Israeli forces launched a barrage of airstrikes at midnight on Thursday (3/10) in an attempt to target Hashim Safieddin, a cousin and potential successor of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The shelling was one of the heaviest in the region since Israel killed Nasrallah, but it was not clear whether Safdin, who is believed to have been in a meeting with senior Hezbollah officials, was killed in the airstrikes, they said – on condition of anonymity – officials as reported by the New York Times article.
The assassination attempt was Israel’s latest move in its bid to permanently decapitate much of Hezbollah’s leadership and followed Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon earlier this week.
The Israeli military attempted to kill Hashem Safieddine in their Beirut bombings on Wednesday, claiming he is the most likely successor to Hezbollah’s leadership after the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, according to Axios.
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What we know about Hashim Safieddin
Born in the early 1960s in southern Lebanon, Safieddin was one of the first members of Hezbollah. He joined after the Shiite Muslim group was created in the 1980s, under Iranian guidance, during Lebanon’s long civil war. She quickly rose through the ranks with Nasrallah, playing multiple roles and serving as a political, intellectual and cultural leader, as well as head of the group’s military activities.
Like Nasrallah, Safieddin was usually seen wearing a black turban, a hallmark of the revered Shiite cleric, who could trace his lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad.
His rise through the ranks of Hezbollah was rapid. In 1995 he was promoted to Hezbollah’s supreme council, its governing advisory assembly, and soon after was appointed head of the group’s Jihadi Council, which oversees Hezbollah’s military activities.
Just three years later, in 1998, Safieddin was elected head of the party’s Executive Council, a position Nasrallah had also held twice, among others, before his appointment as Hezbollah’s secretary general in 1992.
The strong ties with Tehran
Like Nasrallah he studied in Iran. Safieddin developed strong ties to Tehran during his religious studies in the Iranian city of Qom before returning to Lebanon to work for Hezbollah.
These bonds are also deeply personal. He was a close friend of Major General Qassim Suleimani, an Iranian who commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force until the United States killed him in an airstrike in Baghdad in 2020.
Later that year, Safieddin’s son, Reza Hashem, married the Iranian general’s daughter, Zeinab Suleimani, in a much-publicized wedding. The wedding was seen by some analysts and critics as emblematic of Iran’s consolidation of Hezbollah. The US Treasury Department has described Mr. Safieddin’s brother, Abdullah, as Hezbollah’s representative in Iran.
USA: Safieddin is a terrorist
Safieddin was designated a terrorist by the United States and Saudi Arabia in May 2017 for his leadership role in Hezbollah. At the time, the State Department described him as a “senior leader” on Hezbollah’s Executive Council, which oversees the group’s “political, organizational, social and educational activities.” It said Safieddin posed a “serious risk of committing acts of terrorism that threaten the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
The United States designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization in 1997 and holds the group responsible for multiple attacks that have killed hundreds of Americans, including the 1983 suicide truck bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the U.S. Embassy Annex in Beirut in 1984 and in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985.
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