Israeli has fired an intense airstrike on Beirut's southern suburbs in an attempt to target Hashem Safieddine, the rumoured next leader of Hezbollah, according to Israeli officials.
The air raids targeted the Hezbollah official in an underground bunker at around midnight on Thursday but Safieddine's fate was not clear, according to the New York Times.
The attack was one of the heaviest bombardments in the area since Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a similar airstrike.
Safieddine was presumed to be meeting senior Hezbollah officials and the attempted assassination comes days after Israel’s paratroops and commandos moved into southern Lebanon earlier this week.
Safieddine was designated a terrorist by the United States and Saudi Arabia in May 2017 for his leadership role in Hezbollah.
At the time he was described as “a key member” of Hezbollah’s executive council, which oversees its “political, organizational, social, and educational activities”.
It added that Safieddine posed “a serious risk of committing acts of terrorism that threaten the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
He was one of Hezbollah’s earliest members and joined after the Shiite Muslim group was formed in the 1980s during Lebanon’s civil war, according to the New York Times.
Safieddine quickly rose through the ranks alongside Nasrallah. In 1995 he was promoted to Hezbollah’s highest council, its governing Consultative Assembly before he was appointed head of its Jihadi Council, which controls Hezbollah’s military activities.
He was then elected to lead the party’s Executive Council, a position that was also held twice by Nasrallah, in 1998.
He was later appointed as Hezbollah’s secretary-general in 1992, according to reports.
Safieddine studied in Iran and formed strong ties with Tehran during his religious studies in the Iranian city of Qom before he returned to Lebanon to work for Hezbollah.
He was close friends of Major General Qassim Suleimani, an Iranian who commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force until he was killed in a US airstrike in Baghdad in 2020.
His son Reza Hashem Safieddine married the Iranian general’s daughter, Zeinab Suleimani, in a heavily publicised wedding the same year.
Safieddine’s brother Abdallah Safieddine is labelled as Hezbollah’s representative to Iran by the US Treasury.
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 US Embassy and US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the US Embassy annex in Beirut in 1984 and the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847.
