Israel celebrates Nasrallah’s assassination, but warns of future risks

Israelis have reacted with joy and relief to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese cleric who turned Hezbollah into the region’s most formidable paramilitary force and, over the past year, transformed northern Israel into a smouldering conflict zone.
It took Hezbollah until Saturday to confirm Nasrallah’s death, but in Israel the celebrations erupted almost immediately after the massive strike on Friday on the group’s compound in south Beirut. Friends and family exchanged festive memes and selfies of toasts being raised in WhatsApp groups. Swimmers at beaches along the coast applauded, whooped and whistled as lifeguards announced the news over loudspeakers. “Yalla yalla, Nasrallah, we’ll send you to Allah, with all of Hezbollah,” dancers sang at a Tel Aviv nightclub.
Moti Blitzblau, a resident of Haifa whose grandchildren are among the nearly 70,000 people displaced from Israeli communities along the Lebanese border, said the hit was overdue. For months, northern residents have urged the government to take more decisive action against Hezbollah, put an end to its cross-border fire — which it began unleashing on October 8 in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza — and return families to their homes.
“It was clear that Nasrallah needed to be taken out, that this terror campaign in Israel be stopped,” Blitzblau said.
He said the news gave Israelis a rare breath of hope after the “colossal failure of October 7″ and the recurring heartbreak of the hostages still trapped in Gaza. But, like many here, he was “restraining” his optimism — aware the events of the past 10 days would have long-reaching and unpredictable consequences for Israel, and that Hezbollah and the rest of Iran’s proxy network across the Middle East would live to fight another day.
“We’re still under threat,” he said. “Nothing has yet been solved.”
Nasrallah’s assassination — in an underground bunker, surrounded by top advisers — was made possible by high-quality Israeli military intelligence, former officials said. It followed another historic operation this month, when thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies exploded, taking a heavy toll on the group’s communications network.
Throughout the weekend, Israel’s military continued to pummel what it said were Hezbollah sites in Beirut and across southern Lebanon. On Sunday, the militant group announced the deaths of two more officials, Ali Karki and Nabil Kaouk, in recent strikes, in another blow to its top leadership.
The big question now, as Israel masses troops and military equipment along the border, is whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will order a ground invasion.
“All options are open because for 32 years, Nasrallah was the one who called the shots,” said Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer in the Israeli military.
Nasrallah became the group’s leader in 1992 after Israel’s assassination of his predecessor, Sayyed Abbas Musawi. For more than three decades, the image of Nasrallah in his signature black turban loomed large in the Israeli imagination. He used his regular speeches to taunt Israelis and threaten the destruction of their state, nodding to the tens of thousands of fighters he commanded and the increasingly sophisticated weapons they had stockpiled that he said could reach any part of the country.
“My entire childhood, we lived from speech to speech,” said 30-year-old Darinda Kalabrino. She is among the few remaining residents in Kibbutz Sasa, an Israeli agricultural village near the Lebanon border where she works at a local tech company.
Kalabrino’s family home was destroyed by a Hezbollah missile in 2006, during the last Lebanon war, which lasted 34 days after militants abducted two Israeli soldiers. She has become reaccustomed over the past year to the wail of air sirens; Hezbollah missiles have landed near her house and the homes of other family members. One hit her brother’s car.
“We surprised even ourselves, that over 10 days we were able to almost destroy [Hezbollah], and it finally feels that after being so patient, something has finally moved,” Kalabrino said. But nothing about the future seemed certain: “We haven’t beat them,” she said. “They still have capabilities.”
Hezbollah, like Hamas in Gaza, is a seasoned, resilient military organisation and has experience in replacing leaders and shifting tactics. Even as it announced the deaths of top commanders, the group continued to fire on Israel in recent days, including anti-tank missiles, which fly too low and fast for Israel’s air defences.
On Wednesday, the group said it fired a long-range ballistic missile towards Tel Aviv, but it was intercepted. A second missile fired towards Tel Aviv by Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen was intercepted on Saturday. Hezbollah and its allies have yet to unleash the kind of concentrated, co-ordinated barrage that weapons experts say could threaten Israeli population centres.
Growing up in the northern town of Kiryat Tivon, Yuval Bar On thought of Nasrallah as a “very iconic” figure “who led a very serious campaign of terror”.
Now a resident of Tel Aviv, he talked about fleeing Hezbollah bombardment as a child in 2006, when he was 11, a period he remembers as a “strange adventure”. Nasrallah’s killing, he said, was a “very important strategic achievement that goes to show that when the Israeli government and the IDF want to achieve their goals and prioritise their resources correctly, they can do amazing things to maintain our security here”.
But Bar On’s father-in-law is Keith Siegel, an American-Israeli hostage who was dragged by Hamas into Gaza on October 7. For Siegel and the rest of the hostages, he said, nothing had changed: “They’re still there in the tunnels, in conditions that are getting worse every day.”
With a possible Israeli ground invasion looming, he worried that the “focus and resources will shift to this bigger front, and people will take less action to promote the release of the hostages”.
Though Israel has called up troops from Gaza and other reservists for its operation in the north, it is unclear how far it is prepared to go — weighed down by memories of past military setbacks in Lebanon. But momentum for further action is building in Israel, where many believe their country has gained an upper hand against a long-time foe and should make the most of its advantage.
“It’s the same way all Americans felt when Osama bin Laden was killed,” said Jeff Weiss, an American-Israeli patent lawyer strolling on Tel Aviv’s beach promenade on Sunday afternoon.
He said he did not presume to understand all the military calculations, but believed it was important that “Israel go all the way”.
His friend, Baruch Gordon, also an American-Israeli, said since learning Nasrallah was killed, he hasn’t been able to stop smiling.
“It is a great source of honour for me, as a Jew and as an Israeli,” he said.