Hashem Safieddine, head of Hezbollah's Executive Council could replace the group's slain long-time leader Hassan Nasrallah. He was reported to have survived the Israeli attack on the terror group's underground bunker on Friday.
Safieddine is Nasrallah's cousin and has been designated, next in line since the 1990s when he was called back to Beirut from his studies in Iran, to head Hezbollah's Executive Council just two years after Nasrallah took over leadership of the Group.
According to a report in the Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper he is also related by marriage to Qassim Soleimani, the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Quds force, killed by the U.S. in 2020.
Over the past three decades, he oversaw all daily and sensitive aspects of Hezbollah's civilian operations including its education system and finances including foreign investments, leaving strategic matters to Nasrallah.
He heads an investment group operating in Lebanon, across the Arab world, in Africa, Europe and North and Latin America. Safieddine has close ties to the military wing of Hezbollah as well and has been on the U.S. terror list since 2017.
He maintains good relations with Tehran and supports its regime after his religious studies there. His brother Abdullah is Hezbollah's envoy to Tehran, which the Saudi newspaper says could increase his chances of being named the next leader of the group.
He was born in 1964 in a village near the coastal city of Tyre in South Lebanon, to a well-established family of clerics.
Since the outbreak of the war, Safieddine represented Nasrallah in public events including at the funeral of high-ranking members of terror group, who were killed in the coordinated detonation of communication devices, attributed to Israel.
"The wounded will return to their Jihad," he said. "We tell the enemy that if its aim is to stop support of Gaza, it must know that that will only grow."