BEIRUT (Reuters) -Hashem Safieddine, whose killing was confirmed on Tuesday by Israel’s navy in its confrontation with Hezbollah, is broadly seen as Hassan Nasrallah’s seemingly successor as head of the Iran-backed group.
A relative of Nasrallah, he has been operating the motion alongside its deputy secretary normal Naim Qassem since Nasrallah’s assassination by Israel on Sept. 27.
Safieddine has sat on the group’s Jihad Council – the physique answerable for its navy operations. He’s additionally head of its govt council, overseeing monetary and administrative affairs for the Iran-backed group.
Whereas not as well-known to Israelis as Nasrallah, Safieddine is seen by Israel as a number one goal in what it deems a terrorist organisation and a proxy for arch-foe Iran.
Safieddine assumed a distinguished function talking for Hezbollah throughout the previous 12 months of hostilities with Israel, addressing funerals and different occasions that Nasrallah had lengthy averted for safety causes.
He was the primary Hezbollah official to talk in public after the group’s Palestinian ally Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, igniting the Gaza conflict that drew the Lebanese Shi’ite Islamist motion right into a parallel battle with Israel.
With observers throughout the Center East ready to see what Hezbollah may do to assist Hamas, Safieddine advised a rally in Beirut’s southern suburbs the day after the assault that the group’s “guns and our rockets are with you”.
“Everything we have is with you,” Safieddine declared.
Like Nasrallah, Safieddine wears the black turban denoting his standing as a sayyed, or descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. He bears a robust bodily resemblance to Nasrallah.
He hails from a distinguished Lebanese Shi’ite household, and was born within the nation’s predominantly Shi’ite south.
Safieddine studied at spiritual seminaries within the Iranian metropolis of Qom earlier than returning to Lebanon within the Nineteen Nineties to imagine management obligations within the group.
He maintained robust ties to Hezbollah’s backers in Iran.
His son, Rida, is married to the daughter of the late Iranian normal Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Drive till he was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.
His brother, Abdullah, serves as Hezbollah’s consultant in Tehran.
As govt council chief, Safieddine performs a job some likened to that of prime minister of a authorities, answerable for an array of Hezbollah establishments concerned in well being care, schooling, tradition, and building, and different actions.
He led efforts to rebuild the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut following the group’s 2006 conflict with Israel, when swathes of the world had been flattened by Israeli airstrikes. In a 2012 speech, Safieddine mentioned the post-war reconstruction had amounted to “a new victory” over Israel.
Phillip Smyth, an knowledgeable who research Iran-backed Shi’ite militias, mentioned Nasrallah “started tailoring positions for him within a variety of different councils within Lebanese Hezbollah. Some of them were more opaque than others”.
The U.S. State Division declared him a specifically designated world terrorist in 2017. In response to U.S. stress on Hezbollah that very same 12 months, he mentioned “this mentally impeded, crazy U.S. administration headed by Trump will not be able to harm the resistance”.
