The New Hezbollah Chief Who Has Succeeded Hassan Nasrallah

Hezbollah’s deputy secretary common Sheikh Naim Qassem, elected head of the Lebanese armed group on Tuesday, has been a senior determine within the Iran-backed motion for greater than 30 years. 

Talking in entrance of curtains from an undisclosed location on October 8, Qassem stated the battle between Hezbollah and Israel was a conflict about who cries first, and Hezbollah wouldn’t cry first. The group’s capabilities have been intact regardless of “painful blows” from Israel.

However he added the group supported the efforts of parliament speaker Nabih Berri – a Hezbollah ally – to safe a ceasefire, for the primary time omitting any point out of a Gaza truce deal as a pre-condition for halting the group’s hearth on Israel.

His 30-minute televised tackle got here simply days after senior Hezbollah determine Hashem Safieddine was thought to have been the goal of an Israeli strike and 11 days after the killing of Hezbollah’s secretary common Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Safieddine’s killing was confirmed by Hezbollah on Oct. 23.

Qassem was appointed deputy chief in 1991 by the armed group’s then-secretary common Abbas al-Musawi, who was killed by an Israeli helicopter assault the next yr. 

Qassem remained in his function when Nasrallah grew to become chief, and has lengthy been considered one of Hezbollah’s main spokesmen, conducting interviews with overseas media together with as cross-border hostilities with Israel raged over the past yr.

Qassem’s televised tackle on Oct. 8 was his second since hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah intensified in September.

He was the primary member of Hezbollah’s prime management to make televised remarks after Nasrallah’s killing in an Israeli air assault on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sept. 27. 

Talking on Sept. 30, Qassem stated Hezbollah would select a successor to its former secretary common “on the earliest alternative” and would proceed to combat Israel in solidarity with Palestinians. 

“What we’re doing is the naked minimal… We all know that the battle could also be lengthy,” he stated in a 19-minute speech.

Born in 1953 in Beirut to a household from Lebanon’s south, Qassem’s political activism started with the Lebanese Shi’ite Amal Motion.

He left the group in 1979 within the wake of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, which formed the political considering of many younger Lebanese Shi’ite activists. 

Qassem took half in conferences that led to the formation of Hezbollah, established with the backing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

He has been the overall coordinator of Hezbollah’s parliamentary election campaigns because the group first contested them in 1992. 

In 2005, he wrote a historical past of Hezbollah seen as a uncommon “insider’s look” into the organisation. Qassem wears a white turban in contrast to Nasrallah and Safieddine, whose black turbans denoted their standing as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. 

(Aside from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)