The Lebanese town of Al-Nabi Chit, in the eastern Bekaa Valley, is considered a possible burial place of the prophet Seth, Adam and Eve’s lesser-known third son. The prophet’s remains are believed to be entombed in an elegant mosque with sandstone arches. Elsewhere in town, there is another, more elaborate dome-topped mausoleum, which houses the remains of Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi, one of the founders of Hezbollah, who was born here. Canary-yellow Hezbollah flags ring the mosque’s rooftop, crowning a façade of brilliant blue tiles, which, on a recent visit, shimmered in a cool November sun.
Musawi was the Party’s second secretary-general, until he was assassinated by Israel, in 1992. He was replaced by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longest-serving leader, who helmed the organization for thirty-two years, until his death in a ferocious Israeli bombardment on Beirut in September. Another of the Party’s earliest members, the senior commander Fuad Shukr, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in July, also hailed from Al-Nabi Chit.
The town is a bastion of support for Hezbollah and a proud source of its fighting men, whose identities are usually only revealed publicly in death. Yellow banners stretch across the narrow streets, rippling in the air like waves, one after another, each bearing the name and image of a local fallen fighter.
Hezbollah was born in the early nineteen-eighties in the flat, sunburnt plains of this valley, in response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanese territory. In Al-Nabi Chit, I met Wehbi al-Musawi, a local mukhtar, who is related to Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi. We sat in his kitchen as he made coffee and reminisced about the group’s early days. “They would meet here,” Musawi, who is seventy-four years old, said, gesturing to an adjacent room. “And it took off. Praise be to God.” The attendees at those gatherings included Sayyed Musawi and Nasrallah when he “was still a budding young man.”
Nasrallah transformed Hezbollah from a small group of armed men into a powerful multipronged organization with parliamentarians, government ministers, a social-services network, and the Middle East’s most powerful non-state actor, said to comprise a hundred thousand men and an arsenal of a hundred and fifty thousand rockets. But this round of the conflict, which began on October 8, 2023, a day after Hamas’s surprise attack in Israel, has inflicted losses on Hezbollah that Nasrallah himself had described as “painful” and “unprecedented.” In mid-September, 2024, explosives planted in communication devices used by the Party’s military and civilian cadres killed dozens and wounded thousands. A campaign of assassinations has eliminated a slew of top military commanders and other officials, culminating in Nasrallah’s death.
What people in Lebanon refer to as the resistance community—Hezbollah’s base of supporters—is also under tremendous pressure. It is bearing the brunt of Israel’s assault, which has included bombing residential buildings and destroying entire towns and villages in the south. (Israel claims that it is targeting Hezbollah military infrastructure embedded in civilian areas.) To date, more than thirty-five hundred Lebanese have been killed, and some fifteen thousand wounded. More than 1.2 million people, about a fifth of Lebanon’s population, have fled their homes. They have fled from the southern part of the country, the Bekaa Valley, the northeastern city of Baalbek, and the southern suburbs of Beirut—all areas with significant Shiite communities from which Hezbollah draws the bulk, but not all, of its support. (In Lebanon’s multiconfessional society, political affiliations are not confined or defined by sectarian identities, and few areas are solely inhabited by followers of one sect or party.)
In Al-Nabi Chit, unlike many nearby places that have become ghost towns, the streets bustle with men, women, and children. Still, Musawi, the mukhtar, estimated that as many as five thousand of the town’s twenty-two thousand residents had left, owing to intensified air strikes in recent months; the evacuees included his own wife and an adult son, who has three young children. There are pancaked houses all over town. “They are striking civilians, entire families, in their homes,” Musawi said. “We don’t have fighters here, and wherever they are, may God protect them and blind their enemies to them.” To date, some twenty-five combatants from Al-Nabi Chit have been killed on front lines in other parts of the country, he said. The Israelis, he went on, “are trying to pressure us, the resistance community, to change our views. But, on the contrary, we will not. Victory requires patience and sacrifice, and we must pay the price of victory.”
