The coffin of Hachem Safieddine wrapped in the yellow flag of Hezbollah, during a public funeral organized for Safieddine and Hassan Nasrallah, on Feb. 23, 2025, at Camille Chamoun Sports City in Beirut. (Credit: Lucile Wassermann/L'Orient-Le Jour)
Hezbollah on Thursday released the last speech written by Hashem Safieddine, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 3, 2024, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a week after the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, whom he was set to succeed as head of the party.
According to Hezbollah, three handwritten pages of the unfinished text were found at the scene of Safieddine's assassination. The statement was reportedly meant to be a speech he intended to deliver after his official designation as Hezbollah’s leader.
Nasrallah was killed Sept. 27, 2024, in a massive Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs. Public funerals for both leaders were held on Feb. 23 at Camille Chamoun Sports City stadium, drawing hundreds of thousands of people.
Safieddine wrote that Hezbollah opened "a support front" for Hamas in Gaza on Oct. 8, 2023, in southern Lebanon, committing to "preventing events from escalating into a full-scale open war." However, he accused Israel of deciding to "expand the war and intensify its aggression" against Lebanon — a move he claimed would have happened "anyway, even if we had not intervened on Oct. 8." The assertion echoed Hezbollah’s argument that it was not responsible for the scale of destruction that followed.
Initially sporadic and limited to southern Lebanon, clashes between Hezbollah and Israel escalated into near-total war last September before a cease-fire took effect on Nov. 27, 2024. At least 4,047 people, including 736 women and 248 children, were killed in Lebanon by Israeli attacks during the conflict, according to estimates from the Lebanese Health Ministry.
In the text, Safieddine praised "martyrs," particularly Nasrallah, describing him as a leader whose "words soothed wounds, enlightened minds, clarified stakes and strengthened convictions." He accused Israel of carrying out an extermination campaign in Gaza with the goal of "eradicating resistance, whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or later, any form of resistance in Lebanon and elsewhere."
Hezbollah, he wrote, aimed to "protect and support the people of Gaza and the Palestinian resistance" while defending "Lebanon and the future of the entire region."
He also condemned U.S. support for Israel, citing its provision of "sophisticated" weapons that gave Israel a technological edge to conduct a "massive and continuous extermination campaign."
Post-Mortem photos of Nasrallah
In a video released Wednesday on social media, Nasrallah's son, Jawad, announced plans to publish post-mortem photos of his father. "We took his photo for the first time. We did not photograph him when he died a martyr, nor during his preparation for burial because we didn't want people to look at the sayyed like this," he said. "Always keep your head up when you look at him."
Nasrallah was buried Sunday, Feb. 23, in a mausoleum near the road to Beirut's international airport following the public funeral at the Sports City. The event drew an estimated 700,000 to 900,000 participants, according to figures published Monday by the Lebanese polling institute Information International.
Safieddine was buried Monday in Deir Qanoun al-Nahr (Sour), his hometown in South Lebanon.
