Israeli forces announced that they had confirmed his death Hashem Safieddin, potential successor to murdered Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
According to the IDF, Safieddin was killed in bombing of a Beirut suburb on October 4.
Safieddin, head of Hezbollah’s executive council, was seen as Nasrallah’s preferred successor in leading Lebanon’s pro-Iranian movement.
In the October 4 Israeli airstrike, Hashem Safieddin was killed along with intelligence chief Hussein Ali Hazima and other Hezbollah officials, according to the IDF briefing.
Who was Safieddin?
Safieddin, designated a terrorist by the US State Department in 2017, is Nasrallah’s cousin and, like him, is a cleric who wears the black turban that suggests descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Safieddin has taken on a prominent role, speaking as his spokesman at funerals and other events, which Nasrallah has long avoided for security reasons.
He was the first Hezbollah official to speak publicly after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, telling a rally in the southern suburbs of Beirut on October 8, 2023, that “the group’s weapons and our rockets are with you. Everything we have is with you.”
Descendant of an important Lebanese Shiite family, he was born in the Shiite south of the country. He attended religious seminars in the Iranian city of Qom before returning to Lebanon in the 1990s to take on leadership responsibilities in the group. His son, Rida, is married to the daughter of murdered Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force. The latter was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in 2020. His brother Abdullah serves as Hezbollah’s spokesman in Tehran.
Hezbollah: how Israel killed Safieddin, Nasrallah’s successor, but also… the successor’s successor