Who is Hassan Nasrallah, longtime leader of terror group Hezbollah?

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Middle Eastern militant group Hezbollah, was the main target of Israel’s powerful air strike in Lebanon Friday that leveled as many as six residential buildings.It was not clear whether the 64-year-old terror chief survived the attack.Israel said it was targeting the terror group’s main headquarters, which lies beneath the city of Beirut.The strike marks an intense escalation of the fighting — Israel killed three senior Hezbollah military commanders earlier this week, as well as more than 700 other soldiers and citizens.Narsallah’s death would mark Israel’s biggest bounty yet.Nasrallah is one of Hezbollah’s founding members.

Born in 1960, he grew up under Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon after his poor Shiite family was displaced from the Beirut suburb of Bourj Hammoud.He studied theology before joining the Amal movement, a Shiite political and paramilitary organization, before creating the group in 1982.The secretary-general became Hazbollah’s sole leader in 1992, when his predecessor and the group’s co-founder Abbas al-Musawi was killed in an air strike.At the time, Hezbollah was devoted to ending Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon — a goal that was achieved in 2000 under Narsallah’s leadership following a long war that eventually forced Israel to withdraw.

Nasrallah’s own son died as part of the cause — the 18-year-old was killed in a 1997 firefight with the Israelis.That mission slowly altered in the following years to usher in the destruction of Israel.Nasrallah is largely credited with igniting Hezbollah’s 34-day war against Israel in 2006 by launching a rocket strike over Lebanon’s southern border before ordering a ground invasion.Several Israeli soldiers were killed and others were taken hostage, a bloodbath Nasrallah justified by claiming Israel failed to follow through on promises to conduct a prisoner swap.Israel retaliated with the mission of eliminating Hezbollah, but the...