- PM presumably referring to Hashem Safieddine, targeted in raid last week, though neither Hezbollah nor IDF have said he’s dead; urges Lebanese to ‘free your country from Hezbollah’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to confirm on Tuesday evening that Israel had successfully assassinated projected new Hezbollah leader Hashem Safieddine, who was targeted in an airstrike in Beirut last Thursday, and claimed Israel has also killed the next in line for the job.
In an English-language video message addressed to the Lebanese public, Netanyahu said that Israel has “degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities; we took out thousands of terrorists, including [longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah himself, and Nasrallah’s replacement, and his replacement’s replacement.”
“Today, Hezbollah is weaker than it has been in many, many years,” said the premier.
Netanyahu did not identify by name any of the successors he said had been killed, although Safieddine had been widely considered to be next in line for the position of secretary-general. Hezbollah has not publicly confirmed his death, and the IDF spokesman declined Tuesday evening to conclusively say that Safieddine had been killed.
“We struck Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters in Beirut… this is the headquarters of the head of the intelligence division, Abu Abdullah Mortada,” IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in response to a question from a reporter at a press conference. “With him, we know that Hashem Safieddine was there. The results of this strike are still being looked into, Hezbollah is trying to hide the details. When we know, we will update the public.”
Israel killed Nasrallah, who had led the terror group since 1992, in an airstrike on Beirut on September 27, sending shockwaves across the region. Late on October 3, Israel carried out a heavy bombing in Beirut said to target Safieddine, who was the head of the Hezbollah executive council, overseeing the group’s political affairs, and was presumed to be Nasrallah’s successor.
Safieddine, whom the US State Department designated as a terrorist in 2017, is a cousin of Nasrallah and, like him, is a cleric who wears the black turban denoting ostensible descent from Islam’s Prophet Mohammed. Safieddine assumed a prominent role speaking for Hezbollah during the past year, addressing funerals and other events that Nasrallah had long avoided for security reasons.
He was the first Hezbollah official to speak in public after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, telling a rally in Beirut’s southern suburbs on October 8, 2023, that the group’s “guns and our rockets are with you. Everything we have is with you.”
TIMES OF ISRAEL
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