The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah announced on Tuesday that Naim Qassem, a deputy of the slain leader, Hassan Nasrallahwill direct the Iranian-backed organization. Qassem has served as the group’s acting leader since Nasrallah’s death.
“Hezbollah’s (ruling) Shura Council agreed to elect Sheikh Naim Qassem as Secretary General of Hezbollah,” the militant group said in a statement on Tuesday.
It was initially speculated that the head of Hezbollah’s executive council, Hashem Safieddine, would succeed Nasrallah, but he was killed in October in another Israeli attack on Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Qassem, 71, was one of the founders of Hezbollah in 1982 and is the party’s second leader since the group entered the political domain in the early 1990s, according to The Counter Extremism Project, an international organization. He was born in 1953 and his family comes from the village of Kfar Fila, on the border with Israel.
Nasrallah, who only gave speeches via video because of his fear of assassination, led the terror group with fiery rhetoric for 30 years. Qassem was the highest-ranking Hezbollah official to continue to act publicly after Nasrallah largely went into hiding following the group’s 2006 war with Israel, and was seen as the group’s leading media personality, according to the Counter Extremism Project.
Since Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, Qassem has made three televised speeches, speaking in more formal Arabic than the Lebanese dialect Nasrallah prefers.
Haley Ott contributed to this report.
