“
secretly meeting with Uri Saguy in safe houses provided by Mossad, Mahmoud Zahhar met with Hezbollah’s leader in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, the chief power broker of the 1.4 million Shia community in the country. Intelligent, charismatic, and a born street orator, Nasrallah’s entire career had been shaped by Israel’s repeated interventions in Lebanon, from the civil war in the mid-1970s to when the Israeli Defense Force had unilaterally withdrawn from southern Lebanon after years of failing to subdue Hezbollah. Just as his brother’s death had led to Bashar al-Assad becoming Syria’s president, it was an assassination that had paved the way for Nasrallah’s rise to absolute power. In 1992 an Israeli gunship killed Nasrallah’s mentor, his predecessor Abbas Moussawi. Since then Nasrallah has survived similar attempts by Mossad to kill him with explosives planted in both his home and his office in Beirut. Each failure to assassinate him has enhanced his status across the
”
”