MIDDLE EAST: Wednesday's dramatic raid into Israel was a gamble taken by a man whose life has been ruled by constant conflict, writes Michael Jansen
Hizbullah's secretary general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah personally took the decision to carry out Wednesday's dramatic raid into Israel with the aim of capturing Israeli soldiers and opening up a second front to counter the Israeli onslaught on Gaza.
The operation was a gamble taken by a man whose life has been ruled by constant conflict.
Nasrallah was born in 1960 in the poor Beirut Qarantina neighbourhood attacked and razed by Maronite Christian militiamen during the opening phase of the 1975-1991 civil war.
The Nasrallah family fled to its native village near the southern port city of Tyre where the young Hassan became involved with the secular Amal Shia rights movement.
After finishing secondary school, Nasrallah, whose intelligence and interest in Islamic theology impressed local clerics, was sent to the Shia seminary in Najaf in Iraq. There he was tutored by Abbas Musawi, a Lebanese cleric who was a disciple of Muhammad Baqr Sadr, the founder of the Shia fundamentalist Dawa party now in power in Baghdad.
When the Lebanese clerics and students were expelled from Iraq in 1978, Musawi established a religious institute in Baalbek in the eastern Bekaa Valley. Nasrallah, who resumed his Amal connection, joined as both student and instructor.
In response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Iran dispatched several hundred Revolutionary Guards to Baalbek to train Lebanese Shias in guerrilla warfare.
Nasrallah left Amal with 300 of his followers and joined a Tehran-sponsored umbrella organisation of Lebanese militants which staged suicide missions against Israeli and western forces.
Hizbullah (the Party of God) emerged in 1985. Nasrallah became its representative in Beirut and took over the top post in 1992 when Musawi was assassinated by Israel.
Under Nasrallah's stewardship, Hizbullah's military operations, mounted with the support of Iran and Syria, became sophisticated and deadly and compelled Israel to agree to limit retaliatory strikes to the occupation zone in order to avoid civilian areas.
Nasrallah poured vast sums of money provided by the Shia diaspora into social welfare schemes in deprived Shia areas, constructed schools, clinics, subsidised housing and a modern hospital. In 1996 Hizbullah's Manar television station began broadcasting in Arabic, Hebrew and English.
This helped to build grassroots support for the movement which fielded candidates in parliamentary elections. The message to Israel was that Hizbullah's war would end once the Jewish state had pulled out of all of Lebanon.
In 1997, Nasrallah's charismatic leadership was given a boost by the death of his eldest son Hadi during a raid against Israeli forces. He is one of the few Arab leaders to put a child in the line of fire. In 2000 Nasrallah was celebrated throughout the Arab world when Israel pulled out of south Lebanon.
However his policy of maintaining military pressure on Israel, with the aim of liberating farmlands belonging to the Lebanese village of Shebaa, has turned the traditional Lebanese political and commercial establishment against Nasrallah and Hizbullah's sponsors, Iran and Syria, and prompted the US and Europe to designate the movement a "terrorist" group.
Since the murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2004 and the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, Hizbullah has been under growing Lebanese and international pressure to disarm and disband its military wing.
While Nasrallah's earlier jousts with Israel proved successful, many Lebanese fear that their country could, once again, be devastated by Israel in retaliation for Hizbullah's latest operation and firing of Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.
Lebanon's Shias, Hizbullah's popular base, could also be alienated if Israel continues its attacks on infrastructure in the south and Shia villages or strikes at Beirut's largely Shia southern suburbs.