Naim Qassem
Naim Qassem became Secretary-General of Hezbollah in October 2024, weeks after Israel killed his predecessor. Born in Beirut in 1953 to a family from southern Lebanon, he trained as a chemistry teacher and taught religious studies, and came into politics through the Amal movement in the 1970s before leaving it. He was among the founders of Hezbollah in 1982, formed among Lebanese Shia clerics and militants with Iranian Revolutionary Guard support during the Israeli invasion, and was made deputy secretary-general in 1991 — a post he held for thirty-three years under Abbas al-Musawi and then Hassan Nasrallah. His role in that period was largely political and organisational rather than military: he ran the party's parliamentary work after it entered elections in 1992, its educational institutions, and much of its public argument, and wrote the standard account of the movement from the inside. Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a headquarters bunker in southern Beirut in September 2024, along with much of the senior command over the preceding weeks — a decapitation carried out with intelligence penetration that included the detonation of thousands of pagers. Hashem Safieddine, the expected successor, was killed days later. Qassem was announced as leader in October, and appeared only by video for months. He inherited an organisation that had lost its leadership, much of its arsenal, and the Syrian supply route when Assad fell that December, and a Lebanese state under pressure to disarm it. He has refused disarmament while accepting the November 2024 ceasefire. He is the first Hezbollah leader who is not a battlefield figure, taking over a movement that has to decide what it is for.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Lebanese
- Roles: Secretary-General of Hezbollah (2024-)
