Moussa Dirani, 57, brought his teenage son to the memorial event. “It is very sad and painful to see this site,” he said. “But the resistance does not stop with Nasrallah, his death gives us power to continue along his path.”
The hundreds of Hezbollah flags at the event would “continue to fly high”, said Fida Nasreddine, 34. “We are with Hassan Nasrallah until the last breath,” she said.
Nasrallah’s assassination shocked Lebanon and the wider world when the news broke in September. He had rarely been seen in public since Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, and was protected by tight security at all times.
He was one of a number of senior Hezbollah figures killed by Israel in air strikes between September and the ceasefire agreement struck on Wednesday.
The group had been badly damaged by the assassinations, but the sense of celebration in the Hezbollah-dominated areas of Beirut “cannot be dismissed as insincere”, said David Wood, a Lebanon analyst with Crisis Group.
“The achievements that Hezbollah has promoted – maintaining its ground operations against Israel, ensuring that tens of thousands of Israelis couldn’t return to their homes, and having a severe impact on Israel’s economy, I don’t think those achievements are nothing, and I think lots of its supporters will see an element of victory in that.”
Additional reporting by Joanna Mazjoub.
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