Lebanese armed group Hezbollah on Tuesday announced that it has named its deputy head Naim Qassem to succeed Hasan Nasrallah after the latter was killed in an Israeli strike on south Beirut last month.
Hezbollah said in a written statement that Qassem, 71, has been chosen by its Shura Council in accordance with the mechanism established for choosing a secertary general. "Hezbollah's (governing) Shura Council agreed to elect... Sheikh Naim Qassem as secretary general of Hezbollah," the Iran-backed group's statement read. The development has come over a month after Nasrallah's killing.
Hezbollah's executive council head Hashem Safieddine was initially tipped to succeed Nasrallah. However, he too was killed in an Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs shortly after Nasrallah's death.
According to news agency AFP, Qassem was also one of Hezbollah's founders in 1982. Besides this, he has been the party's deputy secretary general since 1991, the year before Hassan Nasrallah took the helm of the group. He was appointed by the then secretary general Abbas al-Musawi, who was killed in an Israeli helicopter attack the following year.
He was born in Beirut in 1953 to a family from the village of Kfar Fila on the border with Israel. Qassem was the most senior Hezbollah official who continued to make public appearances after Nasrallah went into hiding following the group's 2006 war with Israel.
Qassem has also been one of the leading spokesmen of Hezbollah, participating in foreign media interactions even as the hostilities with Israel increased over the last year.
Nasrallah died on September 27 and the next successor and senior Hezbollah figure Safieddine was also killed a week later in Israeli strikes. After Nasrallah's killing, Qassem gave three televised addresses, including one on October 8, wherein he mentioned that Hezbollah supported efforts to reach a ceasefire deal for Lebanon, news agency Reuters reported.
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