The crowds came, weeping in the dark, to a bombsite and a shrine.
The crater was huge, with twisted rods of steel and mounds of earth and rubble on its side. This is where Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah was killed, in a massive Israeli airstrike, on 27 September.
Those dirt mounds were covered in small candles, the surrounding buildings were lit in red and, at the bottom of the pit, a white cube beamed spotlights straight up into the sky,
Hezbollah called Nasrallah their “soul and heart”. Western governments called him a terrorist and celebrated his death.
The crowds here, in their thousands, chanted his name, again and again.
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Fatima al Atrash, a 65-year-old woman who comes from the south of Lebanon, told me that Nasrallah “means a lot to us – more than our children, more than our brothers, more than our families”.
“I wanted to come and see where he died – to smell his odour.”
Abbass Suleiman, a middle-aged man, said that Nasrallah was “our dignity, our pride”.
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“This is not the main goodbye, but of course this is the first opportunity to see where he died,” he added.
This had been a highly protected site, opened now for the first time and only under strict Hezbollah control. And the media was invited in first to film these bright lights and these crowds.
Although Nasrallah died months ago, this wasn’t about history, but about memory and how it can be used in the battle for the future. A memorial – and a rallying cry for the future.
Teenager Aya Issawi said: “They thought that by assassinating him, they had defeated him, but his blood will rebuild in the future, many generations will avenge him.”
Another girl, even younger, 11-years-old, said: “I came here to tell the people and tell the Israeli soldiers that we are strong, we don’t fear them, we will always stay strong.”
But the distraught crowd also showed the scale of Hezbollah’s difficulty and of Israel’s success.
They now have a new leader but how do they replace a figurehead with this sort of following?
There is defiance here but what’s newer is the sense of some defeat.
