Sheikh Naim Qassem, a 71-year-old Shia religious scholar long viewed as Hezbollah’s “number two”, has been chosen to succeed Hassan Nasrallah as the leader of the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah.
Last week the previous alleged successor to Nasrallah, Hashem Safieddine, was killed by an Israeli airstrike. Following Safieddine’s death, Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general since 1991 and acting head, was left as the sole surviving member of the group’s public-facing senior leadership.
Qassem is one of the radical Shia group’s leading spokesmen, having given many interviews with foreign media, and was a founding member of the group in the early 1980s along with Nasrallah.
He was the first of Hezbollah’s senior leadership to address the public following the death of Nasrallah in Beirut on September 27. He has made two other public addresses since then and in his third, on October 15, reiterated the Iranian terror proxy’s unshakable support for Hamas.
Naim was elected via the group’s Shura Council, the normal procedure for appointing a new secretary general. In a statement, Hezbollah said Naim was elected due to his “adherence to the principles and goals of Hezbollah”.
He is reportedly currently residing in Tehran after fleeing Beirut after Nasrallah’s assassination, aboard the aircraft used by Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, according to the UAE-based Erem News outlet.
In 2011, Qassem said that despite “billions of dollars” being offered to the group in order for them to lay down their arms, help rebuild southern Lebanon and stop the work of the resistance, they would not cease their activities. “We’re not in need [of their money], and the resistance will go on regardless of the consequences,” he said.
The killing of Nasrallah, who was seen as the embodiment of the Lebanese Shia movement to his supporters, left a power vacuum inside a group that had lost much of its leadership to months of targeted Israeli airstrikes and intelligence operations.
The appointment comes on the same morning that Hezbollah launched some 50 rockets in the latest barrage on the Galilee in northern Israel. While most were intercepted, some fell on civilian areas resulting in the death of at least one man.
