Lebanon’s Hezbollah Names Naim Qassem as New Leader, Israel Says His Days May Be Numbered

Lebanon's Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem attends a memorial service for Mohammed Nasser, Hezbollah's senior commander who was killed on June 3 in an Israeli strike in south Lebanon, in Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, July 10, 2024. (Reuters)
Lebanon's Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem attends a memorial service for Mohammed Nasser, Hezbollah's senior commander who was killed on June 3 in an Israeli strike in south Lebanon, in Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, July 10, 2024. (Reuters)
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Lebanon’s Hezbollah Names Naim Qassem as New Leader, Israel Says His Days May Be Numbered

Lebanon's Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem attends a memorial service for Mohammed Nasser, Hezbollah's senior commander who was killed on June 3 in an Israeli strike in south Lebanon, in Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, July 10, 2024. (Reuters)
Lebanon's Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem attends a memorial service for Mohammed Nasser, Hezbollah's senior commander who was killed on June 3 in an Israeli strike in south Lebanon, in Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, July 10, 2024. (Reuters)

Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said on Tuesday it had elected deputy head Sheikh Naim Qassem to succeed Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air attack on Beirut's southern suburb over a month ago.

The group said in a written statement that its Shura Council had elected Qassem, 71, in accordance with its established mechanism for choosing a secretary general.

He was appointed as Hezbollah's deputy chief in 1991 by the armed group's then-secretary-general Abbas al-Mousawi, who was killed by an Israeli helicopter attack the following year.

Qassem remained in his role when Nasrallah became leader, and has long been one of Hezbollah's leading spokesmen, conducting interviews with foreign media, including as cross-border hostilities with Israel raged over the last year.

Nasrallah was killed on Sept. 27, and senior Hezbollah figure Hashem Safieddine - considered the most likely successor - was killed in Israeli strikes a week later.

Since Nasrallah's killing, Qassem has given three televised addresses, including one on Oct. 8 in which he said the Iran-backed group supported efforts to reach a ceasefire for Lebanon.

He is considered by many in Lebanon to lack the charisma and gravitas of Nasrallah.

The Israeli government's official Arabic account on X posted, "His tenure in this position may be the shortest in the history of this terrorist organization if he follows in the footsteps of his predecessors Hassan Nasrallah and Hashem Safieddine."

"There is no solution in Lebanon except to dismantle this organization as a military force," it wrote.

Born in 1953 in Beirut to a family from Lebanon's south, Qassem's political activism began with the Lebanese Shiite Amal Movement, now a Hezbollah ally.    

He left the group in 1979 in the wake of Iran's revolution, which shaped the political thinking of many young Lebanese Shiite activists. Qassem took part in meetings that led to the formation of Hezbollah, established with the backing of Iran's Revolutionary Guards in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.    

He has been the general coordinator of Hezbollah's parliamentary election campaigns since the group first contested them in 1992.



US Tracking Nearly 500 Incidents of Civilian Harm During Israel’s Gaza War

 People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)
People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)
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US Tracking Nearly 500 Incidents of Civilian Harm During Israel’s Gaza War

 People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)
People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)

US State Department officials have identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilian harm during Israel's military operations in Gaza involving US-furnished weapons, but have not taken further action on any of them, three sources, including a US official familiar with the matter, said this week.

The incidents - some of which might have violated international humanitarian law, according to the sources - have been recorded since Oct. 7, 2023, when the Gaza war started. They are being collected by the State Department's Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons.

State Department officials gathered the incidents from public and non-public sources, including media reporting, civil society groups and foreign government contacts.

The mechanism, which was established in August 2023 to be applied to all countries that receive US arms, has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment, and coordinated department action, according to a December internal State Department cable reviewed by Reuters.

None of the Gaza cases had yet reached the third stage of action, said a former US official familiar with the matter. Options, the former official said, could range from working with Israel's government to help mitigate harm, to suspending existing arms export licenses or withholding future approvals.

The Washington Post first reported the nearly 500 incidents on Wednesday.

The Biden administration has said it is reasonable to assess that Israel has breached international law in the conflict, but assessing individual incidents was "very difficult work," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday.

"We are conducting those investigations, and we are conducting them thoroughly, and we are conducting them aggressively, but we want to get to the right answer, and it's important that we not jump to a pre-ordained result, and that we not skip any of the work," Miller said, adding that Washington consistently raises concerns over civilian harm with Israel.

The administration of President Joe Biden has long said it is yet to definitively assess an incident in which Israel has violated international humanitarian law during its operation in Gaza.

John Ramming Chappell, advocacy and legal adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, said the Biden administration "has consistently deferred to Israeli authorities and declined to do its own investigations."

"The US government hasn't done nearly enough to investigate how the Israeli military uses weapons made in the United States and paid for by US taxpayers," he said.

The civilian harm process does not only look at potential violations of international law but at any incident where civilians are killed or injured and where US arms are implicated, and looks at whether this could have been avoided or reduced, said one US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A review of an incident can lead to a recommendation that a unit needs more training or different equipment, as well as more severe consequences, the official said.

Israel's military conduct has come under increasing scrutiny as its forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the enclave's health authorities.

The latest episode of bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others, according to Israeli tallies.