Hashem Safieddine, Hezbollah's likely next leader, followed Hassan Nasrallah down militant path

Lebanese group says successor to long-time head will be appointed soon

Hashem Safieddine, senior Hezbollah official and prospective leader, attends the funeral ceremony of Fouad Shukr, a commander of the group, in Beirut's southern suburbs on August 1, 2024. AFP

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Hashem Safieddine is one of the front-runners for leadership of Hezbollah after Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli attack on south Beirut last Friday.

A maternal cousin of Nasrallah, Mr Safieddine has rarely appeared in public but could soon be leading an organisation that works hard on propaganda, although its military has suffered at the hands of the Israeli military over the past months.

Nasrallah has not been buried as of Monday and it is not yet certain that Mr Safieddine, born in 1964, will become the next leader.

Hezbollah has been in a state of flux since Israeli strikes in the last several weeks killed many of its senior commanders, field operatives, and disrupted its communications and logistics networks. Although Nasrallah had rarely appeared in public setting since 2006, his fiery televised speeches have been ubiquitous. Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, has often appeared in the media to further the group’s resistance narrative and send messages when needed.

In a televised address on Monday, Qassem boasted that the group is prepared to counter any Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon and that a successor to Nasrallah will be named soon.

Mr Safieddine, like Nasrallah, studied theology in Iran. His son married the daughter of Iranian lslamic Revolutionary Guard Corp commander Maj Gen Qassim Suleimani, who was assassinated in a US drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.

Unlike the Shiite rural underclass that formed the bulk of Hezbollah cadres when it was created in the 1980s, Mr Safieddine comes from a relatively established family in the southern city of Tyre. Nasrallah promoted him and he is the current head of Hezbollah's executive council, which is akin to a cabinet.

Orna Mizrahi, senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, said that as far back as 2008, both Nasrallah and Iran had decided that Mr Safieddine would be his replacement.

Although Mr Safieddine has mainly dealt with Hezbollah's finances and ties to its Shiite constituency, he was assigned to some military tasks, Ms Mizrahi said from Tel Aviv. “He does not have the experience or standing of Nasrallah,” she said, adding that he could grow into the role.

She said that in the event he becomes the leader, the magnitude of damage that Israel has inflicted on Hezbollah's command structure has made it imperative for Mr Safieddine to conduct a review of “what kind of organisation Hezbollah will be”, helped by the surviving top cadres, such as Mr Qassem.

But Hezbollah “will continue to attack Israel because of the Iranian influence” and an anti-Israel ideology that guided Nasrallah and appears to also permeates the thinking of Safieddin, Ms Mizrahi said.