ON THE day Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah received news of his eldest son Hadi’s death he displayed a defiant resolve that impressed many in the Arab world.

It was September 13, 1997, and Hadi was only 18. Nasrallah, the general secretary of Hezbollah, adored him but this was no time for a public show of emotion.

Lebanon was still under Israeli occupation and Hadi had been killed while taking part in an attack by Hezbollah’s miliary wing, known as the Islamic Resistance.

Nasrallah made no change to his schedule. He was due to address an audience in Beirut. Shedding no tears, he said he had just been told that his boy had died. At last, he said, he could look without shame into the eyes of other parents who had lost sons in action against Israel.

“I am proud to be, like so many other Lebanese, the father of a martyr,” he declared.

His words struck a chord among thousands of Lebanese, who saw in him a selflessness that seemed in stark contrast to the attitude of the political elite who had sent their children to the safety of Europe at the start of the country’s civil war in 1976.

For days on end Christians and Muslims, both Sunnis and Shi’ites, from all walks of life poured into his modest home to shake his hand, extend their condolences and express their admiration.

The ascent of Nasrallah, a grocer’s son, was only beginning. His popularity increased again in May 2002 when, after 22 years of occupation, the Israeli army finally withdrew from Lebanon and Hezbollah claimed to have driven it out.

Then in 2004 he won further kudos by securing the Middle East’s most spectacular prisoner exchange for decades.

Hezbollah handed back to Israel a colonel who had been captured in 2001 and the remains of three Israeli soldiers killed in combat. In exchange, 30 Lebanese and 420 Palestinian prisoners were released.

Regarded as a terrorist leader by the United States, Israel and many other countries, Nasrallah is seen by hundreds of thousands of Lebanese as a great resistance fighter.

Both Iran and Syria have been staunch supporters of Hezbollah, which was accused in the early 1980s of plotting kidnappings of westerners in Lebanon, including the British hostages Terry Waite and John McCarthy.

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