The head of the Executive Council of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, the cleric Hashem Safi al-Din, was this Sunday elected general secretary of the organization’s political and armed movement, reported the Saudi state television channel Al Arabiya.
According to the international news channel in Arabic, cited by the Spanish agency Efe, the Hezbollah council chose Safi al-Din as the successor to his cousin, Hassan Nasrallah, killed last Friday in an Israeli bombing on the outskirts of Beirut.
Safi al-Din was born in 1964 in southern Lebanon and has been close to the leadership of Hezbollah since 1995, as a member of the movement’s Shura Council (consultative body).
He did his Islamic studies in the holy cities of Najaf, in Iraq, and Qom, in Iran, where the main schools are located for those who aspire to become Grand Ayatollah, one of the highest titles among Shiite Islamists.
Like most of the senior officials of Hezbollah — an organization considered terrorist by Israel and the United States, but not by the European Union, which only considers its armed wing a terrorist organization —, Safi al-Din was classified as a terrorist by the US Government in 2017, for being “a key member” of the group, according to a note then published by the State Department.
One of his last public interventions was in mid-September, when he condemned Israel’s murder of the top commander of the Hezbollah militia, Fuad Shukr, in a selective bombing in the southern neighborhoods of Beirut known as Dahye, the same area where Israel announced it had killed Nasrallah.
Around a million people have fled their homes in recent days in Lebanon due to the Israeli bombing campaign, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati announced this Sunday, recalling that his Government has been appealing for “seven or eight months” for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
This Sunday, the Israeli Army continued its campaign of violent bombings against Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, killing at least 105 people, two days after the death of the leader and dozens of other members of the Lebanese Islamist movement.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 70,000 Lebanese and Syrians living in Lebanon fled the country, the majority of whom crossed the border into Syria, as a result of the intensification of Israeli bombings.
“The situation is difficult for civilians shaken by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon. To date, more than 70,000 people have fled the country,” wrote UNHCR on its X (formerly Twitter) social network account.
The specialized UN agency cites its representatives in Lebanon, Ivo Freijsen, and in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, as sources of information about the “growing crisis in the region and the way in which UNHCR is responding to it”.
Hezbollah began firing ‘rockets’, missiles and ‘drones’ (unmanned aircraft) over northern Israel the day after the October 7, 2023 attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Israeli territory triggered an Israeli war in that Palestinian enclave.
Hamas and Hezbollah are allies who consider themselves part of an “Axis of Resistance” supported by Iran against Israel.
