Iran parliament speaker to attend Nasrallah funeral: state media

TEHRAN: Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, will travel to Lebanon for the funeral of long-time Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Sunday, Iranian media reported.

Tens of thousands of people are expected to turn out in Beirut to farewell the Iran-backed group’s leader.

An Israeli air strike killed Nasrallah on September 27 last year at the start of an all-out war between his group and Israel after roughly a year of lower-level conflict.

The massive air strike on Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold also killed Abbas Nilforoushan, a senior commander in Iran’s Quds Force — the foreign operations arm of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Hezbollah is part of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”, a loose alliance of forces united in their opposition to Israel.

In October 2023 Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with fellow axis member Hamas during the Gaza war.

Those exchanges escalated into more than two months of full-scale war before a ceasefire came into effect in November last year.

Ghalibaf “along with a number of parliamentarians and state officials will leave on Sunday for Lebanon to attend Nasrallah’s funeral”, member of parliament Alireza Salimi told the official IRNA news agency on Saturday.

On Friday evening, the 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 major figure in Middle Eastern politics.