Hasan Nasrallah wanted to live and die as a fighter, and he got his wish Friday, when Israeli bombs pulverized his underground lair in Beirut. Hezbollah will surely seek to avenge Nasrallah’s death, but he was the rare leader who was close to irreplaceable.

I met Nasrallah in October 2003 in a fortified bunker in the southern suburbs of Beirut, not far from where he died. For a man who ordered the deaths of so many Israelis and Lebanese, he was surprisingly soft-spoken. He was a charmer, not a shouter; his legitimacy came from his clerical study in Najaf, Iraq, and his riveting sermons, televised during Muharram and other religious holidays.

In a Lebanon where political leaders usually live the soft life, even as they plunder the people, Nasrallah was different. He told me proudly that his own son Hadi had died fighting Israel in 1997. “We didn’t send our children to London or Paris to university but to fight alongside other Lebanese,” he said.

Nasrallah was also unyielding. That’s why he was an inevitable Israeli target. He ordered rocket attacks against Israel starting Oct. 8, the day after Hamas’s barbaric massacre of Israeli civilians. He exercised a measure of restraint, refraining from large-scale attacks on Israeli cities. But he wouldn’t step away from the battle.

And he would never separate Hezbollah’s fate — and Lebanon’s — from the Hamas fighters hidden in Gaza. He had a chance to save himself and his movement, in a peace plan devised by U.S. emissary Amos Hochstein. But that would have required a break with Hamas. Nasrallah wouldn’t do it.

In 2003, I asked Nasrallah if there were any formula for peace that would end the suicide bombings that were then ravaging Israeli civilians. He gave a cold-blooded answer: “I can’t imagine a situation, based on the nature of the Israeli project and the nature of the Israeli leaders, where the Palestinians would agree to lay down arms.”.

Nasrallah saw no exit, only war between Israel and the “resistance” he claimed to lead. At the time of the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, “there was a philosophical debate” about a peace agreement, he said. But that era was over.

Nasrallah created an extraordinarily powerful movement in Hezbollah. It was so strong and well-disciplined that it was able, over time, to seize power from the Lebanese state. Hezbollah’s operatives looked different than other Lebanese militias. They were leaner, tougher and better organized. You could make them out, occasionally wearing green blazers, when you arrived at the Beirut airport.

Hezbollah embodied the organized power of the Lebanese Shiites, who had once been the dispossessed, the outcasts at Lebanon’s party of self-celebration. They became the largest of Lebanon’s ethnic groups — and gradually the toughest, too.

Hezbollah ministers served in the dysfunctional Lebanese government, and they exercised a veto over who would lead the country as president (a Christian, by Lebanon’s power-sharing formula) and prime minister (a Sunni Muslim). But Hezbollah’s real power was that it was an alternative government, with its own network of social welfare and security organizations to serve the followers of its self-appointed resistance to Israel.

Animating this state within a state was Nasrallah. Augustus Richard Norton noted in his 2007 book, “Hezbollah,” that as far away as Damascus you could buy key rings, shirts, buttons, bumper stickers and posters bearing Nasrallah’s face.

For all Nasrallah’s charisma, however, many Lebanese grew to hate him and his militia. When patriarchal former prime minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in February 2005, many of the tens of thousands of Lebanese who poured into the streets blamed Syria and, implicitly, its ally Hezbollah. (A U.N.-backed tribunal in 2020 found a Hezbollah member guilty of the assassination.) The anti-Hezbollah feeling deepened after the 2006 war, when Israel warplanes — retaliating against a Hezbollah cross-border kidnapping operation — destroyed much of Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Even Nasrallah knew he had gone too far. “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say, no, absolutely not,” he told Lebanon’s New TV station. But despite the 2006 disaster, Nasrallah kept baiting the Israeli tiger.

The war that finally claimed Nasrallah is one that he and the movement tragically didn’t want to escape. The fight defined them. Without the mantle of resistance, Hezbollah would lose its rationale for overriding the Lebanese state. Paradoxically, it needed war to survive.

In June 2002, I asked one of Nasrallah’s spiritual mentors, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, what he would say to innocent Israeli children who had been killed by a suicide bomber. He turned the question back on me, asking what I would tell the victims of Nagasaki.

“Under war, everything happens,” Fadlallah told me. “Because war is war.”

The Shiite have a devotion to martyrs, all the way back to the murder of Ali, the prophet Muhammad’s cousin, in 661, and his son, Hussein, in 680. During the 1970s in Lebanon, that revered martyred imam was Musa al-Sadr, a brilliant cleric who disappeared in Libya in 1978.

When Nasrallah emerged as the Hezbollah leader in 1992, posters displayed his round face under an iconic portrait of Sadr. Fouad Ajami, in a 1987 study al Sadr, “The Vanished Imam,” described a cult of defiance and death: “Young men behind sandbags, with their Imam’s posters, defend the ruins that are theirs and their sect’s.”

Now Nasrallah has joined the long line of Shiite martyrs. He will be mourned by his followers, who will try to avenge him. But his death offers a chance for Lebanese to reclaim their country after nearly 40 years of ruinous Hezbollah leadership.