Hezbollah has a new leader: Naim Qasem. It is not the option with the most charisma or presence, but it did not have many more either. Headless, weakened and forced to communicate with a thousand precautions, given its level of infiltration by the Israeli Mossad, the Lebanese party-militia only made the announcement this Tuesday, a month after its predecessor of three decades, Hasan Nasrallah, died. in an Israeli bombing in Dahiye, the large Shiite suburb of Beirut. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has already threatened Qasem. “Temporary appointment, not for long,” he wrote in English on the social network X.
Born 71 years ago in Kfar Fila, a village near the city of Nabatiye, in southern Lebanon, Qasem was the eternal number two, since 1991. Always in the shadow of Nasrallah, a great orator who controlled the timing of his speeches in a nearby Arab, which a crowd followed on the big screen. Qasem is, on the other hand, a gray former high school Chemistry teacher who uses classical Arabic in a monotone tone in his speeches.
He participated in the founding of Hezbollah in the 1980s, from the then large Shiite faction, Amal. In 1991, he was appointed deputy secretary general. number oneIt was then Abbas Mussawi. Israel assassinated him a year later with a shot from a military helicopter and the organization preferred Nasrallah, who chaired the Executive Committee, to succeed him. They worked together for three decades, with Qasem more recently focused on political and parliamentary group affairs.
According to his official biography, he is married with six children, has published numerous books on religious education and political essays, and trained in theology with one of the main spiritual figures of the Lebanese Shiite community, Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. It also has a network of schools in the Shiite community where it attended the diploma ceremony every year. It was also when he gave statements in public (he also speaks English and French), but he has not appeared in public since the Israeli offensive began last month.
“We ask God to help him in his mission to lead the party and its resistance. We promise our martyr, sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, the fighters of the Islamic resistance and our resistant people who will work together to achieve the objectives of Hezbollah and keep the flame of resistance alive,” said the statement, broadcast by Al Manar, the group’s television network. As the note points out, Nasrallah was a sayyed,a cleric who belongs to the lineage of Muhammad, among the Shiites. Qasem, no. It has the consideration of sheikh(sheikh). It was considered a point against him, as was the certain suspicion he has shown of Iranian influence.
The person expected to be Nasrallah’s successor – or already was, secretly chosen – was actually Hashem Saifeddine. But Israel killed him on the 3rd, along with the bulk of Hezbollah’s military leadership and part of politics, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted five days later: “We have eliminated Nasrallah, Nasrallah’s replacement and the replaced from replacement.” He did so in the speech in which, instead of defending the “limited and localized incursions in the south” that his army had just launched and have lasted almost a month, he urged the Lebanese to take advantage of Hezbollah’s weakness (“an opportunity that has not existed in decades”) to force a regime change that would avoid the country from the “abyss of a long war” with the “same destruction and suffering” as in Gaza.
After Saifeddine’s death, other options were being considered to succeed Nasrallah, such as Mohammad Yazbeck, close to the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and his representative in the Bekaa Valley. Or Ibrahim Amine el Sayed, the man who announced the birth of Hezbollah in 1985 at a press conference in a mosque south of Beirut and explained that the name (the party of God) was inspired by a verse from the Koran: “Those who take party for God they will triumph.”
three speeches
Since Nasrallah’s death on September 27, Qasem has given three speeches, always previously recorded and broadcast by Al Manar and indoors, without details that allow him to be located. The background has changed. Some information from anonymous sources suggests, in fact, that he is in Iran, where leaders had apparently urged Nasrallah (shortly before his assassination) to hide after identifying a security breach.
In the first speech, on September 30 and with Saifeddine still alive, he admitted that these were “difficult” times for the Shura Council to elect a new leader, due to the need to take extreme precautions and avoid any unnecessary communication, but he insisted that It would be “as soon as possible” and that Hezbollah continued to have, despite the blows received, “alternatives and replacements for any position” and military capabilities, as shown by the high number of casualties it is causing to the Israeli army in the south. Three days later, Israeli aircraft killed Saifeddine.
His next speech was subjected to scrutiny and debate, as he did not expressly mention the need for a ceasefire in Gaza to reach another with Israel in Lebanon. Harassed and pressured inside and outside the country, Hezbollah has since played with ambiguity in this regard as a negotiating card.
