Al Jazeera :
The killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah leaves a vacuum inside a movement that has already had much of its leadership decapitated as a result of months of Israeli assassinations.
But Nasrallah’s death on Friday evening, during a massive Israeli attack on southern Beirut, marks the passing of not just a figurehead, but the man who embodied the Lebanese Shia movement in the eyes of its supporters and the wider region.
Nasrallah became secretary-general of Hezbollah in 1992 while he was in his 30s, and he led the movement for the majority of its existence. Finding a replacement of a similar stature will be difficult for Hezbollah, as it looks ahead to continued Israeli attacks and even a possible ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
There are, however, two leading figures thought to be in contention to be Nasrallah’s successor: Hashem Safieddine and Naim Qassem. Here’s what you need to know about them.
The head of Hezbollah’s executive council and a cousin of Nasrallah, Safieddine is widely thought to be in pole position to become the movement’s next secretary-general.
Born in 1964 in the southern village of Deir Qanoun en-Nahr, near Tyre, Safieddine studied theology together with Nasrallah in the two main centres of Shia religious learning, the Iraqi city of Najaf and Qom, in Iran. Both joined Hezbollah in the organisation’s early days.
Safieddine comes from a respected Shia family that has produced religious scholars and Lebanese parliamentarians, while his brother Abdullah serves as Hezbollah’s representative to Iran. Safieddine has his own close ties to Iran; his son, Redha, is married to the daughter of Qassem Soleimani, the top Iranian general killed in a US strike in 2020.
