In war-battered Gaza, Palestinians mourn death of Israel enemy Nasrallah

 

Hezbollah confirmed its leader Hassan Nasrallah had been killed, after Israel said it had "eliminated" him in an air strike a day earlier. [AFP]

Palestinians mourned Saturday the death of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli strike, hailing the slain militant leader as a "rare" figure who backed his fierce rhetoric with determination to fight Israel.

Gaza City resident Khalil Youssef, 45, said that "the martyrdom" of Nasrallah, a powerful ally of the Palestinian armed group Hamas, was "a great loss for us as Palestinians".

The Lebanese Iran-backed Hezbollah movement confirmed Saturday the death of Nasrallah, its leader for more than three decades, sending shockwaves across the region including in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, where Palestinians have endured nearly a year of a relentless Israeli military campaign since the October 7 attack.

"He was a rare man who stood against the (Israeli) occupation and supported us," said Youssef.

"He never wavered in his resistance" to Israel, he added.

Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel from Lebanon a day after the Hamas attack on southern Israel that triggered the ongoing war.

The near-daily cross-border clashes dramatically escalated this month, with intense Israeli bombings in Lebanon and retaliatory attacks by Hezbollah fighters. On Friday, a major Israeli air raid on Beirut killed Nasrallah.

"Gaza lost a rare resistance leader," said another Gaza City resident, 32-year-old Ali Tafesh.

"Nasrallah has been with us since the founding of Hezbollah, and especially since the beginning of the war on Gaza" in October, said Tafesh.

"He was the first to support Gaza and to fire rockets at the occupation in solidarity with Gaza."

Nearly a year of Israeli bombardment and fighting in the besieged territory's biggest city, where Tafesh lives, have caused widespread destruction and displaced many thousands of Palestinians.

But "the resistance will not stop until the victory of the Palestinians is achieved", said Tafesh.

For Youssef, Nasrallah's death would not stop the fight against Israel, and "there will be 1,000 Nasrallahs to replace him".

In the occupied West Bank, which is separated from Gaza by Israeli territory, Ramallah resident Abu Saleh Hisham said Nasrallah's killing in a strike on a densely-packed residential area of Beirut's southern suburbs was a case of Israeli "terrorism".

"This is Zionist aggression... and terrorism against the Lebanese people, against the heroic Lebanese resistance, against the leaders of the brave resistance," he said.

In Gaza's southern city of Khan Yunis, graffiti artist Jamil al-Baz painted a mural on cracked concrete slab by rubble, the remains of a building destroyed in the fighting, with a message of "solidarity with Lebanon", he told AFP.

The mural features the Lebanese and Palestinian flags along with the message: "Stop war."

"The war has been going on in Gaza for a whole year and it has started to spread", affecting people in other parts of the Middle East, said Baz.

"I do not want them to suffer as we did."