“Contact Lost” With Possible Nasrallah Successor, Israel’s Gaza Warning Before Oct 7 Anniversary

Hashen Safieddine, widely expected to succeed slain Hassan Nasrallah as leader of Hezbollah, has been unreachable since an Israeli air strike on Friday, three Lebanese security sources told Reuters.Reports suggest Safieddine, who was Nasrallah’s cousin, had been targeted in an Israeli strike.A high-level Hezbollah source confirmed that contact with Safieddine had been lost.“Contact with Sayyed Safieddine has been lost since the violent strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs” early Friday, the source told AFP. “We don’t know if he was at the targeted site, or who may have been there with him.”Safieddine was born in the southern Lebanese village of Deir Qanun En Nahr near Tyre in 1960 and studied theology at two Shia institutions – one in Najaf, Iraq and the other in Qom, Iran.His son is married to the daughter of the former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a 2021 US drone strike. The loss of Nasrallah’s rumoured successor would be yet another blow to Hezbollah and its patron Iran.Israeli strikes across the region in the past year, sharply accelerated in the past few weeks, have decimated Hezbollah’s leadership.