Nearby, on the top floor of a two-story building in a cul-de-sac, I met a woman known as Em Ali, or mother of Ali, who had paid that price in the previous war with Israel. Her twenty-four-year-old son, Mohammad, died in 2006, fighting in the southern border town of Bint Jbeil, which is more than eighty miles away. The night before I visited her, a home not far away had been flattened in an Israeli strike. The house was still smoldering, but Em Ali scoffed at the idea of leaving. Clad in a black abaya and a head scarf that matched her black-rimmed glasses, she sat ramrod straight in a living room that had become a shrine to her son; the walls were decorated with half a dozen posters and paintings depicting the young man.
Em Ali placed the losses endured by Hezbollah’s supporters within a deeply religious Shiite tradition rooted in the martyrdom of the sect’s revered imams, Ali and Hussein. “The history in my blood, this is who we are,” she said. “Our young resistance fighters are important to us, and they are fighting for this soil, for these stones. We won’t leave—not our land, not our homes, not our young men. If we are not strong, our sons won’t be.”
I asked her about the moment her son returned home, in a shroud, and the cost of such a sacrifice. “I didn’t scream or yell,” she said. “I told him, ‘You chose this fate, and I approve.’ ” She went on, “But don’t think that our children aren’t dear to us. I would like to have my son near me, to see him married with children, but life compelled us to offer our children, and they went willingly, not because they were forced. Most mothers, take it from me—I would pack my son’s bag when he would head out to the front. We are unshakable. We are mountains.”
On October 30th, Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s new secretary-general, gave his inaugural speech, in which he acknowledged the “grave sacrifices” made by his party’s supporters. “We know you are paying a heavy price . . . but this battle requires this level of sacrifice,” he said. “The resistance cannot be victorious without your sacrifices. . . . We must all remain patient.”
Some have lost their patience—along with their homes, and their loved ones. I recently met a man named Hamza, who was sixty-four years old and living in a van he’d parked along a deserted patch of seaside land in Beirut which was teeming with hundreds of displaced people. He described the war as one of choice, not necessity. “What do we have to do with Gaza? Do we have houses in Gaza? I say it how it is, and I often argue with people about this,” he told me. He said that he supported Hezbollah but was not a member, and didn’t belong to any political party. His WhatsApp profile picture was a series of images of more than a dozen dead Hezbollah fighters from his home town, starting with a photo of his nephew.
In late September, Hamza had reluctantly fled his village, a few miles from the border with Israel.“There was nobody still there,” he told me. “I was alone. If the house fell on top of me, nobody could help me.” He had an apartment in Beirut’s southern suburbs, which he used to sleep in occasionally, despite the danger there, too. Before dawn one night in early November, Israel issued an evacuation order for the premises with little notice. Hamza was staying there that evening, and escaped with nothing minutes before the building was levelled. In his panic, he left behind a jar of homemade fig jam, made with fruit harvested from his village garden, and honey still on the comb, both of which he’d set aside to bring with him the next morning to his van. “Why our building?” he asked. There was a supermarket warehouse in the basement, he said, “with food, but not weapons.” He tried to find photos of the apartment on his phone to show me but couldn’t; he told me that he was proud of how tastefully his wife had furnished it.
Like many of the displaced, Hamza wanted to return to his village, even if it meant pitching a tent on the rubble of whatever remained. He was confident that Hezbollah’s fighters would prevent Israel from occupying southern Lebanon—a goal voiced by several Israeli ministers—but lamented the price that his town and others had paid as well as Hezbollah’s decision to launch rockets at Israel, which it has done more or less continually since October, 2023, in solidarity with Hamas. “Why? Why did we attack them before they attacked us?” he said. “If they invaded, we would have confronted them with whatever we had, even if all I had was a stick. But why provoke them?” He continued, “Palestinians are Sunnis.” (They’re also Christians.) “Why haven’t the Sunnis of the Arab world risen to defend them? Why is it only us?”
