Hashem Safieddine, a cousin of and presumed successor to the assassinated Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was the latest top official in the organization whom the Israeli military says it has killed.
Israel said on Tuesday that Mr. Safieddine had been killed in a strike about three weeks ago. There had been speculation about his death since Israeli warplanes targeted a meeting of senior Hezbollah leadership in early October near Beirut, the Lebanese capital. Mr. Safieddine had been presumed to be at that meeting.
Mr. Safieddine, born in the early 1960s in southern Lebanon, was one of Hezbollah’s earliest members. He joined after the Shiite Muslim group was formed in the 1980s, with Iranian guidance, during Lebanon’s long civil war. He rose quickly up its ranks alongside Mr. Nasrallah, playing many roles and serving as a political, spiritual and cultural leader, as well as leading the group’s military activities at one point.
As Mr. Nasrallah did, Mr. Safieddine usually appeared in a black turban, marking him as a revered Shiite cleric who could trace his ancestry back to the Prophet Muhammad.
Biographical information reported in various outlets across the Middle East and Turkey portrays a rapid rise through Hezbollah’s ranks. In 1995, he was promoted to Hezbollah’s highest council, its governing Consultative Assembly, and was soon after appointed as head of the group’s Jihadi Council, which controls Hezbollah’s military activities. Just three years later, in 1998, Mr. Safieddine, was elected to lead the party’s Executive Council, a position that was also twice held by Mr. Nasrallah, including before his appointment as Hezbollah’s secretary-general in 1992, the report said.
Like Mr. Nasrallah, he studied in Iran. Mr. Safieddine formed strong ties with Tehran during his religious studies in the Iranian city of Qom before returning to Lebanon to work for Hezbollah.
Those ties were also deeply personal. He was close friends of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, an Iranian who commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force until the United States killed him in an airstrike in Baghdad in 2020.
Later that year, Mr. Safieddine’s son Reza Hashem Safieddine married the Iranian general’s daughter, Zeinab Suleimani, in a much-publicized wedding. The marriage was seen by some analysts and critics as emblematic of Iran’s entrenchment in Hezbollah. The U.S. Treasury Department has described Mr. Safieddine’s brother, Abdallah Safieddine, as Hezbollah’s representative to Iran.
Mr. Safieddine 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 called him “a senior leader” in Hezbollah’s Executive Council, which oversees the group’s “political, organizational, social, and educational activities.” It said that Mr. Safieddine 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 killed hundreds of Americans, including the suicide truck bombings of the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut in 1984 and the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847.
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