Who Is Hashem Safieddine, the Latest Hezbollah Official Targeted by Israel?

Who Is Hashem Safieddine, the Latest Hezbollah Official Targeted by Israel?

A cousin and possible successor to Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader assassinated by Israel, Safieddine joined the group soon after it was formed and rose quickly up its ranks.

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By Ephrat Livni

Israeli warplanes launched an intense barrage of airstrikes around midnight on Thursday in an attempt to target Hashem Safieddine, a cousin and the presumed successor of the assassinated Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, according to three Israeli officials.

The bombardment was one of the heaviest in the area since Israel killed Mr. Nasrallah, but it was not clear if Mr. Safieddine, who was presumed to be at a meeting of senior Hezbollah officials, was killed in the airstrikes, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The attempted assassination was the latest move by Israel in its quest to steadily decapitate much of Hezbollah’s leadership. It followed Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon earlier this week.

Here’s what we know about Mr. Safieddine.

Born in the early 1960s in southern Lebanon, Mr. Safieddine 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. Safeiddine 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 Hezbhollah’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 are 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.

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.

Our Coverage of the Middle East Crisis

• Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon: Israel said that eight of its soldiers had been killed in clashes with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, in what appeared to be the first direct ground confrontation between the two sides since the invasion
• Iran’s Calculated Strikes: Iran’s missile barrage against Israel is unlikely to deter its regional foe, experts say, but the attack may help Tehran retain the support of the “Axis of Resistance” it has built up over years.
• Israel Weighs Retaliation: Security analysts and former officials said the damage Israel had inflicted on Hezbollah in Lebanon had stripped Iran of much of its deterrence against a wider Israeli attack.
• Tel Aviv Shooting: Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a light rail train in Tel Aviv, killing at least seven people and injuring several others. The Israeli police called the attack an act of terrorism.
• Lebanese Government’s Absence: Already crippled by years of economic decline, political paralysis and other crises, Lebanon has little but its own citizens’ grit to survive the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.