Hashem Safieddine

Hashem Safieddine was Hezbollah's head of its executive council and the man widely expected to succeed Hassan Nasrallah, and was killed by Israeli airstrikes three weeks after Nasrallah was. He was a cleric from a prominent family in Deir Qanoun al-Nahr in southern Lebanon, studied in Qom, and was Nasrallah's maternal cousin; the physical resemblance was often remarked on. He ran the executive council, which handles the movement's political, financial, social and educational apparatus - the schools, clinics, construction arm and reconstruction payments that make Hezbollah a state within the Lebanese state - and sat on the jihad council that oversees military matters. The United States designated him a terrorist in 2017 and Saudi Arabia in 2018. His son married the daughter of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian Quds Force commander killed by an American drone in 2020, which is a fair indication of how close the connection to Tehran ran. In September 2024, during the Israeli campaign that followed a year of exchanges across the Lebanese border, Nasrallah was killed in a strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut. Safieddine was struck on 3 October in an underground headquarters in Dahiyeh; Hezbollah confirmed his death more than three weeks later, after Israel had announced it. Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary-general, was named leader instead. The decapitation of the leadership over those weeks was among the most severe losses the organisation has taken since its founding in the 1980s. He had studied alongside Nasrallah in Najaf and Qom. Lebanon held no functioning presidency for the two years before his death, which is part of why the movement s internal succession mattered so much. A ceasefire took effect in November 2024.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history