Israeli Defence Minister hints at death of Nasrallah’s ‘successor’ in recent airstrike

JERUSALEM — Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Tuesday that a senior Hezbollah official, believed to be a potential successor to the group’s leader, may have been killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Gallant was referring to Hashem Safieddine, a senior Shiite cleric widely considered a likely successor to Hassan Nasrallah, who died on September 27 during an Israeli airstrike. This marks the first time an Israeli official has commented on the reported strike on Safieddine, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Defence Minister’s remarks came during a security assessment meeting at the military’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. Gallant received a briefing on Israel’s ground campaign in Lebanon and “assessed the continuation of targeted strikes against Hezbollah’s leadership and field commanders”, his office said in a statement.

“When the smoke clears over Lebanon, Iran will understand that they have lost the valuable asset they spent years building — Hezbollah,” Gallant said.

He added, “A year after the war began, Hamas is a dismantled organization, and Hezbollah is a beaten and broken entity, with no command or control capabilities — neither politically nor militarily.”

Hezbollah has lost contact with Safieddine since Friday after an Israeli airstrike on the Dahieh suburb in the south of Beirut. The airstrikes came one week after Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli attack that hit Hezbollah’s headquarters in Dahieh.

Since September 23, Israel has launched an intensive air campaign on Lebanon, dubbed “Arrows of the North”, marking a significant escalation with Hezbollah.

The cross-border exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel, which began on October 8, 2023, have raised concerns of a wider conflict amid the ongoing Hamas-Israel war in Gaza.