Tens of thousands of people have attended a funeral in Beirut for Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Iran-backed, Lebanese militia and political party Hezbollah for three decades before being killed in an Israeli bombing last September.

The ceremony was held in a sports stadium in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which had extra seats installed prior to the ceremony in anticipation of the massive crowds.

The funeral for Nasrallah and his deputy, Hashem Safieddine, also killed in an Israeli airstrike in early October, was delayed for five months due to security concerns.

Most of Hezbollah’s senior leadership was killed by Israel late last year, due to what analysts have described as Israel’s deep intelligence infiltration of a group once famed for its secrecy.

The stadium was packed by mourners carrying pictures of Nasrallah and waving Hezbollah flags, with some hanging off floodlights to get a better vantage point of the stage. Several foreign delegations attended the funeral, including the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Aragchi, and several Iraqi lawmakers.

“I can’t even express how I feel, it feels like my father or grandfather I died. Most of us still don’t believe he’s actually dead,” said Mohammed Khalifeh, a Lebanese man who traveled from Australia for the funeral.

Nasrallah was born into a working-class family in Beirut in 1960, though he was originally from south Lebanon. One of the founding members of Hezbollah, he was the longest-serving leader of the group and was famed for his charisma and skills as an orator.

He became a celebrated figure in Lebanon for Hezbollah’s role in ending Israel’s 18-year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000, although that image was tarnished after the group’s intervention in Syria’s civil war in support of the long-time dictator Bashar al-Assad. The group’s dominance of Lebanon’s politics over the last two decades also engendered resentment among its opponents.

Mourners wept as Nasrallah and Safieddine’s caskets were paraded around the stadium and threw rings, jackets and scarves for pallbearers to rub on the coffins and return to them as mementoes of the late leaders. As the caskets were unveiled, four Israeli fighter jets flew low over the stadium, prompting cries of “Death to Israel!”.

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, said the planes were “conveying a clear message: whoever threatens to destroy Israel and attacks Israel – that will be the end of him. You will specialise in funerals – and we will specialise in victories.”.

Israeli fighter jets bombed south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley before and during the funeral ceremony, despite the ceasefire agreement signed months earlier.

Nasrallah’s death marked the beginning of an escalation in the Hezbollah-Israel war, which up until then had mostly been defined by low-level, tit-for-tat-style fighting in Lebanon’s border region.

Hezbollah attacked Israel on 8 October 2023 “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack from Gaza on Israel the day before. The conflict was confined mainly to the Lebanese border until a dramatic Israeli escalation and ground invasion in south Lebanon in late September 2024, which left more than 3,000 people in Lebanon dead and displaced more than a million people.

Fighting officially ended under a ceasefire agreement and Israeli troops mostly withdrew on 18 February, though Israeli troops have remained in five points in south Lebanon and continue to strike targets periodically.

Despite the organisation’s massive losses and the immense humanitarian cost of the war, Hezbollah’s followers said on Sunday that they remained undeterred.

“They thought that after they killed our leaders that we would become weak and that they could occupy Lebanon, but they couldn’t do it,” said Lina Jawad, a 27-year-old designer who lives in Beirut.

Hezbollah’s secretary general, Naim Qassem, whose speech during the ceremony was televised from a remote location, said the group would “not submit” and would not accept Israeli forces remaining in the country.

The group’s status in the country and influence on the state after the war has been diminished, with Lebanon’s new government attempting to disarm the non-state group.

Hezbollah has long claimed its forces acted a deterrent to Israeli invasions, although some of the Lebanese public has grown frustrated with the now-weakened militant group.

In the government’s first statement last week, it dropped any references to the right to “armed resistance” – a reference to Hezbollah’s right to hold weapons – the first time since 2000 that the state did not pay homage to Hezbollah.

In a meeting with an Iranian delegation on Sunday, the Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun, said the country was “tired of others’ wars” and that Lebanon had paid a “heavy price” for the Palestinian cause.