense of instability in Lebanon, where the group was both an armed force and a powerful, longstanding political entity. But the loss of Hezbollah’s longtime leader could create a path to regaining stability, said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Lebanon has been in a worsening political crisis since 2019, when Hezbollah and its allies survived protests over a deep economic crisis, and since the outrage over a huge 2020 port explosion, widely attributed to government negligence. Political dysfunction in the state reached its nadir two years ago, when Hezbollah and its allies lost their parliamentary majority but maintained enough clout to block major decisions.

Since 2022, Lebanon’s Parliament has been unable to name a president, and the country has been run by a caretaker prime minister with limited powers to lift the country out of its severe economic crisis and political disarray.

Some politicians, including both rivals and allies of Hezbollah, have proposed using this moment to call an emergency session of Parliament, name a president and try to restore some functionality to the state.

“A lot of Lebanese are saying, you know, tragic as it is, it shuffles the deck and probably gives more of an opening to do some long-needed domestic repairs,” Mr. Salem said. “A weakened, traumatized Hezbollah might even agree, because they’ll realize that they are going to need at least five years to recover.”

The wild card may be Hezbollah’s supporters among the country’s large Shiite Muslim community, tens of thousands of whom have been displaced by fierce Israeli bombardment across the south and east of the country, where Hezbollah holds sway. They have also borne the brunt of the death toll, which is already in the hundreds but expected to rise.

Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at the London-based research organization Chatham House, said a big question is how Hezbollah’s supporters react to the appearance of weakness in a force that long claimed to protect them.

“There is wide anger among Hezbollah’s constituents that is likely to spill out onto the streets of Beirut and may spark clashes with Hezbollah’s opponents,” she said. “It’s important for Lebanon’s political leaders to take measures to restore calm and project a degree of unity.”

Some political leaders have taken that approach with Lebanon’s Christians, whose sect customarily holds the presidential post. So has the former prime minister, Saad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim. He offered condolences over the killing of Mr. Nasrallah, even though Hezbollah has been accused of orchestrating the assassination of his father, who also served as prime minister.

Mr. Hariri called Mr. Nasrallah’s killing a “cowardly act condemned in its entirety by those of us who paid dearly with the lives of our loved ones, when assassination became an alternative to politics.”

“What is required now is for everyone to rise above differences and selfishness to bring our country to safety,” he wrote in a statement.

Lebanese officials have stressed that they do not want a conflict with Israel. “We’d like to live without war — happily, as a tourist country, a beautiful country, good food — and we are not able to do it,” the foreign minister, Abdallah BouHabib, told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before Mr. Nasrallah’s killing this week. “And so there is a lot of depression, especially with the latest escalation.”

But as has long been the case in tiny Lebanon, where different parties and sects are often influenced by a wide array of international actors, the reactions of foreign powers could affect the fallout.

Joshua Landis, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of Oklahoma, wrote on social media that efforts by Israel and the United States to push Lebanon to sever ties with Iranian influence and purge Hezbollah and its allies from the state could stoke unrest.

If Lebanese politicians call for the Lebanese military to spread and take control of the state, he added, they would face wariness and hostility from Hezbollah and its supporters, who will fear any attempt to completely disarm them.

Shiite forces and their allies, Mr. Landis said, “will resist, and Lebanon’s fragile stability will again be shattered.”

With a fragile government, a struggling economy and the competing motives of armed groups and foreign powers, Lebanon could slide from instability to greater violence, experts say. Sectarian conflict has long plagued the country, which was mired in civil war from 1975 until 1990.

That is why, even though many of Mr. Nasrallah’s rivals in Lebanon welcomed his death, Israel’s continued airstrikes after his killing could create new problems, said Nadim Shehadi, an independent Lebanese analyst.

“Israel is on a rampage and is its own worst enemy,” said Mr. Shehadi.

The longer the bombardment lasts, he said, the more it erodes divisions in the Middle East between those who want to fight Israel and those who would rather reach some kind of settlement with it.

“Israel is not making it easy to be on that other side,” he said. “Even the most moderate person, or the most Israel-friendly person in Lebanon, is shocked by the inhumanity that they have shown.”

Aryn Baker contributed reporting.