The world knew Hashem Safieddine’s name for exactly a week before the IDF buried him under the suburbs of Beirut.

I should clarify. If you were possessed of anything beyond a glancing familiarity with Hezbollah prior to recent events, you knew Safieddine as Hassan Nasrallah’s cousin and likely heir. He was a prominent, bellicose figure who, like his cousin, traced a decades-old relationship with Iran which was both close and personal.

So, although the world at large was only aware of Safieddine for a few days, to call him a known quantity in Iran’s network would be to materially understate the case.

On September 25, I speculated about Safieddine’s fate given his overlapping roles in Hezbollah. “I don’t know if Safieddine still has an official seat on the military panel,” I wrote. “If he does, he might get a temporary pass from the IDF given the overlap with Hezbollah’s ‘political’ bodies and also with the Shura Council.”

As it turns out, Israel wasn’t giving out passes. Nasrallah was assassinated less than two days after I penned those words. But my point — in addition to suggesting the world was about to find out whether Israel was content to eliminate Hezbollah’s top military commanders or whether the IDF was coming after the entire leadership structure — was to underscore the “key man risk” associated with Safieddine.

Although the mainstream media typically referred to Safieddine as the head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council, he once chaired the Jihad Council too. This is an oversimplification, but Hezbollah’s military was a three-headed dragon. The heads were Fuad Shukr (assassinated by Israel on July 31), Ibrahim Aqil (assassinated by Israel on September 20) and Ali Karaki (who died in the bunker with Nasrallah on September 27). At one juncture, Safieddine held a role which, at least by rank, made him supervisor of that dragon.

Suffice to say he wore many hats. Safieddine was, in a sense, Hezbollah’s top bureaucrat, its co-propaganda chief (with Nasrallah and Naim Qassem), a manager of military strategists and, most importantly, someone whose ties to Tehran ran nearly as deep as his cousin’s.

By now, most media outlets have emphasized that Safieddine’s son is married to Zeinab Soleimani. That marriage has enormous symbolic value (Zeinab’s father was, of course, Qassem Soleimani), but from a practical perspective, the more notable family connection is probably Abdullah Safieddine, Hashem’s brother. He’s an ambassador of sorts to Iran, and during last week’s Friday prayer (which Khamenei led personally for the first time since Soleimani’s assassination in January of 2020), Abdullah was photographed sitting right next to Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, Iran’s Judiciary Chief. That’s a helluva good seat.

Late Sunday, in the course of suggesting that after more than 48 hours “missing,” Hashem Safieddine was almost surely dead (Israel targeted him in Dahiya not far from where his cousin was assassinated a week earlier), I wondered if the IDF might’ve stumbled into a two-for-one: Esmail Qaani, Soleimani’s successor at the helm of the Quds Force, went missing around the same time Israel went after Safieddine. Subsequently, the Quds claimed Qaani was alive but didn’t provide any proof. Israeli media, citing unnamed IDF officials, said that if Qaani was with Safieddine that day, Israel either didn’t know it or wasn’t planning on it. Qaani wasn’t the target of the strike, but believe you me: Mossad would be thrilled if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In that linked article, I noted that Qaani was absent from the Friday prayer where Safieddine’s brother was photographed just one seat down from Khamenei. “The last time the public saw [Qaani],” I wrote, citing The New York Times‘s Farnaz Fassihi, “was in Hezbollah’s Tehran offices, two days after Nasrallah was killed.” It struck me today that if Qaani’s last public appearance was indeed in Hezbollah’s Tehran offices, he must’ve been photographed with Abdullah Safieddine. Sure enough.

There they are: Esmail Qaani (on the right) and Abdullah in Tehran, on September 29.

At some point over the next few days, Khamenei sent Qaani to Beirut to help Hezbollah regroup after Nasrallah’s death. Although there’s still no definitive word on Qaani’s status, it seems just as likely as not that he was killed in the massive bombardment that targeted Safieddine.

Neither Hezbollah nor the IDF had officially confirmed Safieddine dead, but Yoav Gallant told Channel 12 on Tuesday that he “has apparently been eliminated.” Maybe Qaani was in the room with Safieddine, maybe he wasn’t, but footage of the strike suggested anyone in close proximity would’ve been killed. If Qaani was in Beirut — and he was — where else would he have been if not there?

If your question is who’ll lead Hezbollah now, it pretty much has to be Naim Qassem, at least nominally and temporarily. That’s not ideal, to put it politely. He was supposed to be a “forever No. 2,” and even then, “No. 2” was in name only. Safieddine was No. 2. There’s a reason Israel went after him immediately upon confirming Nasrallah dead.

Naim Qassem’s not a military guy. He’s a writer, a political coordinator and something of a media hound, whose cartoonishly severe appearance elicits instinctual laughter. “Our fighters are solid,” he insisted on Tuesday, in a grainy video looking every bit like an old man holding a flashlight up to his chin while telling a ghost story in a backyard tent.

Don’t get me wrong: Naim Qassem’s a committed ideologue and committed ideologues are inherently dangerous. My point is that this situation — Nasrallah and Safieddine both dead leaving Naim Qassem to make empty threats from a ramshackle TV studio — is so far afield from any “plan” Hezbollah might’ve had a year ago, when the group pledged to stand in solidarity with their inter-sectarian brothers in Hamas, that it’s fair to call the group finished.

“What’s been said by the enemy about our capabilities is an illusion,” Qassem chided, in Tuesday’s vlog from an undisclosed location. Yes, an “illusion.” Just like the illusion that Safieddine was “alive and safe” following the strike that killed his cousin.

That social media message — posted posthumously “by” Nasrallah — didn’t age well, as they say.

Sorry, but the only “illusion” here is the illusion that Hezbollah (or Iran, for that matter) can keep at this.

“There’s nobody left to make decisions,” Gallant remarked. “When the smoke clears, [Iran] will understand that they’ve lost their most valued asset.” Whatever Hezbollah becomes — and it’ll survive to become something — it won’t be what Nasrallah built.

Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday indicated that Israel didn’t even consider Naim Qassem to be a candidate to replace Nasrallah. “We took out Nasrallah himself. And Nasrallah’s replacement. And the replacement of his replacement,” he said, smirking and exhorting Lebanese to “take back your country.” “If you don’t,” he went on, “Hezbollah will continue to fight Israel from densely-populated areas at your expense.”