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 portray 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, wa s 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 before returning to Lebanon to work for Hezbollah. Mr. Safieddine formed strong ties with Tehran during his religious studies in the Iranian city of Qom.
His links to Iran are also personal: In 2020, Israeli and Iranian news outlets reported that Mr. Safieddine’s son Reza had married Zeinab Suleimani, the daughter of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, an Iranian who commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, whom the United States killed in an airstrike in Baghdad the same year. 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.
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Hashem Safieddine, the latest Hezbollah official targeted by Israel? appeared first on New York Times.
