Nasrallah relative Hashem Safieddine seen as future Hezbollah leader

Hashem Safieddine, reported by Israel as killed during its invasion and bombardment of Lebanon, is seen widely as the likely successor of Hassan Nasrallah as head of Hezbollah, Reuters has reported. A relative of Nasrallah, Safieddine has been running the movement alongside its deputy secretary general Naim Qassem since the former leader’s political murder by Israel on 27 September.

Safieddine has sat on the Hezbollah Jihad Council, the body responsible for the movement’s military operations. He is also head of its executive council, overseeing financial and administrative affairs.

While not as well-known to Israelis as Nasrallah, Safieddine is seen by Israel as a leading target in what it deems to be a terrorist organisation and a proxy for arch-foe Iran. He assumed a prominent role speaking for Hezbollah during the past year of cross-border exchanges of fire with Israel, addressing funerals and other events that Nasrallah had long avoided for security reasons.

Safieddine was the first Hezbollah official to speak in public after the group’s Palestinian ally Hamas entered southern Israel on 7 October last year, igniting the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza that prompted the Lebanese Shia movement to fire rockets towards military targets in Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians in the coastal enclave.

With observers across the Middle East waiting to see what Hezbollah might do to help Hamas, Safieddine spoke at an 8 October rally in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “The movement’s guns and our rockets are with you,” he declared. “Everything we have is with you.”

Like Nasrallah, Safieddine wears the black turban denoting his status as a Sayyed, or descendent of Prophet Muhammad. He also bears a strong physical resemblance to Nasrallah and hails from a prominent Lebanese Shia family, born in predominantly Shia southern Lebanon.

Safieddine studied at religious seminaries in the Iranian city of Qom before returning to Lebanon in the 1990s to assume leadership responsibilities within Hezbollah. He maintained strong ties to Hezbollah’s backers in Iran.

His son, Rida, is married to the daughter of the late Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force until he was killed by a US drone strike in Baghdad in 2020. Safieddine’s brother, Abdullah, serves as Hezbollah’s representative in Tehran.

As executive council chief, Safieddine plays a role that some have likened to that of a prime minister of a government. He is responsible for an array of Hezbollah institutions involved in health care, education, culture and construction, and other activities.

He led efforts to rebuild the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut following Israel’s 2006 invasion and war in Lebanon, when swathes of the area were flattened by Israeli air strikes. In a 2012 speech, Safieddine said that the post-war reconstruction had amounted to “a new victory” over the occupation state.

According to Phillip Smyth, an expert who studies Iran-backed Shia militias, Nasrallah “started tailoring positions for him within a variety of different councils within Lebanese Hezbollah. Some of them were more opaque than others.”

The US State Department declared Safieddine to be a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2017. In response to US pressure on Hezbollah that same year, he said, “This mentally impaired, crazy US administration headed by Trump will not be able to harm the resistance.”

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