Hezbollah names deputy head Naim Qassem as successor to slain chief Nasrallah

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement announced on Tuesday (Oct 29) that it has chosen deputy head Naim Qassem to succeed Hasan Nasrallah as leader after his death in an Israeli strike on south Beirut last month.
“Hezbollah’s (governing) Shura Council agreed to elect … Sheikh Naim Qassem as secretary general of Hezbollah,” the Iran-backed group said in a statement, more than a month after Nasrallah’s killing.
Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah’s central headquarters on Sep 27. He had led the group for 32 years.
Hashem Safieddine, the head of Hezbollah’s executive council, was initially tipped to succeed Nasrallah. But he too was killed in an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Qassem, 71, was one of Hezbollah’s founders in 1982 and has been the party’s deputy secretary general since 1991, the year before Nasrallah took the helm.
Born in 1953 in Beirut to a family from Lebanon’s south, Qassem’s political activism began with the Lebanese Shi’ite Amal Movement.
He left the group in 1979 in the wake of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, which shaped the political thinking of many young Lebanese Shi’ite activists.
Qassem took part in meetings 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 general coordinator of Hezbollah’s parliamentary election campaigns since the group first contested them in 1992.
The deputy head was the most senior Hezbollah official to continue making public appearances after Nasrallah largely went into hiding following the group’s 2006 war with Israel.
Since Nasrallah’s death, Qassem has made three televised addresses, speaking in more formal Arabic than the colloquial Lebanese favoured by Nasrallah.