Who is Naim Qassem, the new leader of Hezbollah

In a speech on 30 September, Qassem said that Hezbollah would choose a successor to the slain secretary general 'at the first opportunity' and would continue to fight Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians. "What we are doing is the bare minimum.... We know the battle could be long," he said, speaking for 19 minutes.

Born in 1953 in Beirut to a family from southern Lebanon, Qassem is married with six children. He studied chemistry at the Lebanese University before working for several years as a teacher and pursuing religious studies in parallel. He participated in the founding of the Lebanese Union of Muslim Students, an organisation that aimed to promote religious adherence among students. In the 1970s, Qassem joined the Dispossessed Movement, a political organisation founded by Imam Moussa Sadr that pushed for greater representation of Lebanon's historically neglected and impoverished Shia community. The group transformed in 1974 into the Amal movement, one of the main armed groups in the Lebanese civil war and now a powerful political party. He left the group in 1979 in the wake of the Iranian Islamic revolution, which shaped the political thinking of many young Lebanese Shia activists. Qassem thus took part in the meetings that led to the formation of Hezbollah, established with the support of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Qassem has been the general coordinator of Hezbollah's parliamentary election campaigns since the group first contested them in 1992.

In 2005, he wrote a history of Hezbollah seen as a rare 'inside look' at the organisation. Both Nasrallah and Safieddin, both of whom were killed by Israel, were sayyids, i.e. they belonged to the ranks of the 'descendants of the prophet' Muhammad, a moral and political nobility in political Shiism. Qassem - who wears the white turban, not a sayyid but a shaykh - is a figure of respect but does not hold the religious and political authority of the sayyids, who wear the black turban.