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Who is Sheikh Naim Qassem? Hezbollah’s newest leader
The leader reportedly fled to Iran following the killing of his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah
October 29, 2024 11:52
The leader reportedly fled to Iran following the killing of his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah
October 29, 2024 11:52Sheikh Naim Qassem, a 71-year-old Shia religious scholar long viewed as Hezbollah’s “number two”, has been chosen to succeed Hassan Nasrallah as the leader of the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah.
Last week the previous alleged successor to Nasrallah, Hashem Safieddine, was killed by an Israeli airstrike. Following Safieddine’s death, Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general since 1991 and acting head, was left as the sole surviving member of the group’s public-facing senior leadership.
Qassem is one of the radical Shia group’s leading spokesmen, having given many interviews with foreign media, and was a founding member of the group in the early 1980s along with Nasrallah.
He was the first of Hezbollah’s senior leadership to address the public following the death of Nasrallah in Beirut on September 27. He has made two other public addresses since then and in his third, on October 15, reiterated the Iranian terror proxy’s unshakable support for Hamas.
