“”Hezbollah”” [valdošā] “The Shura Council agreed to elect Sheikh Naim Qassem as the Secretary General of Hezbollah,” the organization said in a statement.
Longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli strike a month ago.
The head of Hezbollah’s executive council, Hashem Safiedin, was initially nominated as Nasrallah’s successor, but he too was killed in an Israeli strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut shortly after Nasrallah’s death.
The 71-year-old Qassem was one of the founders of Hezbollah in 1982, and since 1991, when Nasrallah took over, he was the party’s deputy secretary general.
He was born in 1953 in Beirut in a family from the village of Kfar Fil near the Israeli border.
He was a senior Hezbollah official who continued to speak publicly even when Nasrallah lived largely in secret after the group’s 2006 war with Israel.