(CNN) – The fate of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s potential successor is unclear following an Israeli airstrike on Beirut.
An Israeli official told CNN that Hashem Safieddine was the target of the attack, but it is unclear if he was killed.
Safieddine is Nasrallah’s maternal cousin; the two studied together in Iran in the early 1980s. Like Nasrallah, Safieddine is a staunch critic of Israel and the West, with deep alliances with the Iranian leadership.
Safieddine was head of Hezbollah’s executive council and, until his predecessor’s death, was considered one of the most likely heirs to the organization’s top job. The group has not yet named a successor to Nasrallah.
The executive council is one of the five bodies that make up the Shura Council, the decision-making body of the organization. The executive council oversees political affairs, unlike the Jihad Council, which is the group’s military body, of which Safieddine is a member.
Safieddine has spoken before of the “strong relationship” between Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and especially Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a US airstrike at Baghdad airport in 2020. Safieddine’s son is married to Soleimani’s daughter.
The Shiite cleric was born in 1964 in the village of Deir Qanoun En Nahr, in southern Lebanon. Like the late Hezbollah leader, he wears the black turban that indicates he is a “sayyid,” a Shiite honorific title that denotes descent from the Prophet Muhammad.
The 60-year-old cleric has been a visible presence on Hezbollah’s political scene, especially over the past year. During the war in Gaza, Safieddine made statements denouncing Israel’s actions in the enclave and on his country’s southern border.
Nasrallah “began to create positions tailored to him within various councils of the Lebanese Hezbollah. Some were more opaque than others. They have made him come, come out and talk,” Phillip Smyth, an expert who studies Iranian-backed Shiite militias, told Reuters.
In a speech at the funeral ceremony for one of the Hezbollah members killed in May, Safieddine boasted that, despite everything, his group is strong and resilient, and prioritizes – along with its Iranian allies – the cause. Palestine and the need to liberate the Palestinian people.
Following the back-to-back explosions that targeted Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies, Safieddine stated that his organization “will not go back until the end”.
Saffiedine has long been a staunch critic of US policies, which he sees as complicit in Israel’s actions in Gaza and southern Lebanon.
In 2021, he accused Washington of “interfering” in Lebanese domestic politics, claiming that “American tyranny” is “sabotaging” nations in the region, citing Iraq and Afghanistan among examples.
The United States designated Hezbollah a foreign terrorist organization in 1997, and in 2017 designated Safieddine a foreign terrorist.
