Hezbollah’s New Leader Naim Qassem Is No Hassan Nasrallah

Excerpt This past week, US officials were busy talking about disarming Hezbollah, pressing the visiting Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam to disrupt Hezbollah’s finances and move toward disarming the group. Hezbollah, meanwhile, focused on housing. On September 27, which marked the second anniversary of Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination, Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem defended the group’s arsenal at length but dwelled on more mundane material concerns, especially reconstruction and housing for the displaced. He announced a housing project for devastated villages. Qassem’s focus may seem badly mismatched to the scale of Hezbollah’s predicament as Israeli military and diplomatic pressure mounts, much as Qassem himself seemed mismatched to succeeding Nasrallah. But the same qualities that made Qassem seem ill-suited to replace Nasrallah—his bureaucratic instinct, low profile, and lack of martial charisma—may have made him better suited to the Hezbollah that survived 2024: it needed to look less threatening, preserve its Shia base and arsenal, and buy time to regenerate. Qassem was never supposed to succeed Nasrallah. The soft-spoken former chemistry teacher became al-Musawi’s deputy in 1991. When Israel killed al-Musawi the following year, the younger Nasrallah succeeded him. Qassem remained deputy for three decades while Hashem Safieddine was groomed for succession. David Daoud is a senior fellow at FDD focused on Lebanon and Hezbollah. He previously worked as a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, director of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria research at United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and a research analyst at FDD.