Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalib will travel to Lebanon on Sunday for the funeral of Hezbollah’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian media reported. Tens of thousands of people are expected to attend the farewell ceremony for the leader of an Iran-backed group in Beirut.
He was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27 last year, marking the beginning of a full-scale war between Nasrallah’s group and Israel after nearly a year of low-level conflict. Abbas Nilforosan, a senior commander of the Quds Force, the foreign operations wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was also killed in a major airstrike on Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold.
Hezbollah is part of Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ and a loose coalition of forces united in opposition to Israel. During the Gaza War in October 2023, Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with its fellow axis member Hamas. Those exchanges escalated into full-scale fighting for more than two months before a ceasefire came into effect in November last year.
Parliament member Alireza Salimi told state news agency IRNA on Saturday that Ghalibaf will travel to Lebanon to attend Nasrallah’s funeral on Sunday, along with some lawmakers and state officials. On Friday evening, Fars News Agency reported that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi would also attend the ceremony.
Nasrallah led Hezbollah for more than three decades and was a key figure in Middle Eastern politics. In retaliation for his assassination, Iran fired about 200 missiles at Israel in October. In response, Israel attacked some Iranian military sites.
