Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah became depressed and was emotionally changed by Israel’s exploding pager attack on his operatives as well as by strikes that decimated the group’s leadership, his family told Lebanese media.
His son said Nasrallah was noticeably no longer the same man, and his daughter revealed that he cried after the beeper attack.
Nasrallah’s son, daughter, and three grandchildren spoke to Al-Manar television for interviews that were broadcast on Friday.
On September 17, 2024, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah across Lebanon suddenly exploded, killing dozens of operatives and maiming thousands, marking the beginning of Israel’s escalation against the terror group after almost a year of persistent Hezbollah rocket fire that displaced some 60,000 residents of the north, and was met with Israeli airstrikes.
The pagers, laced with explosives, were detonated via an encrypted message that required users to hold the devices with both hands, maximizing the likelihood of the subsequent blast causing debilitating injuries.
Over the next several weeks, Israeli airstrikes pounded Hezbollah, wiping out almost all of its leaders — including Nasrallah himself — and depleting the Iran-backed terror group’s fighting abilities. A ceasefire was eventually reached at the end of November.
Nasrallah’s daughter Zeinab Nasrallah told Al-Manar that she called her mother the day after the beeper explosions to find out how her father had reacted.
“She told me that he cried,” Zeinab Nasrallah said, according to an English translation of her comments on the site.
Son Mohammed Jawad Nasrallah said that his father sank into a serious depression after a July airstrike killed Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in his Beirut apartment, and then the beeper attacks.
Everyone who met him said “he is no longer with us,” Jawad Nasrallah recalled.
In addition, Israel’s relentless bombing campaign, once the conflict escalated into open war, had a profound effect on the Hezbollah leader, and directly impacted the terror group’s morale, Nasrallah said.
He also said that his father was aware of the danger he faced, but apparently had dropped his guard and become less cautious than he had in the past about evading a possible Israeli strike against him.
Ten days after the beeper attack, Israel killed Nasrallah in a massive bombing of his Beirut underground bunker. He had led the terror group for three decades.
Last December, two former Mossad agents spoke to CBS’s 60 Minutes about the beeper operation, with one of them asserting that the veteran Hezbollah leader saw pagers exploding and injuring people who were right next to him in his bunker.
“Nasrallah — when we operated the beeper operation — just next to him in the bunker several people had a beeper receiving the message. And in his own eyes, he saw them collapsing.”
Asked how he knew that, the agent said, “It’s a strong rumor.”
Two days after the attack, Nasrallah gave a speech.
“If you look at his eyes, he was defeated,” the agent said in accented English. “He already lose the war. And his soldier look at him during that speech. And they saw a broken leader.”
Last week, Mossad chief David Barnea described the beeper operation as a “turning point” in the fight in Lebanon.
Nasrallah was buried last week in a Beirut funeral ceremony. As the funeral began at the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium, Lebanon’s biggest sports arena, Israeli warplanes flew at low altitude over Beirut.
The beeper attacks, swiftly attributed to Israel, came as Israel began to step up a counteroffensive against Hezbollah, which began striking Israel the day after the allied Palestinian terror group Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack.
Some 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, were killed in the Hamas onslaught, and 251 were taken hostage, sparking the war in Gaza.
A complex, three-phase ceasefire with Hamas began last month, though its future is unclear, as only the first stage has been completed.